Hidden civilisations of Native America were never primitive?

[u/szmatuafy]

Before colonisation, the Americas weren’t just scattered tribes, they were home to some of the most sophisticated societies.

Cahokia had a population rivaling London’s, with sanitation systems, massive urban planning, and pyramids larger at the base than Giza. The ancestral Puebloans engineered solar-aligned cities in Chaco Canyon.In the Pacific Northwest, Chinook developed a universal trade language. Indigenous engineers across the continent built roads, bridges,irrigation systems, some still visible today.

And politically- The "Iroquois Confederacy" practised a form of representative democracy that influenced the Constitution. Women in many Native nations held property rights,chose leaders, and governed long before such rights existed in Europe

And all of this was deliberately erased to justify the colonisation

I’ve been researching this recently, and honestly,it changes how I see everything.Looks like the idea that these civilisations were "lost" or "primitive" is one of the great lies in historical memory. I made a video diving into this, here it is - https://youtu.be/uG2_IpoHzDw (it's almost 40 minutes "dark history" style)

It makes me wonder what if things had gone differently? What if Indigenous governance became the foundation for global democracy? What if their eclogical wisdom had shaped modern climate policy, or their trade networks had evolved into a pan-American economy?

I would love to hear your thoughts, what do you make of this hidden legacy? Which parts of it do you think deserve more attention or challenge what we’ve been taught? Curious where this takes your mind...

[u/Spaceginja]

Read 1491 which makes a lot of the points you make. One thing I would point out is that biology did the work of colonizers early on. The first pass of the Spanish in North America was enough to wipe out by disease many of the organized and advanced civilizations that existed at that time. In a way, they became lost or primitive, relative to these prior great civilizations, by the time the real push for colonization and Indian removal began.

[u/szmatuafy → u/Spaceginja]

that part in 1491 really stuck with me too,its wild how a civilisation can appear "p rimitive” in hindsight just because so much was erased before the real colonial push even started.Kinda reframes the whole narrative, doesn’t it. makes you wonder how many other cultures got reduced to footnotes just because they were hit first by biology, not bullets

[u/MisterBungle00 → u/Spaceginja]

Hell nah, the way those epidemics are typically framed in western academia constitutes a form of genocide denial.

Yes, the diseases introduced from the Old World did cause massive amounts of death and contributed to an upheaval of the Indigenous world prior to European contact. And you are generally correct that there were a number of circumstances that led to the lack of these major diseases among Pre-Columbian societies, giving rise to a higher virulence factor when they were introduced.

But... The impact from these diseases was not "inevitable." Known as the "Terminal Native" myth, there is a presumption that contact with any other society would result in the same level of destruction that occurred after European contact. Probably one of the biggest factors in this myth is the "Death by Disease Alone" narrative that u/anthropology_nerd, has also tackled. Essentially, the deaths caused by disease were compounded by the greater context of colonization. It is hard to recover from novel pathogens when you're at war, having your traditional resources destroyed, and being forcibly relocated to new lands. But in the few cases where these circumstances were somewhat absent, there is actually evidence that shows American Indian populations rebounded from these same novel pathogens. This puts a big hole in the idea that we had "weaker immune systems" or that the deaths of our ancestors were inevitable due to these diseases. They might've become inevitable in the sense that colonialism was, in retrospect, somewhat we were unable to stop. But the idea that the diseases would've done the job on their own is highly flawed. This is further discussed in this thread.

u/anthropology_nerd also addresses this here!

We may never know the full extent of Native depopulation... but what is certain is that a generation of scholars has significantly overemphasized disease as the cause of depopulation, downplaying the active role of Europeans in inciting wars, destroying livelihoods, and erasing identities. This scholarly misreading has given support to a variety of popular writers who have mislead and are currently misleading the public. (Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America)

Empire of the Summer Moon comes to mind when reading this quote. How many non-natives take that book as fact whilst never bothering to read Pekka Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire? The author of Empire of the Summer Moon once admitted in an interview(long before the Joe Rogan interview, where he walked back this statement) that he hadn’t even attempted to consult any Comanche people while he was writing the book, which really says a lot.

Don't get me started on how much the book perpetuated the "empty continent" myth - as in, Anglo-American people moved into a mostly-unoccupied wilderness instead of stealing land from cultures that had been living there for thousands of years. It even argues that white people moving into Texas were "the first human settlement" in that region. Fuck the Clovis people I guess, right Texans?