American colonists treat Indians as human beings, w/ small changes.

I think you're all underestimating the most important factor here. The biggest reason for the Europeans overwhelming the natives was not their numbers, technology or even their culture. It was their diseases.

If the Europeans had been "benevolent explorers" we'd have a somewhat similar situation that we have today.
 
Quarantine really wouldnt have helped very much because pretty much all of the people who were in contact woth the natives had some kind of sickness when they first arrived and it wouldnt have helped because the second there was any contact much of the population was doomed unless the Europeans or natives had modern medical abilities, procedures and knowledge.

Also, the spread of disease was extremely rapid. Introduced diseases very quickly penetrated the interior, into regions that Europeans had never visited to that point. The indigenous population fell off a cliff in a matter of years after the initial encounter.
 
Also, the spread of disease was extremely rapid. Introduced diseases very quickly penetrated the interior, into regions that Europeans had never visited to that point. The indigenous population fell off a cliff in a matter of years after the initial encounter.

This right here and in order to stop it the Europeans would have to have magically not carry any diseases with them or not ever have any contact.
 

Lateknight

Banned
I think solution is disease if the natives had any endemic diseases they could spread to the Europeans it would have greatly slowed down settlement.
 

jahenders

Banned
That's kind of a "chicken and egg" point. Their numbers, and population density, were relatively low BECAUSE of disease. But, the way they were treated didn't follow from the fact that they'd lost relatives to disease -- it flowed (more directly) from the fact that there was a power mismatch and colonist perception of lots of unused/ill-used land. Again, we all appreciate that open space was, in part, due to losses from disease, but the diseases were not what the colonists responded to -- it was numbers and perception

I think you're all underestimating the most important factor here. The biggest reason for the Europeans overwhelming the natives was not their numbers, technology or even their culture. It was their diseases.

If the Europeans had been "benevolent explorers" we'd have a somewhat similar situation that we have today.
 
Valladolid Debate

Maybe, the thought of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas had managed to impose not only in law but in everyday life in America.
Although the Spanish was the first and only colonial power in question and worry about the condition of American natives and legislate their living conditions, under colonial rule.
But I have done it yet, ought his work transcend the barrier Interfaith influencing the behavior of Europeans and not just of Spanish (partly in Otl) ...

http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/justification/newspain/essay/


http://www.lascasas.org/lascasaswritings.htm /http://userwww.sfsu.edu/epf/journal_archive/volume_X,_2001/hernandez_b.pdf

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/79442/camreyno.pdf?sequence

"...The Valladolid debate (1550–1551) concerned the treatment of natives of the New World. Held in the College of San Gregorio (St Gregory), in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it consisted of two opposing views about the colonization of the Americas. Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others, according to Catholic theology.
Opposing him was humanist scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who insisted that "in order to uproot crimes that offend nature" the Indians should be punished and therefore reducing them to slavery or serfdom was in accordance with Catholic theology and natural law.
Although both Las Casas and Sepúlveda later claimed to have won the disputation, no clear record supportin either claim exists. The affair served to establish Las Casas as the primary defender of the Indians and saw the New Laws of 1542 upheld, providing some momentum to weaken the encomienda system further.
Though it did not completely reverse the situation, the laws achieved some improvement in the treatment of Indians.
They also reflected a concern for morality and justice in 16th century Spain, that surfaced in other colonial powers centuries later.

http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/1014

http://vimeo.com/100851338 [The Valladolid Debate (English sub) Part 1]
 
Refocusing the debate

I hope my previous post help refocusing the debate ... too Anglo-centric (in the cultural sense), in my opinion, of course.
 
Quarantine really wouldnt have helped very much because pretty much all of the people who were in contact woth the natives had some kind of sickness when they first arrived . . .
And to add to this, I think there are a number of diseases in which people are most infectious at the very beginning, often when they don't want to acknowledge to themselves that they're sick. Even in our own time, people go to work and stay at work until they're really sick and then think they're some kind of hero. I'm mainly thinking influenza but I'm pretty sure a number of diseases are like this.

So, the obstacles are formidable.

All the same, I still would have liked to have taken the chance. For example, I think strep caused puerperal fever (childbed fever) in the 1800s, and then evolved where it caused scarlet fever, and later still, evolved where it mainly seemed to cause rheumatic fever. And maybe in our own day and age, now causes PANDAS although that's controversial and a lot of doctors have real doubts. All in all, a very interesting story, and not just the age of antibiotics. I think some of the becoming more mild was pre-antibiotics.
 
. . . Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others, according to Catholic theology. . .
A very interesting chapter in human history. As I recall, the Spanish mainly put it on the shelf without making a definite decision. And then basically the money was too much to do anything other than roll forward.

