If there were good enough factors somehow that encouraged European settlers and natives to intermarry can they create a mestizo group that is at least a visible minority within the US/Canada? What needs to happen? And considering the lower populations of native Americans comparing to Latin America how many can there realistically be?
AHC/PC/WI: Larger Mesitzo Populations in US/Canada
- Thread starter TickTock The Witch's Dead
- Start date
they do exist in Canada, they are called the Metis People and are recognised by the government.
The United States had (and perhaps still has) this thing about maintaining a White, Germanic, and (Protestant) Christian nation, which had led it to a course that avoids that sort of thing at all costs. It's why America didn't just go ahead with annexing Mexico, why it avoided making the Philippines part of the Union, why they once put a ban on interracial marriage and a quota on immigrants.
To achieve what you are aiming for, you have to change parts of the American mythos. Like allowing more coexistence with Native Americans, more one thing. Something that avoids the complex of ideas that make up Manifest Destiny.
To achieve what you are aiming for, you have to change parts of the American mythos. Like allowing more coexistence with Native Americans, more one thing. Something that avoids the complex of ideas that make up Manifest Destiny.
Well, this might be a tad ramble-y, but I think there's a reason for that initial mindset (I'm not going to touch on the knock-on effects you hit on already): the colonization model for the US (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Canada) was quite different from that of Spain and Portugal.
Y'see, the reason those countries have such a mixed population is because the initial settlers there were almost exclusively men, with the same....appetites as men are wont to have. And without any women coming over from Europe any time soon, they had to get accustomed to holding relations (however willing or not) with Native or African-descended women, thus leading to accommodating a "pigmentocracy" which recognized mixed-race persons.
The English, however, did ship entire family units, or even communities, en mass to their colonies from the beginning for the most part. This meant that the entire demographic-cultural bedrock of those countries was set to be distinct from the get-go, which wasn't helped by a much different (i.e. violent and prolonged) broader interaction between those settlers and the Native Americans. Even so, both the US and Canada do have mixed-race communities going back centuries (respectively, Melungeons and the aforementioned Métis), it's just that the different colonization pattern I mentioned meant they were a relatively small group overall, not the norm.
FWIW I don't think the whole Latin-Germanic identity has anything to do with it inherently, since South Africa has a significant mixed population originating from Dutch settlers. Furthermore, the argument that the Iberians were more prone to interacting with persons of different skin color is more than a little spurious to me, since those persons were the OTHER side during the Reconquista and/or Inquisition...I fail to see how/why that would promote racial tolerance at all. I see it it boiling down to a mixture of the aforementioned circumstances with possible religious mindsets on "ethnicity" (such as it was back then) that crystallized over time.
Well, during the Reconquista there is not a racial "otherization", but a religious/cultural one, since the standards at the time were others and in any case it was difficult to tell the physical difference between most iberian muslims and iberian christians. Most of the population of Al-Andalus descended from the same hispano-romans that the population from the christian kingdoms. The Inquisiton also was a religious institution, they would trie you whatever your skin colour. Though I agree that those are not factors to explain the different demographics in the iberian and the anglo Americas.
The other factors you mention, I agree, and I would also add that perhaps the english model of colonisation reduced the ammount of contact between europeans and natives, thus reducing the opportunities for intermarriage: not insitutions like the encomienda, for example, nor was one of the english aims to gather new subjects to the crown as was for the iberians. And of course, population density en both areas was another important factor.
Well, IMHO, you need more White male presence in Western Canada (and Oregon), both French amd Scottish/English, coupled with intense intermarriages with First Nations/Narive Americans living there, and voilá! A métis-dominated nation, speaking either Michif or Bungee,
I don't either. It's more a religious divide between Catholicism and Protestantism. Just that the former tended to be Latin and the latter tended to be Germanic. And both had the 'all non-Europeans are inferior' complex.
It's the difference of composition between the expeditions, just as you said.
And perhaps the difference in intent, because where the Spanish wanted to conquer and convert, regardless of the people already there, the English wanted a space of their own, regardless of the people already there. The former led to mestizaje, the latter to reservations.
