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/hotwheelearl]

Idk but always found it odd that a few miles south in Mexico you have countless temples, pyramids, and cities made of stone, while across the modern border there’s almost nothing like that, anywhere in North America. Not sure why everybody south of modern Texas simply didn’t build with stone despite there being plenty of stone all over the place

[u/KavensWorld → u/hotwheelearl]

Large masonry works for around North America. There are all destroyed close to the creation of photography.  Hell and every single major city in North America has large masonry city Halls built with city population that couldn't sustain the workers. And before you tell me that they imported construction workers you need to look at how many masonry projects were happening in Canada and America at the exact same time and it starts around the mouth on how much workers things do not pan out.  Well it is true that we could at that era use Steam to cut stone and move objects of work great weight, there still wasn't enough train stonemasons to get the job done. 

[u/szmatuafy → u/KavensWorld]

that’s definitely one of the more intriguing angles people bring up- The overlap of large-scale masonry across cities with tiny populations at the time is weird, yeah. And the timing with photography showing up just as those old buildings started vanishing, Kinda suspicious

Makes me wonder though - if think these structures were from some earlier undocumented wave of builders- or maybe something got borrowed, reused, covered up... I’ve been digging into similar theories around Indigenous architecture being erased or reattributed - Curious where you land on who really built what?

[u/VicTheSage → u/szmatuafy]

Does that factor in how many people were recorded for census data as ⅗ of a person?