God I am sick and tired of people uwu-washing indigenous American history.
Did the Inca have exquisite building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks? Yes. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.
Did the Aztecs have a gorgeous capital city built at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon? Yes. Guess what tho. They were also a violent expansionist empire who practiced ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.
The Iroquois confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever heard of, with women taking a forefront in most local government matters too. But their internal peace allowed them to redirect violence to their neighbors, as so often happens with tribal confederations, and they eventually violently conquered the Ohio valley and destroyed or displaced dozens of other indigenous groups.
Even my beloved Cahokia has the graves of sacrifice victims amidst its ruins.
A society should not need to be (and fundamentally cannot be) squeaky clean unproblematically stannable in order to be worth studying and remembering, and pretending that they were is no less disinformative than the European accounts painting them as godless savages.
As an add on to this, I’m also sick of people making blanket statements about indigenous peoples “living in harmony with the land” and other weirdly Noble Savage eco-fetish stuff.
Industrialized capitalist societies are absolutely destructive to the natural world, but, again, pretending that all indigenous peoples are somehow eco heroes beyond reproach is pointless at best and disingenuous at worst.
Hundreds of thousands of years of our species’ history is defined by humans moving into regions we are not native to and drastically shifting the ecosystem balance. Indigenous Australians, whose incredible oral histories are accurate back tens of thousands of years, utterly devastated the continent when they arrived, causing mass extinctions of most of the local megafauna (and the destruction of significant areas of grassland iirc) - some of which we know about in part thanks to those accurate oral histories.
Now what I’m NOT saying here is that modern indigenous groups should be ashamed for the actions of our universal human ancestors fifty thousand years ago. I’m using this as an example to illustrate a point.
Another example is the Iroquois I mentioned earlier. Some experts have theorized that their embracing of maize as a staple crop led to the foundation of their confederacy in the 1400s. They did not exist in stasis, no human society ever has.
Indigenous people did not exist in harmonious states of perpetual oneness with nature, unchanging both themselves and the world around them. To imply they did does a disservice both to their rich histories of progress and discovery and to the natural histories of the lands they live in.
Update: I remembered wrong, controlled burns by the first Aborigine peoples of Australia helped (and still helps in some cases) maintain grasslands they found useful, it didn’t destroy them wholesale. All of the other info in this post is pretty surface level, but if anyone wants further reading/watching here’s some links to follow:
Keep reading
hey guys, this post does the thing correctly. this is the thing i am talking about.
