AHC: OTL the best case scenario for the Native Americans

[Elfwine]

With a POD after Columbus started asking for backers, make a world where the present day OTL represents the best possible outcome.

This may include a more repressive government in general, assimilation that leaves as little left of their languages as Cornish, or any other plausible disaster.

 

[SlyDessertFox]

Well the Inca's can possibly hold on if Pizarro's expedition fails miserably and the Spanish hold off from going into the area for long enough for the Inca's to recover.


I'm not sure about how plausible this is, but what about this: Cortez's expedition fails miserably. A similar expedition lead by another ambitious conqustador, also fails miserably. Instead of continual conquistador quests for gold, the Spanish decide for some time it's better to just trade with the Natives. They do this long enough for the natives of the area to recover enough to be able to hold their own if and when more colonization attempts come.


Again, that might be ASB, but I'm not sure.

 

[Elfwine]

Well the Inca's can possibly hold on if Pizarro's expedition fails miserably and the Spanish hold off from going into the area for long enough for the Inca's to recover.

We have hundreds of threads on "How could the Native Americans survive European contact even though the deck is stacked against them and they don't know how to play the game". One going on at the moment, in fact.

This thread is how you can have a worse fate than OTL - where OTL levels of disaster for a given group is the best outcome any of them achieve.

For example, a world where the Cherokee are so thoroughly assimilated that their language is a dead language.

 

[SlyDessertFox]

We have hundreds of threads on "How could the Native Americans survive European contact even though the deck is stacked against them and they don't know how to play the game". One going on at the moment, in fact.

This thread is how you can have a worse fate than OTL - where OTL levels of disaster for a given group is the best outcome any of them achieve.

For example, a world where the Cherokee are so thoroughly assimilated that their language is a dead language.

The Spanish slaughter them instead of mix with them over time?

 

[Elfwine]

The Spanish slaughter them instead of mix with them over time?

But why would they do that?

 

[Avitus]

Change the perspective of an alt world to one that utterly loaths the Native Americans but considers their total extermination impossible. As such, they consider a world where the natives are nearly extinct to be the best plausable outcome.

 

[SlyDessertFox]

But why would they do that?

For god and gold and stuff. Maybe the Natives continue to put up strong resistance even though their population is being wiped out by the tens of thousands by disease?


Or, have the English/French fund some native uprisings? Don't know how plausible any of this is, just throwing it out there.

 

[RamscoopRaider]

Have the natives be more successful in the mid 1800's

By then it's too late to make a difference for them but they certainly can piss off the white folk even more

Have some tribes get influenced by Communists (or at least seem to) and during the Red Scare the US takes measures against them like taking away their land

 

[Falecius]

Cortez expedition fails. Spectacularly, as in the Aztecs make a point about letting the sacrifice of the Spaniards and a good number of their Tlaxcalan allies very public and very sacred and very choreographic. However, a small number of Spaniards makes it back to Cuba with having witnessed that.
This does not sound terribly likely for the Aztecs to let happen, but let's say a couple of Spaniards manage to sneak through.
However, the Aztec Empire has been ravaged by war and epidemics and the Spanish know it is there, now it is filthy rich, and know it inhabited by awfully barbaric heathens who Must. Be. Annihilated.
The next expedition is better prepared, better armed, more numerous and motivated by sacred rage and vengeance as much as sacred gold hunger. A crusade, only really worse than the actual ones.
The Spaniards don't even try to make good Christian out of the Mexicans any more so they really did with the Moors back in Iberia.
They obviously cannot KILL everyone, but all the natives they take are mercilessly enslaved. Charles V does not know whether he's more pissed at the cruelty of his conquistadores or the Aztecs' one. The Church's objections voiced by the Las Casas sort of guys are silenced, ignored, or impatiently sent back home.
The killing and enslaving spree in Mexico set the precedent for the rest.
Spanish brutality obviously triggers large and brutal native revolts that are mercilessly suppressed. Increasing numbers of African slaves are brought in to compensate the devastated slave native population. Some of them are freed and used as a militia to reinforce tiny Spanish numbers.
Racial feeling cristallyzes that the American natives aren't exactly human, or if, they are inferior and evil anyway. Some theological loophole is devised to legitimize this view with Scriptural reference, though the Church back in Europe still does not really buy into it. The system goes adrift with time solidifying with time in monstrous oppression. In peripheral areas, man hunts, massacres and outright sadism go on unchecked as deviant personalities from Spain are given freehand.
Basically the Free State of Congo, entrenched on a continental scale, for a couple of centuries.
Is this gruesome enough?

