American Indian Victories

My AH Collection "American Indian Victories" is on Kindle Countdown at $1.99 until Saturday. Not sure of the exact timing on Saturday.

The direct link is:

http://www.amazon.com/American-Indian-Victories-Dale-Cozort-ebook/dp/B009XCGWVM/

Here is an extended excerpt from the forward:

American Indians are a tricky subject for alternate history. They were a dramatic and colorful lost cause, but there are two reasons Indians have historically not been as popular as the Confederate States of America or the World War II Axis as subjects of alternate history. First, they lost out against European encroachment for extremely hard-to-reverse reasons. The tides of history ran against Indians to a far greater extent than they did against even the Axis in World War II, or the South in the Civil War. Second, it is difficult to write realistic Indian alternate history that has much to do with Indian tribes most people have heard of, or with the picture most people have of Indians.

Why the Indians lost—Epidemics: Indian battlefield victories were generally meaningless in the face of a cruel bit of arithmetic. In most cases, contact with Europeans led to at least a hundred years of relentless Indian population declines from introduced diseases—declines that cut those populations to a tiny fraction (typically ten to twenty-five percent) of their precontact levels. Indians faced the equivalent of Europe's Black Death every fifteen to twenty years for more than a century.

Those epidemics didn't kill faceless, replaceable generic Indians. They killed experienced leaders, skilled craftsmen and men of genius—artists and innovators. European diseases disrupted Indian societies so severely that many alternate history buffs write them off for that reason alone.
Why the Indians lost—the technology gap: The technology gap wasn't across the board. Indians could show the Old World a thing or two in some areas of technology. However, the most technologically advanced and politically sophisticated Indian groups were materially and politically thousands of years behind the European cultures they faced. Aztecs and Incas technologically and materially resembled—at best—Assyrians of 1000 BC more than Europeans of 1500 AD. The Old World had a twenty-five hundred to five-thousand year lead over the New World in accumulating the tools of technologically advanced cultures.

Unfortunately for the Indians, the technology gap extended beyond the physical realm. Europeans had time to accumulate a much larger playbook of military and political strategies than the Indians, and that gap was just as important as the physical technology.

The technology gap had nothing to do with the intelligence of individual Indians or the worth of Indian cultures. It came about for at least three reasons. First, Indians started out behind Old World humans because they came to the New World with only a subset of Old World human culture. Pieces of technology and knowledge useful in cold climates made it. If something wasn't useful in Siberia and Alaska, it didn't make it to the New World, no matter how useful it was in temperate or tropical climates. Second, Indians never caught up, and often fell further behind because the continents they moved into were smaller than the Old World complex of Asia, Africa and Europe. The smaller continents meant fewer chances to find the right combination of factors for high technology to develop. Third, North and South America had far fewer animal resources to work with. By the time Indians were ready to domesticate animals, most of the best candidates—like North American horses and camels—were extinct.

Why the Indians lost—Indian wars: American Indians had major disadvantages against Europeans from the start, but they often fought hard and well. They almost always lost their wars against Europeans partly because they were more worried about fighting Indian enemies than about fighting Europeans. Try to think of a war between European settlers and Indians where no Indians fought on the side of the Europeans. I can't think of any. Indians fought each other for European powers even when no Europeans were present.

Indians came to the New World with a subset of the Old World human toolkit, a small subset of Old World human genetic diversity and an even smaller subset of the diseases that afflicted Old World humans. As a result, when regular contact between the Old and New Worlds began, Spaniards quickly seized the most heavily populated areas, like Mexico and Peru, and installed themselves at the top echelons of society. They had trouble maintaining that position because their subjects died off so quickly from European diseases.

Spain and other European colonizers imported African slaves to replace the missing workers. That made the problem worse for the Indians, because African diseases, like the deadlier types of malaria and yellow fever, joined European diseases in the New World. In extreme cases, Indians were nearly wiped out. In other areas, populations dropped to ten to twenty-five percent of precontact levels before partially recovering. In a very few areas, Indian populations grew through most or all of the period.

Diseases spread from the more populated areas to less populated ones, leaving those areas open to European colonization. Those colonies brought more diseases, leaving still more territory open to colonization.

