Yeah the explanation I have read is that the Great Plains were extremely similar to the Central Asian Steppes but there were no horses.
When horses were introduced by the Spanish in Mexico and migrated North, it drastically changed much of North America. Sedentary agrarian societies became suddenly vulnerable to the nomadic horseback cultures that pretty quickly sprung up, way ahead of the wave of European migration.
I wonder if not for the introduction of horses, those Native American societies would have been more organized and exploitable like mesoamerican cultures, and maybe caused the English to turn the down the Genocide dial a few notches. There were social and like, apparently theological factors involved in the different levels of ethnic destruction, but the practical influence of capital accumulation could have counteracted those tendencies.
Nah, the hardcore extermination was happening waaayyyy before Euros crossed the Mississippi. During the Beaver Wars in New York and around Ohio, native civilians were brutally murdered, scalped, impaled, and generally just constantly harrassed until entire cultures were pushed into the swamps around the Great Lakes (that were havens for malaria-carrying mosquitos). Then during/after the Northwest Indian War, the Americans pushed them out of the swamps and out to Oklahoma along with the Cherokee. And they did the same thing again with Tecumseh's multicultural project, the Miami, and the Potawotami in Indiana/Michigan. If the pretext of "treaties" were not followed then the inhabitants of the area were forcibly removed by the military as "aggressors". The regions east of the Mississippi have some of the lowest native populations to this day, despite having thriving agricultural civilizations at the time of the De Soto expedition (it's generally understood that De Soto's crew were probably the only Euros to witness/record Mississippian culture firsthand before it was wiped out by smallpox).
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Yeah the explanation I have read is that the Great Plains were extremely similar to the Central Asian Steppes but there were no horses.
When horses were introduced by the Spanish in Mexico and migrated North, it drastically changed much of North America. Sedentary agrarian societies became suddenly vulnerable to the nomadic horseback cultures that pretty quickly sprung up, way ahead of the wave of European migration.
I wonder if not for the introduction of horses, those Native American societies would have been more organized and exploitable like mesoamerican cultures, and maybe caused the English to turn the down the Genocide dial a few notches. There were social and like, apparently theological factors involved in the different levels of ethnic destruction, but the practical influence of capital accumulation could have counteracted those tendencies.
Nah, the hardcore extermination was happening waaayyyy before Euros crossed the Mississippi. During the Beaver Wars in New York and around Ohio, native civilians were brutally murdered, scalped, impaled, and generally just constantly harrassed until entire cultures were pushed into the swamps around the Great Lakes (that were havens for malaria-carrying mosquitos). Then during/after the Northwest Indian War, the Americans pushed them out of the swamps and out to Oklahoma along with the Cherokee. And they did the same thing again with Tecumseh's multicultural project, the Miami, and the Potawotami in Indiana/Michigan. If the pretext of "treaties" were not followed then the inhabitants of the area were forcibly removed by the military as "aggressors". The regions east of the Mississippi have some of the lowest native populations to this day, despite having thriving agricultural civilizations at the time of the De Soto expedition (it's generally understood that De Soto's crew were probably the only Euros to witness/record Mississippian culture firsthand before it was wiped out by smallpox).
Ah yeah that's a great point, I suppose the east coast was just as organized as those pre-horse plains cultures.