This is probably unworkable for a number of reasons, some of which Salmoneus pointed out. The only way I see this working is if the disease transfer isn't so destructively one-way. So more in line with the colonization of Africa (though even there, essentially every native group was subjugated to European rule for some time).
I also see a lot of ... I guess romanticization? ... of what Indian groups were like at the time.
So:
Frislander wrote:Part of the thing I think was that the Natives had not seen White people before and therefore did not have any preconceptions of the Europeans. Perhaps if the Vikings had been present further south, perhaps the natives would have been more wary.
This was only true reeeeeeaaaaally early on. By the actual colonization of the Americas north of Mexico, the Indians whom the settlers were meeting had known Europeans for probably a century. There were European fishermen exploiting the grounds off the northeast coast by the early 1500s. They had enough contact with the natives that a Basque-Algonquian trade jargon (Souriquois) developed, and a few words from that were ultimately loaned into some Algonquian languages (e.g., Mikmaq
atlai "shirt" < Basque
atorra). And there's a reason the Pilgrims had
multiple options for Massachusett-English interpreters (Squanto, Samoset, Hobbamock, etc.) -- namely, because lots of the Indians had had
extensive contact with Europeans! Squanto had been abducted and kept captive in Spain and England for several years, Samoset had numerous dealings with English fishermen in Maine. I don't know how Hobbamock knew English, he may have learned it quickly from the Pilgrims themselves. In any case, none of the Indians the colonists met or interacted with were surprised at the existence of Europeans.
As Squanto demonstrates, Indians had also been repeatedly abducted by English and other Europeans for decades. The Pilgrims met other Indians who had lost family members to such abductions, and a Portuguese explorer captured 50 Indians from around Newfoundland as early as 1501. They were surely under no delusions that Europeans posed no threat (indeed, several European shipwreck victims were massacred shortly before the Pilgrims' arrival). Instead, some groups formed alliances with the Europeans for the same reasons anyone forms alliances with anyone else in the rest of the world: to advance their own power and/or gain an advantage over nearby rivals, for better access to advanced weapons and valuable trade goods, or just out of a sincere affinity for one another. Squanto, the victim of a past abduction, was nonetheless vital to the survival of the colony in its first year, but his end game was evidently gaining regional power by undermining Massasoit, the Pokanoket sachem. He used his superior command of English to manipulate the other Indians and tried to trick the Pokanokets and Pilgrims into fighting a war. He was not the naive, benevolent simpleton of sanitized history lessons in school, he was an actual, scheming, political human being. As was Massasoit, for that matter. He and the Pilgrims seem to have genuinely liked and trusted each other, but Massasoit was also desperate for an alliance to combat the power of the Narragansetts, which had grown in recent years as the Wampanoag confederacy suffered severely from an epidemic.
It's vitally important to think of the Indians as normal human beings. Normal humans are political creatures, and make realpolitik decisions all the time. Just because many Indians seriously distrusted Europeans didn't mean they were opposed to forming alliances with them. Indians were also not a monolithic group. There were thousands of individual bands and tribes and groups and regional conglomerations, all in shifting rivalries with one another. Understandably, many preferred to ally with a newish group of (extremely technologically advanced and numerous) people, rather than with a group that had been their mortal enemies for hundreds of years! It's unrealistic to expect the Indians to form a united front against European settlement, at any point during the settlement period, whether 1492 or 1892.
Zaarin wrote:A third possibility: don't let Andrew Jackson become president. It's worth recalling that the Supreme Court ruled on the side of the Cherokee against Georgia; it was Jackson who ignored their ruling and evicted them anyway.
I really don't think Jackson being president made a huge difference. He was certainly one of the country's most genocidal presidents, but
every other Native group in the eastern US was eventually either destroyed, evicted, or confined to a very small section of their original territory. The Cherokees would have faced the same fate whether Jackson made the removal decision or not. Also, the Supreme Court's decision in Worcester v. Georgia basically just said that only the Federal government had authority to deal with Indians, not the states. It technically imposed no real obligations or restrictions on Jackson, it just imposed restrictions on the state of Georgia -- which Jackson chose not to enforce. (Other Marshall court decisions had the effect of reducing tribal sovereignty, by treating Indian groups as "domestic, dependent nations", rather than foreign nations -- laying the groundwork for the modern situation.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that Indian removal and the succession of land cessions was not just a series of US or state government decisions. They were to a significant extent a result of pressure from the Euro-American population at large, especially frontier settlers and would-be settlers. People were constantly moving onto Indian lands, with or without government approval. Even if Jackson or some other president had wanted to stop it, they would be very unlikely to succeed in the long run, without resorting to drastic measures like turning the army against US citizens.
mèþru wrote:However, as the US starts expanding and having wars against Amerinds outside of its borders, a movement revitalising Amerind culture (I suggest a name like "Wild Movement" or "Indian Revival") springs up in US itself.
How/why would this movement succeed any more than real-life similar movements (Tenskwatawa/Tecumseh, for instance)?
mèþru wrote:One of the most harmful aspects to the settler-Amerind dynamic was that many Amerinds initially, after the shock of people with white skin diminished, saw the Europeans as another tribal group. They therefore engaged the settlers in various raids and so forth, as they were accustomed to raiding and massacres rather than wars, a concept that is exclusive to cheifdoms (which some Amerinds were organised into) and governments. This lack of understanding warfare meant that Great Plains alliances were just temporary raiding or massacring parties. The Europeans, on the other hand, responded to raiding and massacres with warfare.
