Estimates of the native population on the pre-Columbian North American continent vary wildly, but the best educated guess is about 6 million. So imagine the current population of Washington State spread out all over the entirety of America and Canada. Is that really enough people to say “This continent is our property”? That’s like one family claiming to own Vermont. It’s absurd.
The Indians had roughly 6,000 years on their own and all they had to show for it was a meager population because their infant mortality rate was sky-high.
6,000 years and their greatest technological development was the woven basket.
By 1492, it was way past time someone used the continent for a civilization that could actually accomplish something.
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Why, you're right, RKae! So I guess if anyone today owns more than 1 acre of property, you're fine with the rest of us just taking the "excess" by force, right?
Actualy. Most estimates place the population of 1491 turtle Island around 80 to 100 million.
And we idependantly invented farming, metalurgy, and pottery.
So yeah... we were here first.
Tell me, what is the required level of population per square mile before people have a claim to their own nation? Does the USA, with 89 people per square mile qualify? Presumably Macao or Monte Carlo are pretty rock solid on this, eh?
Heh, we've almost completely wiped out the stupid piece-of-shit featherheads. Next, we should move on to the niggers, who have outlived whatever semblance of usefulness they may have once had.
Go People of Light!!
"but the best educated guess is about 6 million."
Except it's roughly 50 million. That's higher than most of Europe at that time...
"their infant mortality rate was sky-high."
Funny thing about that... Infant mortality in Europe at the same time was around 40%... Hell, it was ~25% in Germany around 1900. Kinda makes a fucking mockery of your claim there, doesn't it?
>6,000 years and their greatest technological development was the woven basket.
Technology is the only thing that shows if a race is worthy of staying on their own land, right? The fact that they had developed ways to live without raping the fuck out of natural resources is something you can't accept?
"By 1492, it was way past time someone used the continent for a civilization that could actually accomplish something."
Yes... mass murder, almost constant warfare and a belief that they had a divine edict to do what they wanted.
That is not a very good civilization...
they had monomolecular blades (obsidian is sharp) and you call them out on not being enough of them?
geez... so first you bash the hispanics, then you bash their ancestors... you bash canadians, the french, natives, the scandinavians, the rest of the europeans, yet i don't see you bashing spain for invading and nearly wiping them out!
by the way, i do believe there is a new troglodyte here, refresh my memory, does this happen often and for how long?
Yeah, they weren't doing anything with the land.
Except maybe farming it with an efficiency that made Europeans look like hobbyists.
Land and water which they were not polluting, strip-mining, clear-cutting, damming...
When the Europeans came they didn't clear much land for farming, they just moved on to the land the natives had already used, after about 90% of them had died from introduced diseases.
At Moonfront Republic, they never eat corn, they never plant sunflowers or marigolds, they never eat pumpkin, squash, peppers, tomatoes or potatoes, the use of a decent bean is unknown to them, they can't have strawberries, chocolate, or vanilla, they of course don't smoke, no turkey on holidays for them, and their dull little lives serve them right.
*I realize delicious wild strawberries were known in Europe, but they were so minuscule that jam was tedious and Neapolitan ice cream out of the question.
"but the best educated guess is about 6 million"
That's one of the lowest professional estimates I've seen, most of the professional estimates range from 15-35 million. The higher end of professional estimates guess as high as 50-80 million Native Americans. The 6 million figure is based on patterns Europeans saw AFTER working their way inland - by which time a lot of Natives were already killed off by disease.
"So imagine the current population of Washington State spread out all over the entirety of America and Canada. Is that really enough people to say “This continent is our property”? That’s like one family claiming to own Vermont. It’s absurd."
I bet you don't say that in regards to non-white immigrants coming to Scandinavia (countries with populations under 10 million) or the few million white Africans in South Africa and Zimbabwe being deprived of land they make claims on.....
Dear sir: Fuck you.
