[throwup238]

I was surprised to find out that there are still many indigenous groups with populations in the millions. My California public education made it seem like they were all pretty much wiped out save for those who survived to the various reservation systems.

My favorite group is the Mapuche who managed to hold out against the Spaniards until they were conquered by Chile and Argentina in the late 19th century. They managed to thwart the conquistadors for centuries! It wasn’t until the modern era where military logistics got good enough to unseat them and overcome the advantages they had.

[jcranmer]

Even in the US, the Indian Wars weren't finished until the 1890s. In fact, most of the big wars against the Native Americans took place after the American Civil War. One of the big faults I have with US history in the education system is that it tends to front-load the depiction of Native Americans in the Precolonial portion of history, with an echo in the Trail of Tears and forced migration in the 1830s, and largely edits them out of the history of the settling of the west, despite this process requiring a very violent dispossession of the existing inhabitants.

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

> most of the big wars against the Native Americans

As I learned it, most of the conflicts were between not against. Native Americans, became a term as a general catch all but those peoples saw themselves as quite diverse, and as such is something of a misnomer.

[jcranmer]

It's really hard to read this comment as anything other than "don't worry about the genocidal policy of the US with regards to the natives, for they were a violent people."

Indeed, it's actually an example of problem I lamented: the disinterest in covering Native American history post-founding of the US. The last of major conflicts between different Native American tribes took place around the 1850s, the lingering effects of the Lakota being pushed onto the Plains [1]. From that point on, all of the main conflicts are between the US and the various Native American tribes for a variety of reasons, although mainly "the US wants your land and isn't going to take 'no' for an answer."

[1] If you want to analyze the broader historical context, you of course have to ask "why did the Lakota move onto the Plains?" and following that thread of logic leads you to the first cause being "the English settled on the eastern coast."

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

> It's really hard to read this comment as anything other than "don't worry about the genocidal policy of the US with regards to the natives, for they were a violent people."

This is a wild jump to make. I'm not sure I can take your comment in good faith as being serious.

[jcranmer]

I had the benefit of being able to write that comment after seeing the other replies you wrote to sibling comments, and those comments reinforce the impression that you believe in the inaccurate stereotype of Indians as "noble savages."

[idiotsecant]

Prior to western colonization of course the native people had conflicts, just not at the scale the colonizers could achieve. During the genocide of the natives some tribes used it as an excuse to kill their enemies, sometimes to curry favor with a technologically superior force, and sometimes just to kill their enemies. Some fought back against the invaders, with varying degrees of success. Most people just died.

None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans.

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

> None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans

No that's exactly what it makes it, as their conflicts subtract from those with newer arrivals. Different groups fighting each other, and then other different groups from Europe came, and made allegiances with specific local groups, then collaborated in their conflicts.

It's worth understanding that 'western colonization' wasn't a singular coherent force. There were different foreign groups with different interests - who were fighting with each other in North America.

Similarly there were 'Native Americans' (quotes as this is a colonial term) pursuing their own interests, even going to Europe. I'm not sure it's your perspective but there is a popular historic image of native americans being a defenceless people who foreigners came and wiped out which simply isn't correct, and ironically quite colonial.

[idiotsecant]

There were plenty of regional wars among the native Americans. None of them resulted in widespread genocide and construction of concentration camps and reservations. In the initial Spanish 'not western colonization' nearly 8 million people died. By the 1900s there was nearly an 80% reduction in population and western populations were in possession of their resources.

Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory. What else do you call that?

[WalterBright]

> Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory.

The various tribes also engaged in near constant warfare with each other, defeating them, taking their territory, and making the rest slaves. Cortez was only able to defeat the Aztecs because he was able to enlist the aid of the non-Aztec tribes, who hated the Aztecs because of the depredations of Aztecs against them.

The Inca empire was only recently formed before the Spanish arrived.

In North America, the Commanche carved out an empire in the south at the expense of the tribes that had been living there. See "Empire of the Summer Moon":

https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

None of what you said refutes my first point. All your points are valid, just missing broader context. 'Native American' history didn't begin when Europeans arrived. Seems to all boil down to, people A did X bad things to people B thus people A are responsible for demise of people B, while ignoring everything else that occurred with people A - who by the way are only viewed as A by people B.

[sethammons]

Look up the american bison. The US government's official policy was to eliminate bison to eliminate Indians/First Peoples. Mountains of skulls. In under a decade, the bison population was pushed down from 30-60M to approximately 500 individuals.

Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever. Then colonization and disease and westward expansion. Look up the Trail of Tears, the genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.

Your education may align with propaganda. Even today, first people nations are actively having their history taken. Pete Hegseth, sec of def/war, has pushed to close the door on the massacre of wounded knee, enshrining the medals earned for slaughtering woman and children. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/us/hegseth-wounded-knee.h....

Look up how the US government stole native kids and sent them catholic schools to have the Indian taught out of them. A system that was purpose built to stop their way of life. Or forced, non-consented sterilization of native woman that was happening in the 60s and 70s.

If you somehow didn't know the US government's history of conflict and abuse of Native Americans, you should question your formal education. And you should do some light research.

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

you seem used to issuing commands. best of luck with that approach. your cherry picked data points may be correct, but they are also misleading absent broader historical context. these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period), so your subsequent points about x/y/z impact although valid don't carry weight. imo data driven arguments trump emotional appeals. Trail of tears and similar are powerful and empathy inducing for sure, but don't change the facts around which my comment was based. your presentation skews things to a false dichotomy of one group against another which is inaccurate and unproductive. current politicians (left or right) in the US don't change history (and no I didn't bother reading your nytimes link...).

> Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever.

sounds like you're confused what point you are arguing.

[hitarpetar]

> these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period

this is an obvious contradiction. how could colonial historians know that "these groups had diminished" before colonialism when they weren't there? troll better

[throwup238]

I'm not sure what the GP is referencing specifically (the colonization of the Americas took hundreds of years on two continents after all) but we've got enough archaeological evidence to know that many indigenous cultures were in decline by the time the Spaniards first visited, and many entered a second decline after first contact but before they were conquered or fully economically exploited.

For example I've been studying the Mississippi river cultures [1] which left behind lots of mound villages formed into chiefdoms and paramount chiefdoms. Those cultures suffered a decline around the mid-15th century likely due to environmental changes which we can see in the distribution of villages and mounds changing. We can also see how warfare evolved based on defenses and the distribution of arable land to houses (i.e. are they clustered villages for defense or spread around their fields for efficiency?) Historians then compare them to the accounts of the Narvaez and de Soto expeditions which provides a baseline for post-contact (mid 16th), where we can also see a large decline and social restructuring before the English and French came in to finish the job (the Spaniards more or less gave up on that area as economically uninteresting except for the occasional slave raid).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_shatter_zone

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

> how could colonial historians know that "these groups had diminished" before colonialism when they weren't there?

is this a serious question? what defines history as a subject is precisely that it is not the present.

[estearum]

Genocide is bad even if the victims are imperfect human beings

[vacuity]

For that matter, who can be said to be perfect?

[tdeck]

This is also a difference in outcomes between traditional colonialism (where indigenous people were viewed as a source of labor) and settler colonialism (where indigenous people are viewed simply as "in the way"). That's not to say that traditional colonialism is in any way acceptable, however.

[gausswho]

The Mapuche even expanded their territorial control, in large part to their acquisition and mastery of Spanish horses.

[pjbk]

They also mainly continued to be loyal to the Spanish crown after Argentina and Chile went through their independence, and carried out the final pacification of the Mapuche territories in the 19th century. By then only a very small part of the population had not mingled with Europeans.

[pqtyw]

Relatively (adjusted by area and duration) not that many people from Spain moved to the Americas between 1500 and ~1800, especially compared to the British colonies in North America.

So they couldn't murder/expel (unlike the British/American colonists) most of the native population (especially considering that North America was much less densely inhabited to begin with) if they wanted someone to work in the mines and plantation (again relatively not that many slaves were imported to the mainland colonies as well).

France was similar (except they struggled even more with getting enough people to move to the colonies).

[WalterBright]

The Commanche also held out until after the Civil War.

[beerandt]

Was always weird to me how "the French and Indian War" had Indian involvement almost over emphasized to pretend like it wasn't the extension of a European war...

While all the other American conflicts with tons of Indian involvement (both sides, esp civil war) had it downplayed.

One of my first realizations of slant put on history.

[tdeck]

It's more properly a campaign of the Seven Years War, which was almost a world war of its time.

[beerandt]

>like it wasn't the extension of a European war...

[tdeck]

My comment wasn't intended as a "correction", just adding that historians seem to refer to this war by a different name these days. At least in the textbooks I learned from, it was discussed in the context of the Seven Years War.

[pqtyw]

The French and Indian war began 2 years before the war in Europe. So in a way it was the other way around (of course there were much more important factors than what was effectively an ongoing proxy war in faraway colonies)