How exactly is raiding and massacres fundamentally different from warfare? The Americans' tactics in Indian wars were often very similar! Especially for the earlier wars. The main differences in the later wars, aside from some differences in technology, were: (a) there were a lot more Euro-Americans than Indians, and (b) the Euro-Americans were able to field standing armies composed of dedicated soldiers, in contrast to Indians whose warriors were mostly just ... their men. It's not like Indians didn't "understand" how Euro-Americans conducted warfare. Due to their low population and level of political cohesion/organization, most Indian groups conducted wars in a certain way, but they of course understood that Euro-Americans possessed superior technology (generally) and resources, and sometimes used different tactics. (Again, this wasn't always the case, especially for earlier conflicts, e.g. King Phillip's War was basically fought in the same way by both sides!) This is also kind of like saying that, say, the various insurgent groups opposed to the American occupation of Iraq don't understand the modern Western form of warfare. They know perfectly well what a war is! It's just that generally their method of fighting against a numerically and technologically superior occupying power was -- wisely, for them -- primarily through acts of terrorism rather than pitched battles.
mèþru wrote:The tribes also did not have the concept of private property and "owning" land. They thought that the Europeans were merely asking for temporary usage.
I'll admit I don't know a whole lot about this subject, but I've always been
VERY suspicious of this claim. It's part of the general noble savage narrative (i.e., that Indians were exotic, naive morons rather than normal human beings). ~~Oh, the poor naive Indians had no ideas about land ownership!~~
They certainly had a concept of private property. Now obviously there were a lot of different groups, ranging from nomads to highly settled agriculturalists, so conceptions of land ownership surely varied considerably, and were often different from the normal European view. But even if some groups misunderstood European intentions initially, they surely figured out very quickly what Europeans had in mind when talking about "ceding us this piece of land." Certainly by the time land acquisitions started advancing at a rapid pace, they would have
understood completely what was meant, even if they didn't
agree with that conception of ownership. That is to say, they didn't cede land in treaties because they were morons who thought it was a temporary grant, they did so for normal human reasons, such as (1) in exchange for trade goods or other resources; (2) as part of a genuine political settlement or alliance of the type European states made all the time; (3) it was a decision by one or two individuals that the Euro-Americans conveniently attributed to the group; (4) it resulted from forcing the Indians into debts that they couldn't otherwise repay; etc. Or, very often, it was part of the settlement to end an armed conflict (so, a peace treaty). These are all normal things that people do all over the world, all the time. Again, Indians had agency and understood, at least to a significant extent, what was happening in the world around them. They were just nowhere near as powerful as Europeans and Euro-Americans, and were forced to make very difficult decisions when faced with a lack of truly good choices.
mèþru wrote:I know lots of history due to reading lots of Wikipedia (and analysing it. Wikipedia is a good ressource, but shouldn't be trusted 100%) and reading history textbooks cover to cover.
oh dear
Zaarin wrote:John Quincy Adams was the only opponent to Andrew Jackson in the 1828 election and he was unpopular (IMO, aside from the Alien and Sedition Acts he was a good president--but those two bills killed him).
Yeah. Also John Wayne was a pretty good actor except for the part when he murdered all those boys
(Sorry, had to)
mèþru wrote:What sort of sovereignty would the Iroquois claim—that of a US state (which I believe is the best idea for the althist), or that of a state outside of the US?
The main problem with all of this is, as Sal pointed out, "Nobody was ever going to bother giving those people anything, and they certainly didn't have the slightest chance of getting anything for themselves." Even if
all the Iroquoian individuals
fanatically supported the Americans in the Revolution ... so what? What incentive would the Americans have to provide them with a state? The Iroquois were VASTLY outnumbered by the Euro-Americans by this time, had no leverage, and their support would not have mattered in the war (given that in real life, most of them supported the British rather than the Americans, yet the Americans still won the war!) By this time, most of the Euro-Americans wanted to remove Indians from most of their land. Some were more "liberal" than others in viewing the Indians as human beings and wanting to be "fair" to them. This included most of the Founding Fathers, afaik. But even Jefferson, the epitome of the Enlightenment, who was quite liberal on Indian issues for his day, was convinced that Indians were in the process of dying out, and that they must either (a) adopt Western agriculture, entirely assimilate to Euro-American society, and join the ranks of a new nation of yeoman farmers [their move away from hunting would then helpfully free up large tracts of their land: "The extensive forests necessary in the hunting life, will then become useless, and they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms"], or (b) move across the Mississippi. There was no place in the new America for Indians who still lived like Indians, and too few of them taking up too much space that could be better served by farming. As for any Indians who refused options (a) or (b): "our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only".
I just can't envision a scenario in which the Americans are willing to grant the Iroquois, or any other Indian group, a state. (Even if the Iroquois were politically united and centralized enough to create a viable state without major internal conflict and dysfunction, which again seems ... unlikely.)
It's also worth considering that if ANY Indian group should have had a legitimate chance to become a separate state or to remain a sovereign nation, it was the Cherokee and other Five Civilized Tribes. They were more populous than the Iroquois; had more centralized governments; quickly adopted numerous useful aspects of Euro-American technology, society, and culture; were better integrated into white society; had members who were extremely knowledgeable about American politics and the legal system; had enough money and resources to hire good lawyers and other assistants; etc. A decent portion of public opinion (and opinion among politicians) was against forced removal as well. The fact that they too failed in their efforts at true self-determination is a sobering reminder of how great the numerical and power imbalance was by this point.