EDIT: I don't see this as very likely scenario. Spanish Conquistadores did monstrous things, but they usually weren't monsters just for the heck of it (well, some of them were). However, I think it is not ASB.

 

[Elfwine]

Sounds suitable, yes.

 

[Roger II]

Now here's an idea-let's say the Spanish in North America do substantially better in the 16th and 17th century. This leads to a point where natives can play powers off and many chiefs(perhaps after native religious leaders are discredited OTL) decide to convert to Christianity as a way of playing at this game-effectively saying "we'll convert to whoever's version of christianity is a better deal(think OTL conversion of Rus). If these conversions happen early enough and a distinction is entrenched between "christian" and non-christian indians(with christian , not only will more tribes convert along these lines, but it may be early enough that Indians are regarded as closer to legally equal to white settlers(and there will be less need to use European immigrants for settlement if you have this way of cultivating ties to individual tribes). The pattern would thus lead to a general trend of tribes adopting European cultural norms, and when white immigration eventually increases the tribes would be seen more as parallel European cultures and intermarriage becomes a common norm, with more and more natives becoming bilingual and native elites anxious to "make it' in Spain, Holland, or England dropping their native language. Eventually, one might reach a situation where most native culture has died out or so syncretized as to become unrecognizable through assimilation, even the surviving native languages have a very heavy english or spanish or what-have-you substratum, and the natives are considered by themselves and others as in some way heirs of the old world rather than a distinct culture.

 

[Flubber]

Is this gruesome enough?

That's certainly gruesome enough. :shudder: I was going to suggest a crusades motif but now I'll go with my second idea: benign neglect.

Let's have Rousseau never come up with his "noble savage" claptrap or, if he does, it never catching on in European intellectual circles. The whole idea that "primitive peoples" need to be "protected" from civilization's "corruptions" never gains much currency.

European exploration and colonization occurs on schedule, the Native Americans find themselves on the receiving end of the same diseases and weapons, and what Native Americans survive are mostly assimilated into irrelevance.

There will be no treaties pretending paleolithic hunter-gatherers are nation-states, no reservations, no "cultural reservoirs". Once enough European people and/or European descended people are in a region that is it. These are the boundaries, this is the legal code, land can bought and sold, nothing is communal, etc. If you can't live like that you can die or you can leave. If you want to stay you best assimilate.

What syncretism between native and European cultures occurs will depend on how many natives survive in any given region and there will be pockets of surviving native cultures in out of the way and other marginal areas, but there will be no regions set aside purely for the remaining natives to live as they used to live.

 

[False Dmitri]

By "Native American" do you mean all of the Americas, or just North America or the USA?

For a worse outcome in Spanish America, you might consider USA-style settler colonies in places like Mexico. Mass deportations, etc.

For the USA, if the Civil Rights movement could be delayed, or fail to spawn a Red Power movement, you could see the Termination policies of the 1950s carried to fruition. That would mean no more reservations, no more tribal sovereignty, no more recognition of Native Americans as a unique element of US society. Just a bunch of poor people living in counties with redrawn borders.

Earlier on, get the French out of the picture early and open the way for an earlier, stronger flood of British settlement. Maybe in 1748, have Britain keep Louisbourg and use it to control the St. Lawrence, prompting another colonial war soon after, after which Britain takes Canada ahead of schedule.

 

[mrmandias]

With a POD after Columbus started asking for backers, make a world where the present day OTL represents the best possible outcome.

This may include a more repressive government in general, assimilation that leaves as little left of their languages as Cornish, or any other plausible disaster.

