AHC: Native Americans Pull an Iwakura

For those who don't know, the Iwakura Mission was a Japanese diplomatic expedition in the 1870s to study what made other nations, such as the US, Britain, France, Russia, and Germany, modern, and to apply what they'd learned to Japan itself.

My idea: What if some powerful Native American nation was able to resist extermination by the US/other imperialists for long enough to make such an expedition, and apply their lessons on modernity to their own nation. How far back would the POD need to be? Would this maybe be more possible if Britain still ruled the North American colonies, limiting expansion?

Didn't this essentially happen with the Navajo? The tribe quickly adopted settled agriculture after contact with the Pueblo, and then animal herding after contact with the Spanish. It may be one of the reasons that Navajo is the most widely-spoken indigenous language in the US today, and is actually increasing in number of speakers rather than decreasing. Alternately that could just be due to the remoteness of their home territory. But they were also always a very populous tribe.

I'd say the main problem preventing this from protecting a Native American tribe is that they're still going to have population problems. 20,000 settled people with cutting-edge technology are still going to be overwhelmed and subsumed by a much larger settler wave. The only thing that could really help a tribe to maintain pure sovereignty would be geographic isolation.

Ravenclaw said:

For those who don't know, the Iwakura Mission was a Japanese diplomatic expedition in the 1870s to study what made other nations, such as the US, Britain, France, Russia, and Germany, modern, and to apply what they'd learned to Japan itself.

My idea: What if some powerful Native American nation was able to resist extermination by the US/other imperialists for long enough to make such an expedition, and apply their lessons on modernity to their own nation. How far back would the POD need to be? Would this maybe be more possible if Britain still ruled the North American colonies, limiting expansion?

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The Cherokee did something similar to this. The results were not happy.

Going with my typical and likely expected answer, the Maya. They have a large population and wide variety of scenarios that could lead to them adopting foreign technology and creating a recognized state. They came awfully close in the Caste War that began in the 1840's, complete with British support for a time.

I think the biggest problem would be demographics. Adopting European tech and social organization is very difficult if you don't have cities, for example.

When we're talking about Japan we're talking about a country which already had a dense population settled in cities, with a hierarchical government. Let's look at the places a lot of native american nations would be starting from:

If you want a 19th-century POD we're talking about relatively few nations who still control territory. Maybe the Sioux could be used as an example. According to http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/history/full-text/1994-Teton_Sioux.pdf they had a population of around 20 000 in 1900. That's not very many people for a nation to draw on to fight Americans numbering in the millions. As far as I know, by that point in time they had already adopted many European innovations such as horses, gunpowder weapons, etc. They lost to the US not because they weren't "modern" but because there simply weren't enough of them left.

Ok, so let's go back a little farther - maybe we want the Haudenosaunee (AKA Iroquois) to modernize. From a little research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois), it seems that even at their peak they only had 12 000 people. Again, even though there were fewer European colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries, there's still no way the Haudenosaunnee could become more powerful.

Really I think your best chances for a nation able to defeat European colonists are the Aztecs or the Incas. They both had cities and the population base to support the production of European-level tech. And that would have to be a fairly early POD because both were conquered pre-1600. I'm thinking the Incas would be the best bet as they're less accessible to conquistadors than the Aztecs. If you can have the Incas spend a couple hundred years in contact with Europeans without being conquered, then perhaps they can learn something from their visitors.

I think your best bet would be to have a nation other than Spain make contact with the Americas. Either have a different nation which is less conquest-minded in Iberia, or have some other nation begin exploring first. What you would need is sustained contact and trade without conquest. Then, it becomes possible for the native american nation in question to begin to modernize.

BTW there were lots of examples of native american nations which did have sustained trade without conquest: the Haudenosaunee are a great example. And, to a large extent they did acquire Euorpean tech (I'm thinking muskets here), and used them to conquer their own neighbours. But, they never had the population base to found cities and develop the industry necessary to produce muskets themselves...

9 Fanged Hummingbird said:

Going with my typical and likely expected answer, the Maya. They have a large population and wide variety of scenarios that could lead to them adopting foreign technology and creating a recognized state. They came awfully close in the Caste War that began in the 1840's, complete with British support for a time.

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I agree, 'Native Americans' are not going to do this, but it's possible for an organized NA polity to do something like that. The trick is getting said polity to survive.

9 Fanged Hummingbird said:

Going with my typical and likely expected answer, the Maya. They have a large population and wide variety of scenarios that could lead to them adopting foreign technology and creating a recognized state. They came awfully close in the Caste War that began in the 1840's, complete with British support for a time.

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Somehow I completely neglected the Maya in my earlier assessment. This would be a better option if you want a 19th-century POD

twovultures said:

I agree, 'Native Americans' are not going to do this, but it's possible for an organized NA polity to do something like that. The trick is getting said polity to survive.

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The best option here would be to have the initial Maya advance in 1848 proceed more quickly, arriving at Merida well before the harvest season. IOTL Merida was pretty much defenseless and the governor tried to evacuate the whole city, but lacked enough paper to print enough notices. The harvest season however had just come and many Maya rebels (though not all and some of the commanders tried to stop this) left to go tend their fields. With a swifter advance, this is not a problem and the remnants of the Republic of Yucatan are crushed. Then the Mexican government will lack a local leadership to negotiate with and provide a base for the invasion of the Maya Free State. The Americans on the other hand lack the political will (and military ability IMO) for a protracted guerrilla campaign in the Yucatan against an enemy that has experience fighting, and defeating, western armies and US Marines.

telynk said:

Somehow I completely neglected the Maya in my earlier assessment. This would be a better option if you want a 19th-century POD

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The simplest POD would be to change the results of a single battle in Guatemala in 695 AD. This battle IOTL dramatically changed the political landscape in the most densely populated region in the Maya lands, perhaps all of Mesoamerica or even the world, and had drastic consequences centuries onward. Having the other side results in the status quo more or less lasting longer at least which means that the southern lowlands remain much more politically stable, enabling them to survive other coming catastrophes. Overall, the famous Maya Collapse has been averting which has the consequences of a much different Mesoamerica than OTL, one that Cortez has even less of a chance of overcoming and after yet another Spanish expedition fails, this one containing thousands of conquistadors, the Spanish lose all heart for supporting doomed conquistadors (private enterprises without the consent of the King or governors may still happen), which means the Native Americans all over the area and in South America face far less pressure while they are busy dealing with the after-effect of plague.

I tend to favor the Incas for this. They had two large advantages:

1) An exceptionally defensible core territory.

2) They were a very young nation. When Colombus landed, there were still citizens who remmbered the time before the empire. So they were not yet welded to solutions by history, and looking for new options would have seemed more reasonable.

That being said, I've had it pointed out to me that they had a big disadvatage: Their rulers authority rested on his divine status. So no conversion to christianity. That'd be a dealbreaker for many European countries.

But they have enough gold to drown the objections of any number of smiths and craftsmen.

The way they fell was pretty ASB conquistador luck too.