I have a few questions about Native Americans, there are a lot of very knowledgeable people on this board and thought they could be answered. While I am asking questions that could be considered to be European's are better than Natives, I do not mean it that way at all. I admire a lot about certain nations. My best friend is a member of the Cheyenne nation.
Why did Natives not develop certain things like:
Written language I.e. when the European's arrived or later on.
Cities like in Europe or China?
A monotheistic religion.
Cartography.
Better weapons not excluding gun powder better fighting formations.
Some form of industry on a society level (not talking about animal utilization)
System of Government that's well defined.
Sea going trade and exploration.
I could go on, I have a lot of questions but I will stop now. Perhaps I will ask more if there. If there is any interest in this post. One more thing, and it is a big question. Where would Indian's be today if there was no contact with Europeans today (pick your reason) like a huge plague in the world that wipes out Asia and Europe.
I'm asking about North American plains (mostly). I know nothing about central or South America. I don't know enough about them. I don't want to discus the Aztecs or Mayans or any of the South American tribes. I realize the Pueblo built cliff buildings, which they abandoned with no real reason. I know the Cherokee developed a alphabet much later in the game and the Lakota people.
Cities - They had them. Tons of them. Even in the modern US there were cities, including on the Plains where Mississippian culture influenced traditions there--although on the Plains, "town" is a better word. The warmer years on the Plains helped those cultures expand even into Canada in parts. The main thing hindering settlement was the fact that (as on the East Coast), they'd tend to exhaust the soil in a few decades and thus move the village. They also needed to supplement their diet with protein, so oftentimes they'd leave in long hunting expeditions (or just trade for it with the more nomadic peoples there who became the ones to basically conquer them once said nomads got horses).
Written language - They had this though. Mesoamerica had written language both proto-writing and actual writing. But writing is a very rare invention, as evidenced by the fact that all of the world besides China and Japan use scripts derived from the Proto-Semitic alphabet.
Monotheism - Another rare invention, even rarer than writing. I don't know how many times it independently showed up aside from Akhenaton, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism, which some believe Judaism was influenced by Zoroastrianism in that regard.
Cartography - Not sure about this one. But they obviously did have a conception of their territory, though I think it was pretty flexible as to where the "borders" were since that wasn't really a concept in any of those cultures.
Better weapons - Lack of iron and bronze utilisation in any large scale plus the fact that what they had tended to work seems to be a good reason. It doesn't help that it some parts of the Americas (like the Mississippi area), organised civilisation was very new meaning it might've taken a while to get things started. There was an American Indian culture which used copper in the Great Lakes area.
Industry - What do you mean? The organised civilisations were extremely industrious peoples. All those mounds, those Andean roads, those incredible temples, etc. Am I misunderstanding you?
Government - They ruled based on tradition, which is basically what occurred in most every place prior to the 18th century, especially in pre-literate societies. Seems a bit overrated for a pre-modern civilisation. Then you have societies like the Comanche, Sioux, and yes, the Cheyenne that were basically an anarchist society that because of their lack of organisation became some of the most resilient societies in
Seagoing trade and exploration - Frequently occurred, even amongst the less organised societies. The Aleutian Islands were colonised relatively recently. The Haida raided down to Mexico, and fought the Chumash of California, who also engaged in seagoing trade. The Taino and others in the Caribbean were great explorers. Topa Inca Yupanqui allegedly sent out a great expedition into the Pacific. And trade routes stretched across the Americas long before the Europeans.
The Pueblo abandoned their more famous cliff dwellings because of several of many droughts in the Medieval Warm Period. Of course, they still had dwellings which they live in to this day and are incidentally the oldest towns in the United States by far. The Cherokee alphabet was of course inspired by encounters with the Latin alphabet and couldn't have been invented in that form prior to European contact.
Where would the American Indians be without European contact? That's pretty hard to say--I think it's impossible that neither Europe or Asia contacts them, so ASB death plague kills everyone there. I think we can tell their societies were getting more complex and organised as times went on, and the Mississippi region was on its way to becoming a third major center akin to Mesoamerica and the Andes.
It is like coming into the world of Max Max and asking why there were no cities or surviving industry. What we saw was the survivors of the End of Days.
Or witnessing and contributing to it as de Soto basically did.