1) There was no America or country of any kind until the Europeans came here and built one. It was just open land.
18 comments
You’re right, they didn’t build a nation. They built several. That’s like saying Europe was “a nation”. It is several. There were several nations on both the North and South American continents. Also, even if you don’t think that the people on the east coast had built a nation, have you ever heard of the Aztecs? Or the Inca?
And regardless of whether they came from Asia, they were here first. By about 30,000 years. By that rationale, Europeans don’t come from Europe, they come from Africa, and therefore if other group decided to take over, they could just arrive in some very rural place, pretend the entire continent is like that, and just steal everything.
It’s disgusting how little people in America today know about the peoples that were (and still are) here before.
@Tempus #180824
Since he says that the continent was open land, I’d say he’s getting his “knowledge” of Native Americans from 1950s westerns and old high school history textbooks and actually knows very little. He probably thinks of Aztecs and Incas as Mexicans and therefore somehow not Native Americans. If he thinks of them at all that is.
Let me guess, your notion of “nation” heavily relies on peculiar and oddly specific criteria and definitions that are, at best, reflective of tbe settled peoples towards nomads but more likely tailor-made for West European states to delegitimise the non-European peoples they sought to conquer*?
Also, plenty of Great Plains peoples only abandoned agriculture in favour of hunter-gatherer nomadism post-Columbus but (sometimes at least) before contact with the Europeans themselves due to a variety of factors, including decimation and societal disruption through European plagues, westward displacement cascades originating from the establishment of colonies at the East Coast, and the introduction of the horse that was not only able to carry and drag far more than a dog or a human could but indeed could be ridden - and they adopted to this drastic change of lifestyle with fundamental success and depth. It may be noted that there is a hypothesis that one factor in the Little Ice Age (another factor for abandoning agriculture) continuing was the collapse of Native American agriculture leading to C02 being removed from the atmosphere through reforestation (similarly, this hypothesis posits that the Little Ice Age began in part due to the devastation the Mongols and the Black Death wrought throughout Eurasia).
* after all, oddly, I do not see this argument applied to Germany or Italy during most of the relevant times. Not saying that such sentiments did not exst back in the day , or that there is not some crazy Frenchman who still holds such a belief, but I still thought it worth mentioning…
@Sasha #180840
Yeah, I know - I’m going off the assumption that a lot of people like Ian make that all people from below the southern border of the US are “Mexicans” and also somehow separate from “Native Americans”. I’ve unfortunately dealt with a number of people who think this way. They also seem to think that Mexico is part of South America.
Sorry I’m not totally being clear. My brain is pretty fuzzy right now unfortunately.
Weird how the nation WE made is THE benchmark for what makes one.
We might also be judged not to have created a nation because we don’t have kings, or our presidents aren’t buried in pyramids.
@Bastethotep #180851
There were also quite a few plains tribes in the Midwest that were taught to us in school from the early 1900s into the 1990s as having been nomadic hunter-gatherers when Europeans first ran across them, but turns out … they weren’t. They had hunting parties who would spend a few months every year following and hunting buffalo, but most of the tribespeople stayed back home in towns and farmland. The buffalo hunting was for meat to eat, hide for clothing and shelter walls, and bones and sinew for tools and some of the shelter framing.
In the 90s, though, I did have a high school history teacher who started correcting the teaching, and I’ve learned a little more even since then. Including most of the North America was cultivated land, but cultivated in ways that it seemed to blend in and look natural and wild to people who don’t know about plants.
@KZadBhat #180883
Very true: I should have said the Inca started their empire from Peru. It stretched from Colombia through Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, and Chile, right down the Pacific coast of South America. (I lived in Lima as a child, so I always associate the Inca with Peru.)
@Yutolia #180864
I have encountered many Americans who don't understand that people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are not Mexicans. It can be very frustrating.
Having experienced "lupus fog" myself, you have my sympathies for your brain fuzziness.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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