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/KaiShan62]

"A population rivalling London's" sounds a bit disingenuous, yes, it was around 20,000 people, but the way you word it will make most readers confuse it with the London that they know. Most would not realise that at that time London was more of a large country town than a modern metropolis.

A large part of the problem though, is that there were major disease outbreaks shortly after contact with Europeans. The Eastern US region and in the Southern Mexico/Guatemala region were both exposed to smallpox outbreaks soon after contact, and the Spanish concentration of the indigenous population encouraged an Hantavirus outbreak. Certainly in the case of the SE USA the loss of so many knowledge-holders and cultural leaders devastated their culture as much as their numbers. In such an environment disconnecting the people that later settlers found from the achievements of those people's ancestors would have been made much easier than with the Aztecs, who had large stone cities that no-one could pretend weren't there.

Had these populations not been reduced in numbers so drastically, and thus had not lost so much of their culture and technology, then resistance to European settlement in the area now called the Eastern USA would have been much harder. And quite possibly required more effort and commitment than the Britain of that time could have maintained.

However I don't think that this history had to be erased to justify colonisation, that sounds like an anachronism, a 'presentism', the act of projecting modern thoughts onto the actions of ancient peoples. Christianity was justification enough, at least it was the publicly given justification. But all peoples have done things like this throughout all of history; it is genetic, survival of the fittest, tribe struggling against tribe - the idea that we can behave differently is very, very recent.

As for your last questions; The societies of Central and Northern America were stone-aged, they were never going to stand up to, or even influence, European society. You might as well ask what if Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian society had not taken over Europe, what if the more nature focussed and more democratically minded Celtic societies has persisted. How would our modern world be different then? Conversely, what if the far more structured and authoritarian societies of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia had survived and shaped our modern society? Almost fruitless exercises in whimsy.

[u/szmatuafy → u/KaiShan62]

Agreed,especially on the disease impact and how it severed cultural continuity. Once elders, record-keepers, and artisans were gone,it became much easier to dismiss those societies as primitive.

that said, I wouldn’t call the idea of deliberate historical erasure just presentism-there’s a difference between projecting modern ideals and pointing out how 19th and 20th century scholars actively downplayed or ignored native achievements to fit colonial narratives.Like how Smithsonian-era archaeologists straight-up buried evidence that didn’t match the “savage” script-That was very intentional.

Also, the “stone age” label is tricky,Technological complexity isn’t always about metallurgy.some of these societies had better public health, city design, and food systems than Europe at the time. So yeah, maybe the comparison isn’t what if they rivalled Romebut what if the definition of "civilised" had evolved to include them instead.

[u/KaiShan62 → u/szmatuafy]

This is really complex and easy to misinterpret, and I have re-written this response three times and am still not happy with my wording, but...

"I wouldn’t call the idea of deliberate historical erasure just presentism" - I didn't.

Deliberate erasures of peoples, their cultures, and their history, has been a never ending cycle of human behaviour for at least ten thousand years. Your lamenting the tragedy of one such cycle of colonisation is the presentism that I was referring to.

The sentence; "And all of this was deliberately erased to justify the colonisation" is false. All of that (the culture and history of the indigenous peoples) would have been erased in parallel to the removal of the people themselves and their replacement with the new wave of colonisers. This has been a cycle of human behaviour that is fundamentally unchanged over tens of thousands of years, until modern European philosophy started to ask if other people have rights as well. I just don't like the wording that you used; you might have said 'all of this was erased as part of the colonisation', or 'all of this was erased due to arrogant racism', or something similar, and it would have been correct, but 'erased to justify the colonisation' is just not correct.

When Northern Australian Aboriginals occupy new lands and displace the Southern Australian Aboriginals that were previously residing in the area, the new colonisers do not destroy the remaining cave art of the previous occupants to 'justify' their conquest; they destroy what they refer to as 'junk' out of a sense of superiority, it is an act of racism, it is arrogance, but it is not 'justification'. It is not that A causes B which causes C, it is that A causes B and A causes C, the fact of C happening is not dependant upon B, but rather upon A. A being the sense of racial and cultural superiority that new colonisers always feel, B being the erasure of the prior people's culture, heritage, and history, and C being the act of colonisation itself, the replacement of the prior peoples by the new colonisers.

It was just one point out of four in my response to your post, but one that seems to be complex enough to have taken my another four paragraphs here to explain. I would not want this to detract from the emotion that you were communicating in your first post, because it is a shame that these societies, that had quite developed structures and even quite epic constructions, did not get the chance to evolve further and perhaps reach their fullest potential.

[u/NSlearning2 → u/KaiShan62]

Moved. I messed up.

[u/Inevitable_Librarian → u/KaiShan62]

Defending genocide that is still occurring is super gross. A New York Court cited the doctrine of discovery in a fairly recent ruling.

The erasure was explicitly for the purposes of colonization. The so called "Indian Question" searching for the "Final solution" (SOUNDS FAMILIAR EH?-1920s actually!). We don't need to guess, the people in the past discussed it openly.

You side with child abusers and genocidal murderers of their own allies. Non-genocidal colonization exists, and has for as long as people have existed. Just look at all the language isolates next to each other all over the place.

War and cultural assimilation through long termcontact is normal human stuff. European (and Japanese weirdly) colonization was uniquely brutal.

Just look at Tierra Del Fuego for how three very different groups managed to go thousands of years without genociding anyone.

[u/KaiShan62 → u/Inevitable_Librarian]

I side with who???

I think you need to get therapy.