Aboriginal Americans: cultures, histories, and issues of the First Nations of the New World

Sorry about the double posting, but nothing else was happening here.

Cross-posting from the Anthropogenic Climate Change thread, Eagle of the Ninth has some objections to Jared Diamond's book, "Guns, Germs and Steel", which I am disputing. We both felt it was off topic there, so I am bringing it here. The conversation started here

Demarquis: Diamond's book was fantastic, but I don't understand the premise of his article. I have literally never met anyone who thought that humans gave up a hunting-gathering lifestyle because farming is easier and healthier. They did it because it allowed them to have and raise more babies.

Eagle:

Diamond's book was fundamentally wrong in its assessment of the European conquest of the Americas as an inevitable conquest won by superior firepower and "virgin soil" diseases, rather than centuries of gradual progress and complex relations with Native peoples - many of whom still held power centuries after contact and only got overwhelmed by diseases once compounded by wartime privations, environmental destruction and other stress factors.

His background is in biology and specifically insular biogeography, or how island environments shaped the species living in them. Guns, Germs and Steel was his attempt to bring his methodology into the study of history. And as a refutation of traditional "Great Man" history, where all of history is driven by a small handful of great kings and captains, it's quite decent. It invites its mainstream audience to think about how material factors shape the development of human societies, beyond the simple will of a few great men.

But he makes his case by pulling European accounts of the colonisation of the Americas and taking them at face value, as if they're unbiased, raw data from a scientific observation, when they were anything but. And it kind of ended up repeating the same old racialist narratives that he set out to debunk: the Europeans won and the Natives lost because their inherent upbringings and physiques determined it so. So as a study of the Trans-Atlantic contact as a real, historical event, it's deeply misleading.

Demarquis:

So, you don't agree with his thesis that the fundamental reason that it was the Europeans who colonized NA, and not the North Americans who colonized E, is because there were insufficient native plants and animals to domesticate, resulting in lower total population, fewer urban areas, reduced immunity to cross-species disease, fewer cross-species diseases for European colonists to become infected by, and less advanced technology? After all, those complex relations between Europeans and Native Americans took place in North America, not Europe, and that was the phenomenon he was trying to explain.

I am aware of evidence regarding a substantial population die off in NA beginning just after the Spanish contact. There is also some evidence concerning large scale flora and fauna changes at about the same time. Do you disbelieve these?

Eagle: After all, those complex relations between Europeans and Native Americans took place in North America, not Europe, and that was the phenomenon he was trying to explain.

So I think this is where I'm going to clarify the scope of my argument. That geographic factors affected different societies differently is pretty obvious - I mean, duh. I'm not disputing Diamond on that count. What I'm disputing, specifically, is that these factors affected post-contact interaction in the way he asserts.

Chapter III, "Collision at Cajamarca", kind of exemplifies this, showing Pizarro's party (based on his brothers' account) massacring an Incan army hundreds of times their size with their guns and steel, capturing the empire in one fell swoop. Which is just plain untrue. They massacred Atahualpa's unarmed attendants while his army (which wasn't strictly loyal to him) was camped some distance away. Large swathes of the empire were still in a rebellious mood following the recent civil war with Huascar, and Incan rule barely extended over the frontier territories they'd recently conquered. Every other engagement the conquistadors fought was mainly fought by native allies, who were glossed over by their accounts. It was ultimately political factors on the ground that prevented Pizarro's venture from turning into a disaster like his predecessors' did, not technological or population advantages.

Which brings us into the big picture. The book basically buys into the "terminal narrative": that the 1492 contact was an event horizon for the Americas, and from there on European conquest was pretty much predestined by their material advantages. There's nothing inevitable about the conquest. It was slow, fragile, contested at every turn and is arguably still incomplete to this day. In most places, Native actions and happenstance mattered much more than European advantages.

I am aware of evidence regarding a substantial population die off in NA beginning just after the Spanish contact. There is also some evidence concerning large scale flora and fauna changes at about the same time. Do you disbelieve these?

There's some research out there that took the drop in atmospheric CO 2 during the Little Ice Age and tried to use it to estimate the population drop in the Americas. The paper acknowledges that its use of documentary estimates is flawed, for reasons I'll get to below. More than that, though, the whole thing gives off a whiff of confirmation bias: there must have been a massive die-out across the Americas in this period, so let's use the CO 2 drop to give the numbers a go and link it to the Little Ice Age's anthropogenicity while we're at it. And while there were clear population collapses in Hispaniola* and Central Mexico,* I don't think it's wise to extrapolate these to the whole continent. there were insufficient native plants and animals to domesticate, resulting in lower total population

Why would that matter? If population sizes determined the ability to conquer, then China or India would've gobbled everything up long ago. Population count didn't necessarily translate into the technology or motivation to sail across the Atlantic, and they were a non-factor on the ground, where Natives far outnumbered European colonists for the first century or so.