In fact, the Reconquista is at the root of a concept that promoted racial mixing in the Americas. Jews and Muslims had known of Christ - and willingly rejected him, so fuck them - while Pagans never had the chance to hear of him. Through its discovery of the Americas, Spain had been given a divine mandate to bring those peoples into Christianity and by extension Spain's culture and people.
It'd be interesting to see what happen if England/Spain established policies incentivizing interracial marriage.
I hardly see this influencing individuals migrants/colonists into marrying more natives.
One possibility for Canada would be the prevent or reduce the amount of "Filles du Roi", female war orphans sent by the French King to marry settlers in New France. This could mean a larger number of men marrying native women.
Next following the British conquest, you could have the authorities making a legal distinction between "half-breeds" and french subjects in term of their protection under the Treaty of Paris leading to many of them marrying amongst themselves.
Assuming they regain equal rights in the 19th century, only 2-3 generations with a reproduction tendency equal to their french catholics counterparts (families with 7-10 children) and you might have 2 centers of Metis communities (Lower Canada and the Prairies) with some satellite communities in other areas.
If they are large enough in one area and the provinces' borders separate them from either acadian or french-canadian dominated areas, they may become the largest minorities in at least 2 provinces: OTL Manitoba and an alternate Newfoundland that include a continental component that extend past the Labrador and into OTL Quebec's Cote Nord, and would be present to a lesser though still appreciable extent in other provinces.
South Africa was colonized by Dutch Calvinists and there is a huge community of mixed people known as Coloureds, Indonesia has a large population of Indos who are descended from Dutch Protestants and Indonesians and in America there are communities of triracial isolates known as Melungeons. The Melungeons ancestry more or less is African male European female and Native American. So it's there and it's definitely not due to Catholicism.
Maybe one thing that might have helped (sadly enough) in the USA could be hypodescent laws regarding people with mixed native/european ancestry in some state. If they can't marry legally with whites and they might feel ostracism from their native kins, this could allow the creation of separate metis community but just like african-africans here, a common culture could evolve across them.
The early Brits in India also interbred until the Raj caused women to go over. However while you can get breeding that way, there does seem to be more of a racial antipathy from Northern European powers. The Afrikaans weren't exactly accepting of the coloureds! However I wonder if it's just a matter of skin colour rather than religion. Fair skinned, light haired Brits and Dutch have a much clearer visible distinction to mixed race people than darker French and Spanish people do. That means racism against Mestizos is easier.
It doesn't dissuade them. It doesn't make them think they are doing a bad thing by intermingling with Indians and Africans. People are more willing to do something when they are free to choose to do it, rather than being forced either way.
I have a theory. If the colonial government's use economic incentives like lower taxes or payments to intermarry would that help bring a mestizo population?
A good deal of people who identify as "Native American" are already mixed-blood. You'd have to have those people identify with neither their tribe nor their white ancestry. I don't know how plausible that is, considering that "mixed" peoples like the Seminoles ended up becoming a tribe of their own anyway.
I have difficulty imagining a plausible rationale but for why the government would want that and how it would justify it to people.
I could see making it easier for native woman who marry europeans to have her and her children being given equal rights as long as they adopt western habits. The reverse would probably not be true considering people attitudes back in the days though you could have 3rd generation children of native having adopted western ways being given the same regardless of the gender of their ancestors
in both case however, this would more likely then not being done in a bid to speed up assimilation of the native population so that it's not a metis population that you end up with but a western one with some vestigial traits of the native populations if they proved practical.
Even in new france, some french officials approved of the "acclimatisation" of the canadiens in contact with the native but you get the feeling that the exchange was stronger in one way and more a question of acquiring survival skills. Since you had other officials that were complaining of the canadiens "going native" (mainly in term of how they fought), in the long run, more then likely this would have turned into either isolation (reserves) or else pressure to assimilate.
That's also what happened with the Metis People I mentioned. They are now considered "treaty indians". I don't think any group can permanently consider itself mixed since ultimately, the notion of "we are neither this nor that" will force the group to define itself which will lead to the development of a common culture that is original.
It's in that sense anyway that I had taken the OP.