Finally, most Indian tribes that nonhistorians have heard of developed or became prominent because of direct or indirect interactions with Europeans. Tribes like the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles did not exist as distinct ethnic and political units before European contact, and probably never would have existed given a different pattern of European settlement. The horse-riding plains nomads that most people think of when they think of American Indians were also products of interaction with Europeans. That makes it hard to write serious Alternate History involving Indians recognizable to most readers.

[FONT=&quot]Given those problems, I can understand alternate history buffs writing off Indians as a subject for alternate history. I beg to differ with that opinion though, and will present a series of exercises in alternate history that illustrate why. [/FONT]
 
My AH Collection "American Indian Victories" is on Kindle Countdown at $1.99 until Saturday. Not sure of the exact timing on Saturday.

The direct link is:

http://www.amazon.com/American-Indian-Victories-Dale-Cozort-ebook/dp/B009XCGWVM/

Here is an extended excerpt from the forward:

American Indians are a tricky subject for alternate history. They were a dramatic and colorful lost cause, but there are two reasons Indians have historically not been as popular as the Confederate States of America or the World War II Axis as subjects of alternate history. First, they lost out against European encroachment for extremely hard-to-reverse reasons. The tides of history ran against Indians to a far greater extent than they did against even the Axis in World War II, or the South in the Civil War. Second, it is difficult to write realistic Indian alternate history that has much to do with Indian tribes most people have heard of, or with the picture most people have of Indians.

Why the Indians lost—Epidemics: Indian battlefield victories were generally meaningless in the face of a cruel bit of arithmetic. In most cases, contact with Europeans led to at least a hundred years of relentless Indian population declines from introduced diseases—declines that cut those populations to a tiny fraction (typically ten to twenty-five percent) of their precontact levels. Indians faced the equivalent of Europe's Black Death every fifteen to twenty years for more than a century.

Those epidemics didn't kill faceless, replaceable generic Indians. They killed experienced leaders, skilled craftsmen and men of genius—artists and innovators. European diseases disrupted Indian societies so severely that many alternate history buffs write them off for that reason alone.
Why the Indians lost—the technology gap: The technology gap wasn't across the board. Indians could show the Old World a thing or two in some areas of technology. However, the most technologically advanced and politically sophisticated Indian groups were materially and politically thousands of years behind the European cultures they faced. Aztecs and Incas technologically and materially resembled—at best—Assyrians of 1000 BC more than Europeans of 1500 AD. The Old World had a twenty-five hundred to five-thousand year lead over the New World in accumulating the tools of technologically advanced cultures.

Unfortunately for the Indians, the technology gap extended beyond the physical realm. Europeans had time to accumulate a much larger playbook of military and political strategies than the Indians, and that gap was just as important as the physical technology.

The technology gap had nothing to do with the intelligence of individual Indians or the worth of Indian cultures. It came about for at least three reasons. First, Indians started out behind Old World humans because they came to the New World with only a subset of Old World human culture. Pieces of technology and knowledge useful in cold climates made it. If something wasn't useful in Siberia and Alaska, it didn't make it to the New World, no matter how useful it was in temperate or tropical climates. Second, Indians never caught up, and often fell further behind because the continents they moved into were smaller than the Old World complex of Asia, Africa and Europe. The smaller continents meant fewer chances to find the right combination of factors for high technology to develop. Third, North and South America had far fewer animal resources to work with. By the time Indians were ready to domesticate animals, most of the best candidates—like North American horses and camels—were extinct.

Why the Indians lost—Indian wars: American Indians had major disadvantages against Europeans from the start, but they often fought hard and well. They almost always lost their wars against Europeans partly because they were more worried about fighting Indian enemies than about fighting Europeans. Try to think of a war between European settlers and Indians where no Indians fought on the side of the Europeans. I can't think of any. Indians fought each other for European powers even when no Europeans were present.

Indians came to the New World with a subset of the Old World human toolkit, a small subset of Old World human genetic diversity and an even smaller subset of the diseases that afflicted Old World humans. As a result, when regular contact between the Old and New Worlds began, Spaniards quickly seized the most heavily populated areas, like Mexico and Peru, and installed themselves at the top echelons of society. They had trouble maintaining that position because their subjects died off so quickly from European diseases.

Spain and other European colonizers imported African slaves to replace the missing workers. That made the problem worse for the Indians, because African diseases, like the deadlier types of malaria and yellow fever, joined European diseases in the New World. In extreme cases, Indians were nearly wiped out. In other areas, populations dropped to ten to twenty-five percent of precontact levels before partially recovering. In a very few areas, Indian populations grew through most or all of the period.

