America before the Europeans

Good idea for a thread.

Myself, Ive read quite a lot over the years about pre columbian cultures in all of the Americas.
It has always seemed to me that the europeans just went in and took what they wanted with no regard at all for the Native Americans. The idea that the Indians were not using the land has always struck me as utterly spurious.
I have also noticed a kind of reluctance even to discuss the matter on the part of many of todays Americans. Maybe its a kind of cultural blind spot.

A similar thing goes on in the UK if you mention to a lot of peole that the old empire was not only built on slavery, but destroyed indigenous cultures all over the globe, including of course, North America. Generally the excuse is that as good christians we were civilizing savage races, and saving their souls for jesus. Nowadays of course, we know better.......well, maybe.

I think all us whities should take a good look at history.

 

hmm most of the empire was built after we abolished slavery bill, and the uk was raided by African slavers before we started going to Africa buying slaves off Africans (who were going to kill or eat them )and then shipping them to the states .

Human history is about a conflict for resources before Europeans arrived north American Indians and south Americans Indians oppressed each other and committed genocide, in north America you had pretty much constant inter tribal warfare.
But hey if people with white faces do it that’s terrible what about the guilt of the mayans or the Comanche or all the black Africans involved in the slave trade .
We have left Africa since we have left you have had various genocides Rwanda etc , you have the racist ANC govt of south Africa driving out the whites at the moment like whites have been murdered and driven out of most of the rest of Africa since independence.
In Africa you have a thriving slave trade is that our doing bill

 

"European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land. Had it been pristine wilderness then, it would possibly be so still, for neither the technology nor the social organization of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from home."
-- Francis Jennings

yup they found a inhabited land they also had to fight said inhabitants to take said land , I dont doubt that they had the technology and organisation to build countrys if the place had been uninhabited, if anything having people there was annoying and more of a challenge .

 

I think all us whities should take a good look at history.

starting with the barbary states (africans) raiding europe for slaves, the arabs raiding southern russia for slaves .

You had more slaves taken from europe by non europeans over a longer period than the slaves we took from africa. years ago when african states were trying to get compensation for slavery the russian federation said they supported them but would ask for more money for the 1000 years of arab and african slavers that had been raiding southern russia .

Barbary slavers raided as far north as iceland taking whole towns of people as slaves to africa, yup whites should learn something of their own history maybe it would get them over the whole white guilt trip

 

I rest my case.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sacrifice_in_pre-Columbian_cultures

How much do you learn about the atrocities committed by Native Americans on other Native Americans and Europeans.

How well would the Inca have treated Europeans if they had taken over Europe, looking at their track record now of the human sacrificing conquered peoples.

Compare that with the treatment of Native Americans by whites I'd say the whites were pretty nice they stole land at times they killed off tribes, but as far as I know we aren’t still demanding the apache or Comanche or descendents of the Inca give us small children so we can ritually kill them .

 

You are completely misrepresenting what I said in that other thread, Meagain. Such tactics, I thought, were beneath you. I never once claimed that North America "was sparsely populated by barbaric nomadic tribes who had little interaction with the Europeans. Thus the land was a wild frontier open to any who would claim it." Nor did I claim that "the few Indians present did not comprise a civilization".

Instead, what I did say was that those early European settlers established themselves independently of those native populations; they didn't join with them, nor did they come under the political or social authority of those native populations. Instead, those European settlers hacked out an entirely new existence in the Americas, and established their own political and social structures. Those structures eventually gave rise to what we know today as the United States of America.

 

That is pure, unadulterated supposition you're putting forward as fact. There is zero evidence to support a claim that the entirety of the North American continent was inhabited or that is was entirely farmed.

Good thing I never claimed it was uncivilized, huh?

 

Not entirely true. If those doing the settling are independent of those populations already there, they can also be considered to have settled the land. It isn't like those early Europeans found native populations behind every tree. There were vast tracts of uninhabited land for them to settle.

Did they also invade and conquer lands that were under active use by natives, and then settle those lands themselves? Yes, they did. So what?

You have established the conditions quite well. In the case of North America is there is evidence to support the idea that there were some large native "cities" and that some tribes/populations engaged in large scale farming.

 

In a way the whole human race (homo Sapiens) living outside of a small area of Africa are all immigrants, on one side I’m Celt (Hungarian possibly) on the other I believe Norman (French that were immigrants themselves from Scandinavia) and along the way I may have picked up a bit of Roman (Italian), Anglo-Saxon (German), Norse (more Scandinavians) etc.

The language of Britain has been Celt, Roman, German, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, French, old English and English.

At one time I believe German nearly rival English as the language of the US (it doesn’t have an official language so the most used is the ‘principle’ language) that was due to immigration and now Spanish is catching up also due to immigration.


Sometimes immigration takes place without conflict and with a certain amount of integration on one or both parts and at other times it causes conflict and cultural imposition.

 

Sig i repeat here -

They came, carved out their own territories, and settled.

The very definition of an immigrant - a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence.(Random House Dictionary)

It seems to me irrelevant if they set up their own community or joined an existing one – the thing is they moved from one place to another.

Why are you seemingly trying to give yourself more legitimacy than others?

I mean you seem to be suggesting that your ancestors were not immigrants but all others who came after were meaning that they and by extension you are more of a legitimate ‘American’.

I think is seems a bit silly given that we are all immigrants.