And a disproportionate number of the early conquistadors came from Extremadura and Andalusia, which, y'know, had been an impoverished warzone for centuries. Not exactly the beneficiaries of good nutrition and bountiful growth. reduced immunity to cross-species disease, fewer cross-species diseases for European colonists to become infected by

Diseases were a huge killer, and I don't think anyone's going to dispute that the livestock concentration in the Old World led to a larger cocktail of pathogens. If there's anything we've learned from our current plague year, though, it's that immunology is a complex art bordering on black magic. Europeans might have gained increased innate immunity over the millennia; doesn't change that adaptive immunity is a large part of the puzzle and you can't really acquire that without getting exposed to the pathogen in the first place. And while the "germs" were lethal, they're not "permanently kill off 95% of a whole continent's population" lethal. A study of more recent contact with Amazon Natives shows that populations can rebound from deadly epidemics following peaceful contact. It took a complex mixture of stress factors to achieve the mortality rates we see in the estimates.

For that matter, how do we know that our current estimates of population changes are accurate? To draw from Chinese history, which I'm more familiar with: there's a tendency in pop history to sensationalise the casualty counts of major wars like the Three Kingdoms and the An Lushan rebellion, which supposedly wiped half the country's population off census records. But here's the thing: conflict plays havoc with bureaucracy in ways beyond the killing itself. Population displacement and damaged administrative networks mean that it's incredibly difficult to get an accurate count in conflict zones, even now in the 21st century.

I wouldn't trust the encomenderos of the 16th century to be any more accurate with their numbers. Especially since they would've had motives to exaggerate the population drop, like minimising the amount of tributes they had to pay to the Crown.

Plus, some of the things we took as evidences of depopulation simply weren't. It used to be Common Knowledge that the great mound cities of the Mississippi were depopulated by disease; now we know that many cultures in that region customarily dispersed their populations as a strategy to deal with resource shortages. We've still a long way to go in getting accurate estimate of the Native populations and how much of a drop there really was.

less advanced technology

Define "less advanced". Technology arises according to need, not a linear Civilization-style tech tree. As Aszur said, wheels aren't much use without anything to use them on. How many people can you kill with a 16th century matchlock musket before they're on top of you? Diamond says that it was European guns and steel that persuaded Native allies to join them, but that's ignoring everything that's been written on the topic in the past few decades: the Europeans didn't start reliably winning battles until after they'd recruited Native allies. This is the kind of mistake that you'd get from treating eyewitness accounts as objective data.

For that matter, the Native peoples weren't passive. They adapted their tactics to minimise the impact of European weapons and took them up as they saw fit. The Mapuche famously developed a European-style army with captured Spanish gear, managing to outfight and outlast the Spanish Empire in the Americas and only submitting to Chile in the 19th century. Diamond mentions the Spanish putting down the Vilcabamba Incas with superior firepower, but they, too, had adopted European weapons and armour; once again, it was Native allies that won the battle. The Comanche built an empire on horseback and not only resisted but outright dominated their would-be colonial overlords, bullying the Mexican government for decades and extracting tribute from Spanish, French and American settlers until the decline of the bison population brought their growth to a screeching halt. In the end, European technology in the form of railroads finally eliminated their strategic advantages - but that, too, wouldn't have been possible without Native allies to lend a toehold on the frontier.

n.e.way, this is all outside the scope of this thread and we should probably take the non-climate-related stuff elsewhere. But I've already made my point back at the top of this post. Diamond's book is a useful pop-history primer on how geographic conditions shaped the development of societies besides human agency. It's just spectacularly bad at asserting how those factors shaped the conquest of the Americas, because his understanding of how it actually happened was flawed.

I know that Diamond was trying to refute the idea that the European conquests were enabled by some superiority of character. But the picture he paints is a world of largely-passive Native victims, doomed to failure from the start.

The idea that Native peoples are unable to adapt on their own terms and doomed to a tragic decline (if not extinction) was the exact rationale used to herd them (and Indigenous Australians) into residential schools in the previous century. It paints over their actual existence as a people who have adapted to the post-contact world and are still finding new ways to assert themselves to this day.

I still haven't read that book sadly but IMO, I think that "The American Collapse" is pretty much the IRL example of Worst Possible Case, some populations managed to survive but others didn't. So is a huge variant between ethnic groups within the Americas and the regions.

Like, for a example, the hellish mines of Huancavelica ironically sheltered the natives that were send there, otherwise, they likely would have be wiped out and replaced for African slaves. Meanwhile, natives from the peruvian coasts were practically exterminated.

Kick Them While They Are Down is the best summary of Colonization in its early stages

Said this, I think is fair to say that even the best scenario for the Americans would have be comparable to the European Black Death.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Oct 6th 2020 at 12:17:19 PM

Well, I wouldn't necessarily go that far. Had the Europeans wanted to, they could have conducted a mutually beneficial relationship with the Indigenous Tribes. They didn't want to.

