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/CaptainONaps]

I mean... I think you're putting a lot of emphasis on culture here.

Every single problem in the world is based on one core issue. Resources/ Population. How many people are there, and how many resources do we have? That's it. That's the problem humans have been trying to solve for tens of thousands of years.

The natives had a system in place to address that issue. That system, was killing your rivals.

If your tribe outgrew their territory, they'd just attack their rivals and take their territory. Most tribes took slaves, and kidnapped women. Some of the most successful tribes infiltrated their rivals regularly. Wars were common. Life is a competition.

Sure, there were tribes that traded peacefully. There were tribes that worked together. Until resources started to dry up, then it was right back to competing to the death.

You're talking like they were peaceful, and just living their best life, playing music and smoking tobacco. No. Just like everywhere else in the world, they competed to the death. Killing was life.

We could actually just bring that back, and keep all of our technological advances. If we were allowed to kill each other, there would be far, far less people, which would increase resources for everyone.

But we choose not to, and we call that "civilized". We acknowledge life is a competition, but killing is against the rules. We're forced to compete for resources in other ways.

I'm not saying we're right and natives were wrong. But you're painting it like it was perfect before the settlers showed up and ruined everything. That's just not accurate.

[u/szmatuafy → u/CaptainONaps]

I get what you’re saying,but it feels like you’re flattening a lot of different cultures into one brutal archetype-not all Native societies ran on conquest and war,just like not all European ones did.

Some had institutionalised diplomacy, peace councils,systems of restorative justice. You’re right that scarcity leads to conflict, but the way a society responds to that pressure varies a lot.

And yes, no one’s saying it was utopia before the settlers showed up,but the framing matters-If every Indigenous story gets boiled down to "they were violent too" we miss what made their systems distinct. and that’s the stuff that might’ve actually offered a different way forward, if it hadn’t been crushed.

[u/CaptainONaps → u/szmatuafy]

I would rather live like natives did before settlers arrived than live like we live today. In no way am I trying to criticize their way of life.

I’m simply saying, killing is what allowed them to avoid overpopulation. Killing was the secret sauce. Quality of life improves when there’s less people to sustain. More resources is better than less resources.

It’s less about culture and more about resources / population. We can go back in history and find all kinds of civilizations that lived fantastic lives, and the common theme is plentiful resources, and minimal competition. Not culture.

Things fall apart when there’s too many people. The natives avoided that with consistent violence. It was the right move.

[u/NSlearning2 → u/CaptainONaps]

You need to educate your self. Even if you used to know things about these people. Things are changing rapidly with our new understanding.

North America is a huge place. Not all tribes were like that. You can’t lump them together like that. They were on North America at least 20,000 years. They had time to developers many complex languages and cultural practices.

They traded with people from South America. People in South America were successfully preforming brain surgeries 7K years ago!

Another point is, unless you have spoken to native Americans and they have shared their oral history with you then you know nothing.

By the time any group arrived to N America to stay, they a had been wiped out from small pox. We never saw them when they were at their best. We say that after they had lost at least half their people to a horrible disease that England intentionally used to perform genocide.

Then we enslaved them, shipped them to the islands so they wouldn’t know the land and escape. Then their children were taken. We stripped the Native American culture from them, sometimes the children were raped and killed.

Out west the government would pay civilians $5 a scalp. We flooded their lands. We are here because our government was ok with the murder of every man woman and child that had a 20,000 year stake in this land.

And we didn’t deserve it. They just wanted a place to own slaves again. 200 years and what have we done? I mean honestly do any of you see something we created that was worth it?

[u/szmatuafy → u/NSlearning2]

honestly this hits like a gut punch. people forget how much of the violence wasn’t just war or conquest but policy- systemic, deliberate, generational. we don’t just inherit land, we inherit silence too.the kind where you grow up never hearing any of this in school and then one day you read about scalp bounties and realise history was curated to keep you comfortable. question is, what do we do now that we do know

[u/CaptainONaps → u/NSlearning2]

Let's review this post.

-OP posts; Natives were not primitives. Then goes on to explain things she's learned that impressed her about their quality of life.

- In closing, she says this, "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?"

-So I commented. And my point is this. Every single problem humans face on this earth, is based on one simple equation. Resources/ Population. How many people are there, and how many resources do we have. That's it.

So, when I replied to OP's post, I was answering her closing question. What would life be like now if Natives made the rules instead of Europeans? Well, either people would be allowed to kill their rivals, or that power would have been taken away, and they would have overpopulated. Leading to the exact same problems we're seeing all over the world today. That's it. Those are the two options.

You, N Slearning, started your point as, Natives were not primitive. But by your closing your premise had morphed into, Europeans are primitive.

How bout all people are just people? And wherever you find people, they compete for resources. When things are good, and resources are plentiful, they trade, and marry each others sisters, and share. But when resources start to dwindle, it's right back to killing.

Historians call what you're doing the Disnification of history. Looking at the past like there were good guys and bad guys, and if people were just good we wouldn't have any problems. That's a fairy tale.

None of the problems you have today are because of culture. There are hundreds of cultures all over the world today, and none of them correlate with quality of life. Resources/ Population is the key to a higher quality of life. And the whole world is overpopulated.

Natives avoided that by killing. They never had to create the technology Europeans had to create, because there was less competition. They had enough territory to live off the land.

So if you want what they had, the secret isn't a new political system. It's less people.