= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
bramflakes comments on Open thread, 16-22 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (172)
They ought to subjugate themselves, obviously!
Or, to be a little less flip; if you are facing such a fate, it is because your society is overwhelmingly weaker than its rivals. Yes, as Lumifer, below, suggests, the Native Americans needed weaponry, but it's hardly an accident that they lacked it - they weren't capable of manufacturing such things for themselves, or of producing anything of value to offer in exchange for the weaponry. As a result, they were forced to rely on the goodwill and charity of their neighbours, which is just as disastrous for nations as is it for individuals. Even if the USA had left the natives well alone, the Mexicans, or the French, or some other predatory nation would have wiped them out.
What the Native Americans needed to do was to reorganise their society, to give up their traditional way of life, to live in cities, to adopt the settlers' customs, laws, methods of production, and so on. See, for example, the example of Japan 60 years later.
None of that will stop them dying like flies to smallpox.
Oh and also, giving up traditional ways of life to live like the Americans didn't work out so well for some of the Cherokee. They played by all the rules, but as soon as prospectors found gold on their land they were pushed aside.
Strikes me that adopting Western customs and technology (such as the smallpox vaccine, Jenner, 1798) would have been exactly the right solution to that issue too.
As for the Cherokee - I agree they tried. But they were still too weak to stand up for themselves. My suggestion is not "play by the white man's rules and hope he treats you nicely." It's "copy the white man's ways so you have the strength to resist him."
Huh, I didn't know the smallpox vaccine came about that early.
Either way, there were still plenty of nasty diseases from the Old World that had (or still have) no vaccines, like cholera, typhus, typhoid, measles, malaria, influenza, leprosy and bubonic plague. Their cumulative effect sapped native societies of their vigor, and this would have persisted even if they adopted the kind of sanitation technologies that Euros brought.
The reason it took Europeans until the 19th century to conquer the African interior was that disease was so difficult to overcome. Until quinine was developed, the half-life of a British garrison on the Gold Coast was less than 18 months. With this severe a disadvantage, I don't think there's anything the native Americans could have done, no matter how enlightened their chieftains.
I've heard it went better for the Cherokee than for other tribes, which is why the Cherokee are the ones most people have heard of.
The most successful tribe at adapting to the conditions of European settlement were the Comanches, who dominated a huge region of the west for about 100 years.
Yes - compared to other tribes they did the best. But it'd be pretty depressing to be a chieftain in 1800 knowing that that's the best you can do.