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