I mean the plague effects still would've nightmarish, but yeah, with more friendly Europeans, things likely would mean Americans native would exist in way greater numbers

I also posted about that in that thread and well I can expand a bit on what happened there and compare it with what happened in other places mostly in America, as I am not super familiar with say, Africa or Asia (thought it is telling that on cursory glances there seems to be some paralells).

I just don't think that Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel removes the entire agency of native peoples and their lifelong struggle from what he presents in his theory. That is to say I don't agree that he falls into what eagle describes as a "terminal narrative".

From what I can find online, "Terminal narrative" is the idea that the Native peoples were doomed to dissapear or fade into irrelevance once the Europeans arrived - this regardless of whether the reason for the Europeans being the catalyst were an inherent superiority (A white supremacist perspective), their "guns, germs and steel" (Enviromentalist determinative perspective), or others (including economic, sociologic, religious, etc).

For context of the book Guns, Germs and Steel, it was born from Jared Diamond's experience in Papua New Guinea, where he narrates that a man named Yali, asked him an interesting question: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?". He found he couldn't answer it, and said the book was his best attempt to answer that question.

The question of Diamond's book and thesis is not prompted by an investigative research from a white dude - but from a native himself. That is to say more than seeking to justify a priori what happened, it seeks to wonder why it happened. Terminal narrative, as far as I understand it, more than an explanation is a justification. So from that theoretic perspective alone I contest that Diamond's book falls into that.

However I understand that it may seem that way because, at large after reading Diamond's book one does end with the impression that sorry kid, truth is...the game was rigged from the start. And yet you look at a particular set of historical facts and there is not such a clear cut before and after history for the natives - and the examples of them can be numbered in the hundreds if not thousands.

With those in mind, I do not think that saying "The monumental advantage European invaders had had a severe effect on these peoples' way of life, and we could narrow these advantages to their guns, germs and steel developed by the specific geographical accidents that developed through no one's fault" in any way whatsoever means "These people were doomed from the start". They're still there, but they were bound to be affected eventually, regardless of political, religious or economical intent.

If anything, knowing this is important because it lets us work from there towards understanding how important it is to allow everyone the same access to resources in order to have a level playing field.

And dismissing it as "Oh you're just trying to justify the elimination and agency and history of native struggles" reads a bit glossing over the whole point and what best you can extract from it.

Sorry for the long post. As an apology if you make it through all, here's a joke.

Shortly before 7 am, Don Cleto Gonzáles Víquez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica, walked out of his home, on the north side of Morazán Park. It was routine of his to walk on foot to the Presidential House.

As he donned his hat and dusted his jacket, with an umbrella under his arm, the beloved President was moved when, just a few meters away, a few desolate children whimpered at the foot of a doorstep.

Like the good grandpa he was, he approached them, asking them what was wrong.

-"Sir, sir! It's just that we are so small...and we can't reach the doorbell! But we need to give a message!"

Solemnly, President Cleto rang the doorbell for them, determined to bring an end to their anguish. No sooner had he pressed the button, the children were halfway down the street, screaming.

-"RUN, MISTER, RUN! AN OLD LADY WHO WILL BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF WHOEVER RINGS HER DOORBELL LIVES THERE!"

Edited by Aszur on Oct 7th 2020 at 10:52:36 PM

Uh oh...

And yes, the book seem more like trying to understand the "How the heck we got here?" rather that trying to do any grand analysis of the multiple paths that the contact could have taken.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Oct 7th 2020 at 11:03:53 AM

Well, I was going to write up this brilliant, highly complex and well researched rebuttal to Eagle's assertion, but that kinda takes all the wind out of my sails. In a good way.

The situation in Costa Rica sounds fascinating. And all this just illustrates just how small the world has become—according to you I'm two or three degrees of freedom away from someone who grew up in that semi-isolated little world, a place and a people I will probably never visit or have any direct personal experience of. The thought engenders a feeling of humbleness in me—it's not just that the world is bigger and more diverse than I ever imagined, it's that evidence of this is right in front of me, and if I don't pay attention I'll miss it.

Speaking as a white upper middle class college educated middle aged American male, I am exactly the type of person whose views on this subject are least trusted by those with the most personal experience. So I am aware of the necessity of being very careful, to do the research, and make a good faith effort to have a clue before I opine about someone else's heritage. Yet I must formulate an opinion of some kind, because pretending these issues don't exist or that I don't have a responsibility to try to become engaged by them is counter-productive.

Let's just say that I feel privileged to be able to participate here.

"The name literally translates to "Rich Coast" but we really have no large deposits of gold whatsoever."

So you have something in common with "Greenland", then?