Maybe if Bartolome had instead actually been a business talking about better alternatives to slavery?
 
I think solution is disease if the natives had any endemic diseases they could spread to the Europeans it would have greatly slowed down settlement.

Europeans died in huge numbers in the early days of settlement. Disease laid them low, too. Virginia was basically a death trap for the first two decades of its existence.

However, there was a huge reserve of Europeans on the other side of the Atlantic ready to replace the dead colonists. Many colonial ventures were abandoned after early failure, but those that stuck with it just kept on sending more and more until their colonies survived. In contrast, once the Indian population plummeted, it couldn't easily rebound.
 
During the first generations of New England, many Puritan children were kidnapped by the local tribes and then adopted into them. The kids liked it there so much, that many of them actually ran back to the tribes after they were returned to their Puritan families.
 
This may be that an abusive situation ends up feeling 'normal,' or something similar.

And even if the natives had freer, more prosperous, and all-around better lives than the early colonists, I'd still think they were wrong to kidnap the colonists' children. And I'd say that's part of treating someone as a human being. I mean, part of viewing someone as a full-fledged equal is the ideal that he or she can also be in the wrong.
 
This may be that an abusive situation ends up feeling 'normal,' or something similar.

And even if the natives had freer, more prosperous, and all-around better lives than the early colonists, I'd still think they were wrong to kidnap the colonists' children. And I'd say that's part of treating someone as a human being. I mean, part of viewing someone as a full-fledged equal is the ideal that he or she can also be in the wrong.

No, it wasn't abuse. The natives gave more affection and freedom to their own children then the stick in the mud Pilgrims.
 
No, it wasn't abuse. The natives gave more affection and freedom to their own children then the stick in the mud Pilgrims.

Oh come on. We don't have to condemn kidnapping civilians and adopting the children into the captor's society hundreds of years ago, but we don't need to praise it either.
 
Even if the natives did not treat the kidnapped children visibly as second-class children, I'd still say the act of kidnapping ruptured bonds between parents and children and for that reason alone caused enormous heartache.
 
On the subject of disease again, we had a thread something to the effect, what if variola minor (more minor form of smallpox) was introduced to the Americas first.

Someone said , this form wasn't even described until later. But, it still may have been there. Because microbes do tend to have variants and the more minor ones do tend to spread more widely.

AHC/WI: Variola Minor brought to the New World instead of Smallpox?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=319962
 
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On the subject of disease again, we had a thread something to the effect, what if variola minor (more minor form of smallpox) was introduced to the Americas first.

Someone said , this form wasn't even described until later. But, it still may have been there. Because microbes do tend to have variants and the more minor one do tend to spread more widely.

Indeed they do. A less deadly disease has more opportunity to infect new hosts.
 
Even if the natives did not treat the kidnapped children visibly as second-class children, I'd still say the act of kidnapping ruptured bonds between parents and children and for that reason alone caused enormous heartache.

And I don't know about children, but some Eastern Woodlands tribes would use captives as slaves, though such slavery was non-hereditary.

On the subject of disease again, we had a thread something to the effect, what if variola minor (more minor form of smallpox) was introduced to the Americas first.

Someone said , this form wasn't even described until later. *But, it still may have been there. *Because microbes do tend to have variants and the more minor ones do tend to spread more widely.

AHC/WI: Variola Minor brought to the New World instead of Smallpox?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=319962


Alternately, another "less devastating diseases" (in the long-term) scenario you could use would be to have the Norse sail down shortly after their colonization of Greenland and manage to build a small permanent settlement, and inadvertently pass smallpox on to the native people, followed by it spreading across the continent. The Norse around the year 1000 wouldn't have many settlers to colonize a place so far away, and even if their settlement survived, it would introduce the diseases earlier, let American Indians face off with less technologically advanced Europeans, and most importantly, dramatically, dramatically slow down the pace of any European colonization, so that by the time trans-atlantic travel not using the Greenland route becomes feasible, the population of the Americas will have had hundreds of years to decline and then bounce back from disease introduction.

Actually, if the Norse established several permanent settlements and trade routes around the year 1000, that would probably be an ideal outcome for American Indians, because they'd not only likely be exposed to the full gamut of Eurasian diseases, but the settlements could also spread Eurasian domestic animals as well as bronze and iron working across the continents without being able to pose a major demographic threat. The Norse might eventually take a large chunk of the East Coast if they had a high rate of natural increase, but without much immigration they wouldn't be able to explode in population or conquer like the English and Spanish would half a century or more later.
 
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