Northern Ameridians

Beneeza, Itzelotl, Ometeist Monk:

the fact that the native population in Aridoamerica performed different cultural demonstrations doesn't means that they were not as complex as the one's in Mesoamerica.

There were actually soem highly complex nations such as the Mississipi Mound builders and the Anasazi who built cities and civilisations to match Mexico.

But building sophistication doesn't always mean cultural acheiment. You should read about Lewis and Clarks expedition before you make any naive judgements about the north.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16565

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8419

 

Finally I just finished reading an excellent book that included Apache courting practice. More subtle, more sophisticated, more romantic than anything we have today.

 

Can you end this meaningless fight jalisco? can we get back to history?

Originally posted by ITZOCELOTL But the north Ameridians never had large large armies and cities well i guess most didnt. I admit they have a cool culture but why didnt they build huge cities? anyways respect to North Ameridians if there are any in this forum.

Most Native Americans didn't develope into civilizations. Some, like Mayans, seem to have fled from them. Civilization is not any panacea: just something that happens in the right conditions. These conditions disn't exist in the savage prairies - maybe in the woodlands but they were far enough from the civilization centers of Mesoamerica.

In many cases you will see, if you study anthropolgy or archaeology, that hunter-gatherers prefer their way of life compared with civilization and even rural agriculture. They take some advances at wish, trading maybe with the farmers for pottery or other products but remaining for generations (if allowed) in their hunter-gatherer way of life basically. These peoples and their cultures are called "sub-Neolithic".

I guess that, if America would have remained isolated, we would have seen the prairie tribes to become the Scythians and the Tatars of that land, the ones that would have invaded the civilized centers that arose in Mesoamerica and possibly elsewhere. One wouldn't expect Scythians or Mongols to have built huge cities... yet they palyed an important role in Eurasian history, either as nomadic warriors or intercontinental traders. Of course, they would have needed horses probably.

Originally posted by hugoestr I am surprised that no one mentioned the Iroquois or the Cherokees. Both of these groups had a complex society.

Indeed.
Has anybody read 1491, by Charles Mann? It's a very good book, in the final capital he argues that the whole concept of freedom as we know it today is more derived from the Iroquois than from Western Civilization. A.o. Locke, Rousseau and Paine are said to be influenced by them. Mann states that if a (western) person would meet an Iroquois of 500 years ago and a European of 500 years ago, he would probably notice that the Iroquois would be more like himself than the European. And I think he's right. Europe used to be strictly hierarchical, autoritarian and generally unfree, while the Iroquois used to be anti-autoritarian, slavery was completely unknown and nobody was allowed to take away other people's liberty.

I understood that at least on one occasion Iroquois offered a defeated tribe to join their league... or leave the lands.

Anyhow this "demologic" warfare seems more the sort one would expect from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers than post-Neolithic nomads and farmers.

...

And you're surely very right about social responsability: that must come with the very fact of tribal life, where the community is what matters most. Our society is allienated of itself precisely through that selfishness and individualism: but it is how it works.

I dont have multiple names jalisco. We are just amigos and share the same views! I could say that guy "Cuauhtemoc" who" always agreed with you against me was really just you using multiple names! just because he always agreed with you! but I dont really care if you are Cuauhtemoc! so get off my back etze

Originally posted by Maju I understood that at least on one occasion Iroquois offered a defeated tribe to join their league... or leave the lands.

No. The Tuscarora joined the League in 1722, fleeing their homeland after a war with European settlers, and arrived near Oneida territory as refugees - they were not conquered. I'm not really sure what the Iroqouis reason was for including them in the Great Peace. In that same year, colonial delegates were told by the Grand Council that they were at war with the Nahyssan, �against whom we have had so inveterate an enmity that we thought it could only be extinguished by their total extirpation.� Apparently colonial authorities wanted an end to the conflicts between the Iroqouis and the Siouan tribes (including the Nahyssan) and managed to broker a peace. Seven years later, at a renewal of the 1685 covenant with Virginia and Maryland, Governor Alexander Spotswood assented to Iroqouis demands to be permitted to exterminate the Nahyssan. So obviously they were still practicing genocide at this time, why the Tuscarora were accepted can only be guessed at. The Tuscarora may have been considered "civilized" from the Iroqouis perspective, perhaps, where the Siouan tribes and the Hurons were not. The nature of the Iroqouis motives are not well understood, except that they claimed to be bringing the Great Peace.