Diseases spread from the more populated areas to less populated ones, leaving those areas open to European colonization. Those colonies brought more diseases, leaving still more territory open to colonization.

Finally, most Indian tribes that nonhistorians have heard of developed or became prominent because of direct or indirect interactions with Europeans. Tribes like the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles did not exist as distinct ethnic and political units before European contact, and probably never would have existed given a different pattern of European settlement. The horse-riding plains nomads that most people think of when they think of American Indians were also products of interaction with Europeans. That makes it hard to write serious Alternate History involving Indians recognizable to most readers.

[FONT=&quot]Given those problems, I can understand alternate history buffs writing off Indians as a subject for alternate history. I beg to differ with that opinion though, and will present a series of exercises in alternate history that illustrate why. [/FONT]

Weird question: Do you have anything to do with the YouTube channel Alternate History Hub or have you watched it?
 
A problem I have when people think about indigenous Americans is that there's often a Whiggish concept of a march of history, of course tied to the idea that the Americans had not "caught up" to the Eurasians. No - history isn't one predetermined racing track.
 
Maybe if the Roman Empire survived a few thousand years more the Native Americans could stand a good technological chance?
 
Maybe if the Roman Empire survived a few thousand years more the Native Americans could stand a good technological chance?

Don't forget the lack of a beast of burden in the America's. With the exception of the llama in the Incan area there were no other equivalents of horses or European oxen in the America's. This was a substantial problem for the native Americans.
 
Maybe if the Roman Empire survived a few thousand years more the Native Americans could stand a good technological chance?

That's pretty much the background of my novel "All Timelines Lead to Rome". I have the Roman empire surviving, but stagnating and no Europeans reaching the New World until our timeline discovers how to get to the Rome survives timeline. At that point, the modern world has to decide how to cope with a technologically far less advanced world. Do we go in and grab the natural resources that are laying around waiting to be picked up? Oil? Precious metal, etc? How do we protect the Indians (and Romans) of the alternate timeline from getting screwed over as badly as the Indians were historically?

It's a good book (in my totally unbiased opinion) and the link to it is in my signature line.
 
Don't forget the lack of a beast of burden in the America's. With the exception of the llama in the Incan area there were no other equivalents of horses or European oxen in the America's. This was a substantial problem for the native Americans.

Yep. And llamas were cold/dry country animals surrounded (at least to the north) by hot, wet country they didn't do well in, which kept them from easily spreading.

The Incas were using them in hot tropic areas because llamas were important to Inca logistics, but llamas didn't thrive there at all. I suspect that eventually the Incas would have bred llamas better adapted to the lowland jungles and llamas would have spread to MesoAmerica. I suspect that the Incas would have also bred llamas into a variety of physical types to fill the various niches for beasts of burden. Doing all that would have taken hundreds of years though, maybe a thousand or more.
 
A problem I have when people think about indigenous Americans is that there's often a Whiggish concept of a march of history, of course tied to the idea that the Americans had not "caught up" to the Eurasians. No - history isn't one predetermined racing track.

You're right, to a point. "Primitive" societies do sometimes have more sophisticated understanding of some parts of their world than more technologically advanced ones, and various aspects of technology don't always advance in lockstep.

On the other hand, where they can, societies tend to try to buffer against famine by storing food if they have the technology to do so. They try to encourage plants they find useful and discourage plants they find noxious. If they have useful enough plants, enough water and fertile ground, they develop agriculture eventually. Once they develop agriculture, some members of the society figure out how to convince or coerce the others into doing their share of the hard farming work and you end up, eventually, with what we call civilization.
 
On the other hand, where they can, societies tend to try to buffer against famine by storing food if they have the technology to do so. They try to encourage plants they find useful and discourage plants they find noxious. If they have useful enough plants, enough water and fertile ground, they develop agriculture eventually. Once they develop agriculture, some members of the society figure out how to convince or coerce the others into doing their share of the hard farming work and you end up, eventually, with what we call civilization.

This, that eventually HG --> Agriculture --> State, is what I would dispute.