The easiest way to do this is probably to introduce some new epidemic disease or some new addictive substance. The best time would be in Eurasian pre-history, but I think post-Columbus would still work if you pick some time in say, the 1600s. That's at a point where the colonies in the Americas have enough demographic momentum that they can survive and grow even with more turmoil back in Europe. But its also early enough that many Amerindian groups would still be highly vulnerable.

 

[Elfwine]

By "Native American" do you mean all of the Americas, or just North America or the USA?

All the Americas, though a scenario that only addresses one area is fine. And it doesn't have to be that dystopian - for purposes of this challenge, Roger's scenario is as "good" as Falecius's, even if the lot of the individuals may be better than OTL by measurable criteria (crime, education, etc.) in the former.

For a worse outcome in Spanish America, you might consider USA-style settler colonies in places like Mexico. Mass deportations, etc.

For the USA, if the Civil Rights movement could be delayed, or fail to spawn a Red Power movement, you could see the Termination policies of the 1950s carried to fruition. That would mean no more reservations, no more tribal sovereignty, no more recognition of Native Americans as a unique element of US society. Just a bunch of poor people living in counties with redrawn borders.

Earlier on, get the French out of the picture early and open the way for an earlier, stronger flood of British settlement. Maybe in 1748, have Britain keep Louisbourg and use it to control the St. Lawrence, prompting another colonial war soon after, after which Britain takes Canada ahead of schedule.

Why would this last - I'm not arguing, just looking for elaboration - meaningfully change things?

Note on the AHC in general: I'm not interested in actually exploring this in any timeline - OTL was quite ugly enough. But the "What if the Native Americans kicked out the Europeans?" thread made me wonder what reasonably plausible scenarios could happen that would make their lot worse than OTL's, since we spend so much on the reverse.

 

[Falecius]

Here is an Andean variation of my Mexican scenario above.

In South America, especially in the Andes, the Natives fared comparatively better than most other places in the continents. It is probably the area with the largest room for things getting worse.
I can think for a example an initially successful Tupac Amaru revolt that begins to pull a Dessalines but then is defeated with great bloodshed and bitterness on both sides.
The aftermath is a nasty cycle of brutal tyranny, revolt, repression and more revolts, each time increasingly built into a feeling of racial war and a framework of increasingly oppressive laws. Local whites may be pissed at the very mild attempts by the crown to restrain their mistreatment of the natives, and when the equivalent of the Independence Wars in South America happens, Peruvian provinces turn into an uholy, bloody mess. Indios rebel again and try to set out their own "states" in some places, evicting local whites and maybe mestizos from there. Vengeance is terrible. As soon as the criollo republics stabilize enough to pull it off, such lands are invested with all the genocidal violence you can gather in a given region.

 

[RamscoopRaider]

I remember Goering had some views that the native Americans were vaguely Aryans of some sort

So have the Nazis put out a feel for Native agents, and succeed to some minor degree, this is discovered and sparks an unreasonable panic far out of proportion to the negligible impact, and conditions on the reservations, and restrictions on the natives get much worse, possibly some population transfers and land confiscations are involved

 

[othyrsyde]

Half these posts seem to have even gruesomer fates for Natives. Thought this was best outcome?

This probably the last I'm going to comment on these types of threads. Sick of being the 'Native voice'. Why did Meee000/Sychrial have to get banned?

 

[9 Fanged Hummingbird]

Half these posts seem to have even gruesomer fates for Natives. Thought this was best outcome?

This probably the last I'm going to comment on these types of threads. Sick of being the 'Native voice'. Why did Meee000/Sychrial have to get banned?

Apparently the OP is asking to find a way to make OTL the best possible outcome by coming up with worse ones, but I can't figure out how that makes sense from a logical perspective. Even if you could figure out a way for Native Americans to be worse off than IOTL that still wouldn't make OTL the best possible scenario by any means. It's really a logic fail with a poorly worded title.

 

[Falecius]

Half these posts seem to have even gruesomer fates for Natives.

Well, that was a large part of the point of the OP.