The Native Americans Had A Better Society Than We Currently Do

Sure we've built many great things and achieved many great things like going to the moon and harfnessing electricity but they had a connection with nature we can only begin to comprehend when we've taken a psychedelic smoked some good weed or meditated for a while. They had a pretty stable society. One generation respected the one before it largely because they shared the same Vision.

Sure there was war, they were not all noble...they were humans, some better than others but they respected the Earth as a living being.

If we learned from them instead of killing, enslaving and trying to "convert" them we would take better care of the planet, of our families and friends...sure there would still be war but we wouldn't be trying to take over other countries and waste our money on useless bullshit. There was more meaning to the way they lived and we have a lot we can still learn from them.

You can even say our survival as a species depends on us learning what our tribal ancesters all over the world were trying to teach us.

 

They had skirmishes with other tribes, but I wouldn't call it war.

 

Native Americans did not have a unified society across the continent, there were many different tribes, varied in their customs and cultures, some of which warring amongst each other. I think it is a gross oversimplification and/or erroneous to say we should be like Native American society.


There are some idealizations of Native American societies which I think are worth incorporating into society such as appreciation of nature and animals, however I find the beliefs I've heard various tribes held and some of the customs (meaning in particular) to be incompatible with Western Culture's emphasis of science, logic, and empiricism. Seeing how effective science and modern technology can be, it's difficult for me to imagine 'reverting' (conceding cultural bias) to a more 'primitive' approach to understanding the world. I feel like the cat is out of the bag so to speak.

 

Over 11,000 years of occupation and the land remained largely untouched - amazing

Sure there are some stone structures for worshiping the dead, communicating with ancestors, and for preserving and storing meat, grains, and other dried goods, but for the most part the land was pristine .....


.......... That is before the Europeans happened ...... :bomb:


Hotwater

 

The Native Americans were very quick to embrace imported European technologies, animals, and even white people names. They loved guns, fire water, poker, and horses. Sacajawea even named her baby Jean Baptiste.

 

one thing that's not that simple. there was no one indiginous society. there were somewhere around 300 or so of them, each with their own, largely unique cultural hieratige. nor are they something in a museum from the past. the people haven't gone anywhere, only their soverignty was stolen from them. of course many factors today make many aspects of traditional life no longer practical. mostly laws that infringe upon access to traditional materials, population pressures and the environmental results of those population presures from the dominant culture. as individuals, people are just people, but the various cultures, have had 11,000 years, to evolve into sustainable harmony with their natural surroundings. that was the main thing. much of their cultural values came from what worked, in each particular place where they had traditionally been located.

but please, there is no ONE native american culture. rather these hundreds of soverign cultures that were where they were, before european greed ever imagined there was such a place as what we call america now.

but yes, coyote and bear and how to build your own very small house, and even political culture. most groups didn't use the idea of a formalized heirarchy, but rather the authority of knowledge and ability.

most of the larger tribal groups today, and many smaller ones as well, have their own websites, and also news blogs and that sort of thing, and of course there are occasional public feasts that non-members are often invited to learn and participate in.

 

I'll agree with that OP--although opposing tribes fought each other over hunting grounds and resources, the Native Americans were not conquerors of other foreign cultures. IMO...they were too welcoming of the Europeans.

 

What happened to the Native Americans is lamentable, but probably given the way the European powers were, inevitable.

I find some of the culture fascinating, as far as I've read about it. Seems most of the tribes had a pretty well balanced relationship to nature, something we lack.

I sometimes wonder to what extent the collective American psyche is affected by the knowledge that the land was in effect stolen, and massive abuses of human rights are part of the heritage. Not that I blame contemporary Americans of course, no more than I blame the British of today for their blood soaked history.

 

the thing with that, again is because we're not talking about some one culture, but a very great diversity of them. some would enslave their neighbors, some tried to build a federation with other tribes having soverignity within their soverignty, like the origeonal concept of our states within our federal system. indeed it is there the very model of it came from. still others, many of which have never been federally recognized, WERE complete pacifists. the were prejudice between groups in different locations, which led to small scale individual skirmishes. these were more typical and seldom involved anything resembling formal warfare.

but diversity, there's no one thing that can be said that there weren't exceptions to. it really can't be emphasised or repeated enough, small though many of them were, size of communities and level of organization varied campletely from one culture to another. there's really no one thing you can say that applies accross the board to every indiginous culture, even just those located in what is now the u.s.

think of the patchwork of countries that make up europe and south east asia. before the european invasion of the western hemisphere that began in ernist in the 1400s, not forgetting early visits from elsewhere, but before that time, this is what you had in the western hemisphere.

a practical reverence for their environment, a near constant awareness of how one's personal existence depended on it, that's as close to a generality that all indiginous cultures share to some degree.

so its not a matter of conflict not happening from time to time, but it wasn't a common thing, and it wasn't something that involved everyone in supporting the way like america and before us britain and so on, year after year in some war or another, that just, well there wasn't the scale of resources to do that, even if any of them had wanted to. and pretty much the vast majority just did not.

the means of organized struggle, the overwhelming majority of cultures, just weren't organized along those lines. a very few of the larger more powerful cultures had something like that, but they were really, no more then a handful out of the hundreds of diverse cultures that existed.

 

In some aspects their society was better, in others our society is better. What is better can be subjective. Also, the reason why it seems better in those particular aspects may not be solely by choice... Maybe their connection with nature was merely closer because they depended more on it. Well, we stil depend on nature as well of course, but not always in such a direct way as them. On the other hand, some might conclude we as a society lost our respect for nature because we don't see how much we depend on it Still.. seems like the better society would be a combination of the two. As it seems to me too:

Which does not have to be a bad thing.

 

More White Guilt. I am Native American as well , I was born in America.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s2d3kkP1rg

 

Dieversity = Chasing down the last White Man.

 

^

 

You guys are missing probably the biggest difference between Native American civilization and "Old World" civilizations and is most likely the main if not only reason Native Americans did not progress technologically, politically or culturally to the same degree other areas of the world did or at the same pace;


written language

In the absence of written language as a primary means of communication dissemination of information and knowledge is almost nil and limited to a small area geographically and also small in respect to time.
New innovations may be lost within a few generations if only committed to oral tradition or the oral retelling becomes more the realm of mystery and the gods than what the original practical idea may have been.

 

There's still a few uncontacted native tribes left in the dense jungles of the Amazon basin. Only problem is if you try to contact them they might kill you.

 

There's still a few uncontacted native tribes left in the dense jungles near the detroit river. Only problem is if you try to contact them they might kill you.

 

Ahh yes, the noble savage delusion. Parts of the world where mosquitoes may feast on people freely are indeed to be respected and romanticized.

 

The natives were willing to share the land but the aggressive expansion of colonist territories put an end to that - whitey driven by greed and avarice just couldn’t resist taking it all



Hotwater