HG societies actually have a wider variety of food sources and are consequently less susceptible to famine than most agricultural ones (remember, us in developed countries are hardly the historical or even modern norm), and agriculture is hardly something positive or predetermined. If you compare a French village in the 14th century and a Miwok village in the 13th century, the Miwok are going to have significantly less work and significantly better health (see here for more info on HG vs Agri health). This is perhaps why many HG groups have shunned agriculture even when confronted with it; the Californians had contacts with Puebloan farmers but continued their acorn-based foraging economy, for example, even though nothing was preventing them from growing maize in California. Peter Bellwood actually says that no HG group has been historically documented to choose an agricultural lifestyle, whereas there are many examples of them actively avoiding it.

Some might quibble a bit with the second part too, as there are agricultural and even urban groups that may have avoided or lessened the "convincing or coercing" part. The Harappans, for example, are a possible example: "good quality products seem to have reached even villages, town and city houses are not markedly different in size and wealth, the benefits of sanitation and water seem to have been available to the whole urban population, there are no obvious palaces, and so on." (another thing on Harappans)
 
The problem with a say Cherokee modern nation is the POD to allow that to happen would be so early it would become Monthra and wipe out the Cherokees themself. The only possibility I see is somehow the early settlers are left alone and can't be restocked or reinforced by Europe for a while allowing technology diffusion and population recovery. The problem is that if there are any major plague or disaster in Europe more people will flee to America, negating the whole reason for it happening in the first place. Later plains tribes have a chance if a different cultural mindset becomes active but that's also hard to make happen.
 
This is perhaps why many HG groups have shunned agriculture even when confronted with it; the Californians had contacts with Puebloan farmers but continued their acorn-based foraging economy, for example, even though nothing was preventing them from growing maize in California.

This is drifting quite a ways from the topic, but my understanding is that the timing of the rainfall in California made corn farming without irrigation difficult. Also, California weather is wonderful except when it isn't--roughly every 150 years on average the state gets hit with a 'pineapple express", essentially a river in the air that dumps enormous amounts of rain, flooding large parts of the state. Last one happened around 1860 and bankrupted the state. It literally rained 40 days and 40 nights in a row in places. Then there are droughts that can last decades or even centuries. Not a great place for agriculture unless you have sophisticated irrigation systems.

Peter Bellwood actually says that no HG group has been historically documented to choose an agricultural lifestyle, whereas there are many examples of them actively avoiding it.

The problem here is that while at least some Hunter-Gatherer groups resist agriculture, agricultural groups can build higher population densities and simply swamp hunter-gatherers who are living on contiguous land suited to the nearby agricultural peoples' crops. That leaves only hunter-gatherers who are on land unsuited for agriculture and very rarely, hunter-gatherers in very rich and stable areas that allow large hunter-gather populations--generally aquatic areas with a lot of resources.
 
Are there time-traveling Mars Nazis? :p Just kidding, just kidding.

Ah. I suspect you've been reading "There Will Always Be And England". Hopefully I'll post the rest of that around mid-November.

But, seriously, if Rome survives for a few more centuries, then the Aztecs or their successor states could be fairly advanced civilizations with labor animals, and check out the potential domestications thread (https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=241781&page=1 ) to see what the Iroquois and Choctaws and such could come up with.

I'm thinking it would take a thousand years or more to turn most of the potential domesticated animals into something really useful.
 
Anything on Tecumseh in your collection, perchance?

I don't think there is, unless it's a brief mention of the possibility of Tecumseh surviving the war of 1812 and heading west to found a kind of Indian refuge in the mountain west, which is a scenario I briefly toyed with. If it's in there, it's in the section on "lost cities", which I am not sure if I included or decided to hold it back for the planned (if I ever get time to finish it) American Indian Victories Volume 2.
 
One thing you have to think about with NA is the definition of loosing. For example, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull lost militarilly. However, their example helped hold together Lakota culture so that they will hold together as a culture. Simularly, the Pueblo indians held their culture together with a combination of revolts and cooperation. Both of these groups had disperate leadership, unlike the Aztec and Inca. They had time to react and understand their white foes before being overwhelmed. They made adjustments and evolved without becoming "white". That is something.

I don't think you can come up with a world were NA win outright. However, NA cultures vary from highly assimilated to minimally so.

Look at the cultures that still have their rituals intact. Look at societies that are still very "indian" verses the ones where there may be a reservation but everyone is a Southern baptist and it happens to be in Oklahoma rather than some portion of their original lands.

That is where you can see possibilities for Indian "victories". Learning from those it becomes easier to see where other group had a chance to survive.
 
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