Edited by DeMarquis on Oct 7th 2020 at 12:49:52 PM

I overall agree that yeah, attributing malice to Diamond's work is kinda wrong.

Senpai noticed me

It may be fascinating but what Eagle points out is that the more you investigate, the more commonplace you know it is. As another brief personal example, my grandmother was a bona fide goddamn fucking fascist, supporter of the Pinochet dictatorship and who traveled to Spain and left flowers on Francisco Franco 's tomb.

Yet Chile has a strong culture of pride with the Mapuche which Eagle mentioned. They were basically unfuckingconquerable and belligerently so. My childhood was spent next to a little chihuahua named "Gueñi", which in Mapuche means "small". And this, again, named by a Fascist. So cultural inheritance is not so simple as “The Mapuche were doomed to eventually be conquered by superior firepower, ideology, tactics, germs, or technology”.

The concept of "Terminal Narrative" is very useful, as it seems to be a way to name a pattern of studies or perceptions which seek to simplify or reduce the rich history and interloping of cultures – regardless of the disparity of their situations, to a simple "winners and losers" thing. Whereas in reality the tapestry is diverse, complex, difficult to understand, and…evidenced all around the world.

Any study or conclusion that says "well here is the winner and here is the loser we may now ignore the loser from this point on and focus on what the winner did" is missing out on so, so much.

I have no doubt that Eagle can elaborate with dozens or hundreds of the examples of how the "extermination" or "conquest" of peoples all across Asia, America or Africa were not as simple as a point-and-click gun-and-sneeze adventure, but that cultural and political intrigue as well as simple miscegenation actually leaves behind many interesting questions that are worth paying attention to.

I just don't think the work of Diamond, specifically Guns, Germs and Steel, falls into the trap of seeking to close off discussions of this nature by trying to explain why one group had the advantage over the other.

Yes, but it was not a marketing ploy, unlike Greenland. It was literally an honest to god mistake born out of sheer greed. As I mentioned before there are not a tonne of gold reserves here but there WAS trade and a lot of the gold probably came from Mexico – in fact, one of the tribes is called “Chorotega” which translates to “Running/Fleeing Aztec”. Probably from the Garland Wars.

But everyone sees what they want. And Columbus saw gold.

To be fair I do not think they intended to attribute malice to Diamond. Rather, neglect or carelessness in their treatment of other peoples which is a fair thing to be wary of: it is often that many studies of native tribes about people comes from White rich guys who end up being fairly dismissive, and it behooves anthropologists to be careful about this.

But I think I have done my arguments about why Diamond does not fall into this. Furthermore, he does not pull an Immanuel Kant, describing the entirety of black people without never having met one in his entire fucking life. He lived and loved in foreign lands and clearly interacted with them on their terms.

Edited by Aszur on Oct 7th 2020 at 11:37:31 PM

Really? Where did Kant do that?

(1775) On the Different Races of Man (Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen) where he asserts that the Black race....and the white race are "for self explanatory reasons" the initial races from which the others derive.

(1764) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen) has what would be the equivalent of a cancel tweet quotes. In it he mentiones the dark skin of a person is "Evidence to them being stupid", that the blacks have no feelings "beyond the ridiculous" and that natives are "incapable of culture".

It is, of course, pretty heated a debate in philosophical schools. Suffice to say Kant didn't base his knowledge on anything but travelogues by merchants and travelers rather than own experiences.

Edited by Aszur on Oct 8th 2020 at 12:13:38 AM

Fairly typical of his time, I would say.

Tribes slam GOP lawmaker for trying to derail Haaland nomination

"Stauber cites Haaland’s support for the Green New Deal and opposition to oil and gas drilling on public lands."

So, for being progressive, mostly.

The Amazing Maize! (Hopefully this is the place for this.)

Edited by megaeliz on Jan 19th 2021 at 11:18:38 AM

Well, you really should try to begin a conversation around it. Do you have a questions or a comment to make?

I just thought it was a really good introduction to the history of Maize (better known as corn), and how the (improbable) domestication from the teosinte plant changed the course of Ancient American history.

Like seriously, Maize really shouldn’t exist. It doesn’t follow the typical pattern of grain domestication at all, and is a lot more interesting than most people give it credit for.

Maize is believed to be domesticated from the teosinte plant, a type of wild grass native to Mexico, which has about 4-12 largely inedible kernels. It’s potential isn’t obvious (so not obvious that most scholars laughed off the idea at first), and it must have taken generations of dedicated breeding from Mezo-American farmers and more than a few lucky mutations for it to even begin to start to vaguely resemble anything that we would recognize as maize.

It was so important to ancient Americans, that most people that cultivated Maize as a staple crop, had some sort of Maize deity, and some cultures, such as the Maya, even believed humanity was created from it.

Edited by megaeliz on Jan 20th 2021 at 11:14:20 AM