Sincerely,
An 'Indian'
This is simply ridiculous. The Aztecs, Inca, Maya, and several ancient middle/southwest American empires had civilizations at least on par with China and Europe at the time. But many of these civilizations were highly landlocked and already in a state of imperial decline or collapse when Europeans got there, so developing long-distance sailing technology wasn't exactly high on their list of priorities.
Don't worry, \m/>_<\m/: our trolls do often stick around for a few weeks, because they have no lives; but after that they disappear. Either they regress beyond the ability to type, or they starve when Mommy "forgets" to let them out of the basement.
The Indians had roughly 6,000 years on their own and all they had to show for it was a meager population because their infant mortality rate was sky-high.
6,000 years and their greatest technological development was the woven basket.
What a "woven basket" may look like.
image
1. The natives didn't have European concepts of ownership of land.
2. Ownership of land in any case doesn't depend on numbers. If it did, then foreigners swamping north America would invalidate the sovereignty of the United States and Canada.
3. If inferior technological accomplishment means conquest and theft of land is justified, then if aliens with better technology than us conquered us, that would be just.
4. Depends what you mean by "accomplish". What exactly have you accomplished?
5. If Europeans developed things which other people didn't, then that's mainly due to environmental and not inherent racial factors, just as it was for the Chinese. Often what they had was simply superior weaponry.
@farpadokly - Bingo. Sometimes simply having superior firepower can allow civilizations which are relatively technologically backwards to dominate technologically superior societies.
Ex: The Indo-Aryan tribal conquest of the Dravidians. The mostly Dravidian-run "Indus" Civilization in ancient times was taken over by their lighter-skinned and fairer-featured Indo-Aryan cousins from the North simply because the Aryans had better weapons and more warriors. The more Austronesian and "Negrito"-looking Dravidians had obviously technologically superior city-states in southern India but still lost anyway.
Ex 2: The relatively technologically backward Zulus and Shona tribes in precolonial South Africa and Zimbabwe respectively conquered the medieval city-states of Thulamela/Mapungubwe in South Africa and the internationally-known "Great Zimbabwe" city-states famous for maritime trade with countries as far away as Arabia, Persia, India and China.
Ex 3: The phantom menace that the technologically primitive Viking tribes from Scandinavia posed to the more technologically sophisticated Holy Roman Empire, Frisia and the Frankish Empire in medieval Europe. The Vikings constantly managed to pillage, rape and raze villages in Holy Rome and the Frankish lands to the ground and the armies of those empires usually failed to stop the barbarian-like (in terms of standards of living) Vikings.
Ex 4: The Mongol Horde virtually shutting down the Varangian-Kievan Rus' area of the "Silk Road" and conquering the Kievan Rus' (one of the most technologically forward civilizations in Eastern Europe) and choking off the Byzantine Empire's made trade routes to the East.
Another thing, RKae, not having super-advanced technology does not mean one is morally, spiritually or intellectually inferior.
On top of that, the reason that Indigenous Americans fell so quickly to the White Man was because most of their population had been killed off by some sort of plague right before Europeans began exploring, conquering & colonizing the Americas.
There was likely far more Indigenous Americans than previously thought.
Here's an interesting article. Yes, it may be from "Cracked" but it's still food for thought.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-believe-about-founding-america.html
Had that plague never come, the First Nations may have had more than a fighting chance!
The Mayans developed a calender so accurate that it is still predicting celestial events, dummy. I Think if they hadn't suffered a famine and earthquakes that caused the demise of their Empire, the Mayan Empire would have basically been the China of the Americas.
To think! They were also noticably less bloodthristy and more friendly than the successor empire of the Aztecs.
Shall I look up the European infant mortality rate for the early Renaissance? I don't know it off the top of my head, but I don't need to to know it was high. If you're going to denigrate another group of people on that score, look inwards first.
I know it is going to be very hard for you to understand but the Native Americans had no concept of property.
We could have done things differently and our relations with many of the tribes would have been enormously different.
We definitely could have done without Andrew Jackson and people like him.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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