[iaejpiejf23]

But 95% of natives didn't die of disease. Unless you are saying white men are a disease. We had to cull the indians like we culled the bison, deer, wolves, bears, etc. It was the most successful genocidal campaign in human history. It was also one of the most successful clearing the land of all life period.

Settlers were paid for each indian scalp they got. Indian men, women and children were hunted and slaughtered wholesale.

Idiots like Jared Diamond might try to absolve our sins by lying about how the indians died. But the truth of how the west was won is no so convenient. It was brutal and rapacious.

I mean, we didn't even push the natives past the appalachian mountains until the 1760s and that idiot jared diamond wants us to believe the natives essentially died off in the 1500s.

[learc83]

>But 95% of natives didn't die of disease.

Do you have any sources for that. The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.

It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.

Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.

[iaejpiejf23]

> Do you have any sources for that.

Yes, it called history and biology. Disease doesn't work that way and history proves it didn't work that way.

> The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.

Sure, but jared diamond's silly book is what made it mainstream. No serious historian takes that theory serious because science and history says that didn't happen.

> It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.

North American civilization didn't get completely destroyed until well after the civil war when mass european migration and the invention of machine guns, the expansion of railroads, etc gave american settlers a huge advantage.

> Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.

And like I said, the border that the colonists and the indians drew in 1763 was the appalachian mountains. The colonists were confined to a tiny sliver of land on the eastern seaboard. If disease wiped out the natives, why would the colonists take so little land? Why would the border between "america" and indian lands be divided in such a manner.

[dasil003]

But let's not romanticize Native American culture either. The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times. There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture. It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves. We simply don't have the context to judge them. It was what it was.

[learc83]

You can also look north the the Thule (Inuit) and Dorset cultures. The Thule expanded to Canada and Greenland in the middle ages, and in a very short time they completely wiped out the dominant Dorset culture that had existed for thousands of years.

The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.

[lamuerteflaca]

And I'm sure that if there were any Dorset left they too would still be cursing them for wiping them out.

[iaejpiejf23]

> The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.

Highly doubtful. The Dorset culture probably died off due to change in climate and their failure to adapt rather than inuits traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to kill the dorset.

Not to mention that these dorset was a tiny population already in significant decline.

There is a world of difference between the inuits and dorsets. Hell the norse and europeans were in contact with dorset long before the inuit. Perhaps it was european "disease" or raids that wipe them out...

Nobody really knows. But what we know is that they were a dying peoples long before the inuits came around.

[aminok]

The Dorset culture was spread all across Northern Canada and parts of Greenland. It was found in widely divergent latitudes, with different climates.

It's simply not plausible that such a widely dispersed culture would disappear in such a short time due to climate change.

Disease transmitted from Norse settlers/traders being the cause is also not plausible, as the Dorset disappeared first in the Western stretch of Northern N. America, where the Thule were expanding from, rather than the East, where they would have first had contact with the Norse. Competition from an invasive culture, the Thule, is the likely cause.

[iaejpiejf23]

> But let's not romanticize Native American culture either.

Absolutely. But lets also not pretend that the natives were racially motivated genocidal maniacs either.

> The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times.

Sure. But they need to do so in order to survive. And lets not forget that we hunted the comanche like animals and wiped them out. Settlers were encouraged to hunt indians and bring their scalps in exchange of money.

> There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture.

Even if they were the most peaceful buddhists, they would have been wiped out. We wanted their land and they simply had no choice. It's pretty idiotic to blame the comanches for fighting back.

> It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves.

It was wrong no matter what century you are in.

> We simply don't have the context to judge them.

If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.

What happened to the natives was the greatest extermination campaign in history. The holocaust was a joke compared to what happened to the natives.

To emphasize this point, there are more jews in the US than there are natives...

[dasil003]

> If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.

All the rest are good points, but this is an emotional non-sequitur. The reason we don't have context to judge is because we live lives of comfort today, we have no idea what it was like to move into the Wild West and the danger and hardship that entailed.

Of course I agree genocide is bad, that doesn't make me equipped to judge people who lived 200 years ago based on hazy historical generalities.