 

I don't know exactly how typical our situation is among east coast states, but when North Carolina was first established as a colony, Native Americans were making use of all parts of the state, mostly as hunting grounds. There were lots of small Indian villages, with some agriculture going on, but their ability to store seasonal vegetables was limited. Corn was somewhat popular with them, because it could be stored in dry form. Wild game was generally sufficient to feed the native population, and could be hunted year-round. This included elk, which has now been extinct from the east coast for more than 200 years. Coastal tribes also did some fishing.

The first attempt at an English colony was made at Manteo, on Roanoke Island, NC. The local Native Americans were members of the Tuscarora tribe. After a rough winter, when the colony failed to receive sufficient aid and supplies from England the following summer, the group decided not to attempt weathering another winter in the same spot, which was not great. Modern historians believe that most of them relocated to what is now Chesapeake, Virginia, and lived with the Chesapeake Indians until most of them were slaughtered by a rival tribe, also from eastern Virginia.

The small number of colonists left at Manteo to await English ships that never showed up eventually merged with the fishing-oriented Hatteras Indians, until a hurricane overwashed all of Hatteras Island and left very few survivors. Some believe that the last of their English DNA survives today in the controversial Lumbee Indians of the Lumberton area, not recognized by the US government as a legitimate tribe.

The few survivors of the Chesapeake massacre fled back into NC, to the vicinity of the inland town of Roanoke Rapids, where the English taught the natives how to build two-story houses. Genetically, the settlers disappeared into the larger pool of Native American DNA, over a period of several generations, in an area where they had no contact with the ongoing English colony in Jamestown, Virginia.

The failed effort on Roanoke Island became known as the Lost Colony. Their ultimate fate was unknown for centuries, but they did manage one historical accomplishment that was communicated to England. In that settlement was born the first English baby on this continent, named Virginia Dare. No one knows her eventual fate. No English ship returned to Manteo for three more summers, and later investigations launched from Jamestown turned up no evidence of the original colonists' whereabouts, or signs of violence or other tragedy.

Further inland and to the south, the burial mounds near Mount Gilead, NC were the most extensive man-made structures created by Native Americans in the state. These are not extensive, by Aztec or Mayan standards.

The Cherokee Nation was considerably more advanced, structured, and civilized (by the modern definition of the term) than the more numerous Tuscaroras to the east. Cherokee territory covered much of far western NC, but their largest and most important village was just over the state line in the mountains of Georgia. Most of their land was too rocky and steep for agriculture, so this was overwhelmingly a hunting and gathering tribe.

Though there is evidence of conflict between NC tribes, tribal leaders claimed that this was a mostly peaceful region before Europeans arrived. More than half of all NC natives were either Tuscarora or Cherokee, which generally did not interact.

In other states that had larger Native American cities, maybe agriculture needed to be a bigger deal because the local wildlife population couldn't naturally replentish itself fast enough. Hunting and fishing seemed to be mostly sufficient here. Early English settlers found vast virgin forests inland, but stone arrowheads still regularly turn up in plowed fields to this day, especially near water. Of course, English agriculture reduced the size of animal habitat areas, and the settlers also hunted, further reducing the natural food supply for the natives.

Initially, English coastal settlements lining NC harbors and rivers created only limited conflict with the area's Native American residents, who still controlled more than 99% of the present-day state's land area. That relationship radically changed direction in 1711, when a military action was initiated that would eventually result in the relocation of almost all Tuscaroras to Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario. There is currently no Tuscarora reservation in the state of NC, nor is there a significant ethnic concentration here.

In my opinion, peaceful coexistence with the native residents was possible until 1711. Even after that turning point, the Cherokees tried especially hard to work out functional arrangements with white settlers, but were forcibly removed to Oklahoma in 1838, in a tragic event widely known as the Trail of Tears. Many died en route. Only a small percentage escaped capture and remained in the state.

Native Americans and black Americans are the only large racial and ethnic groups that have ended up in the USA without their consent. It may appear on the surface that blacks have assimilated much better than the natives, but is that only an illusion? I know of no reliable statistics on how many Native Americans have left Indian reservations (or never went to one), intermarried in that same generation or subsequent generations, and lost their racial identity into the broader genectic pool. It is only their distinct cultural institutions that have surely floundered.

They were once immigrants themselves, walking across the Bering Straight when it was dry land, thousands of years ago. Maybe the lesson to be learned here is that it is the destiny of all ethnic groups to merge together into one human race. We can preserve the good things from all the cultures, without preserving the rivalries and hatred.

 

I believe you are wrong in how you interpreted what I posted, and in regards to your conclusions.

First, when I "hacked" I meant it more in terms of "built". These settlers hacked (read built) and entirely new and independent existence for themselves on the American continent. Did they have interactions, both good and bad, with the natives? Yes. We they subject to native law or governance? No.

Also, "influence" can mean different things. As such, regardless of whether the lands/territories they settled on were hunting grounds of native populations, these settlements existence outside the "influence" of native political and social structures. The settlers, in no way, answered to the tribes whose hunting ground/territory/land they established their settlements on. In every other form of immigration we see the arriving populations living under the authority of the native or original population. That didn't happen when the Europeans arrived in what we call the United States.

 

An idol of Hanuman called by the name 'Wilka Huemana' and measuring 50 feet in height and 12 feet in breadth was found in Guatemala. Similar idol was found during an excavation of an Aztec temple in Mexico city and was known as 'Euhectal', a wind God, a monkey God. Buddhism also had a vast influence on pre-Colombian America. Professor F.W. Putnam found in the jungles of Honduras a sculpture which greatly resembles Buddha. According to the July, 1901 issue of American Harper's magazine, it has been proved with evidence that five Buddhist monks had reached Mexico in ancient times, via Alaska.

http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.ae/2013/08/indias-links-with-ancient-america.html