Anyhow this "demologic" warfare seems more the sort one would expect from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers than post-Neolithic nomads and farmers.

Hmm. I'm not really sure what you mean here. Demologic? War outside the demos? Isn't it always, except in civil wars? Organized warfare seems to be very much part of the agrarian package.

Originally posted by Maju Demologic: "with a demographic logic" - according to my own very personal dicctionary.� I meant wars that seeked the actual removal of the defeated population and not their subjugation.

Well, they did seek subjugation. They just wouldn't include the subjected in the League itself. And they had a curious way of doing it, they made apparently 3 offers to submit or die, if all 3 were rejected then it was war, with no more negotiation, just the utter destruction of the refuser.

Subjugation meant that they would pay tributes to the Iroqouis and allow the Iroqouis to control their trade routes. Such tribes would also be forced to disarm, disband their warrior societies, and were forbidden to conduct any sort of sovereign negotiation or diplomacy. Outside of their small homeland in upper NY state, the League itself, they controlled a vast territory, much of present day Ontario, and all around the Great Lakes basin, from Vermont to Ohio. This whole area was filled with such disarmed, neutralized tribes, but they were not members of the league (although they seem to have been part of the so-called "Great Peace"). In that sense, there were literally hundreds of tribes in the Iroqouis "empire", an estimated 400 000 souls at its greatest extent, but only 5 (and later 6) of these were members of the League, with a total population of no more than 25 000 at its peak.

Once a tribe refused to submit, there was no more negotiation. And they didn't want the land (submission was more like a condition of being allowed to be neighbours - the process is even somewhat evident in the wampum covenants they made with the first European settlers), so it was not really a matter of exile, though I suppose if they fled far enough they might have put themselves out of reach. They were offered three wampums of peace, like treaties containing provisions to disarm, pay tributes, etc, and if all three were rejected, it was war to the utter end.

Edited by edgewaters

Originally posted by Maju Interesting. So the Iroquois had an Empire with subjugated tributary peoples who could not defend themselves.

Exactly so. The "Great Peace" was an idea of the strength of the League through peace. Peace between the League members meant that they always outnumbered their opponents, who were divided. The greater peace over their neighbours meant, for those who submitted, that they no longer needed to worry about warfare - they were protected by the Iroqouis. Ironically, though, this peace was made possible by an unprecedented and ongoing campaign of genocidal warfare.

That means that tribal nations, even if they are matrifocal, also can organize vast territories and multiple peoples politically. This is very interesting. In fact I see the Iroqouis league as one of the most fascinating examples of tribal organization in the whole planet and they seem to illustrate possible happenings in other latitudes, which are only documented archaeologically.�

Right, I don't think it's all that uncommon really, just that the Iroqouis are the best documentation we have of it because they were relatively recent (I think the Americas as a whole are useful in this way of understanding how societies evolved during the chalcolithic period). It's the formation of an early sort of state. It seems agriculture is probably the catalyst, and I think if the evidence is really looked at carefully, there's no reason to think that the first agrarian, matrifocal societies were very peaceful at all. Rather they seem to have been the first to practice a kind of organized warfare that went beyond simple raiding; the long-term pacification of neighbours was, I suppose, necessary for agrarian economies - there had to be an end to raiding for livestock etc. Where pastoral peoples could just move away if their neighbours were difficult, or counter-raid them to steal back what was taken, an agrarian society was rooted in place and had to come up with a solution to the problem of dealing with neighbours - it is not surprising that the answer eventually seems to be, in many cases, either federating, subjugating, or warring.

Edited by edgewaters