Native Americans knew something that is blind to society.

a reply to: Hefficide

Europe moved away from walls after cannons. I don't recall any battles where we took a Native fort or layed siege to one.

I guess you could consider adobe as a fort.

originally posted by: LDragonFire
a reply to: boncho

Just curious, if Native Americans used walls and forts why didn't they build any fighting against the Blue coats?

They did, mind the source as I hadn't really looked beyond the keyword, simply posting a quick example:

An Indian traitor betrayed his people and told the English the location of a large Narragansett winter camp. The fortress-camp was surrounded by a palisade deep within a swamp.

www.historyplace.com...

Described here is a palisade:

As early as the year 1000,
for example, Huron, Neutral, Petun and Iroquois villages
were increasingly fortified by a timber palisade that
could be nearly 10 metres in height, sometimes villages
built a second or even third ring to protect them against
attacks by enemy nations. Craig Keener has described
how these structures became larger and more elaborate
through to the 1500s, with logs as large as 24 inches
in diameter being used to construct the multi-layered
defences, an enormous investment in communal labour
that the villagers would not have made had it not been
deemed necessary. Sieges and assaults on such fortified
villages therefore must have occurred before Europeans
arrived, and were certainly evident in the 17th and 18th
Centuries. War

www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca...




Certainly not for keeping animals out.

a reply to: LDragonFire

Cannonade caused walls to be thickened for a fairly long time. There are European made walled fortifications here in the US - the one is St. Augustine, Florida comes to mind as I have visited it several times.

I would have to research a bit to learn why Europeans moved from seige warfare to the methods used later on - lining up and simply shooting at each other from a few yards away - and then onto trench warfare. I've never really studied that progression.

a reply to: Hefficide

Look at the French and Indian war and the use of cannon really made the fort obsolete, the French had some pretty big mortar's and they could pound the British forts from a safe distance from the English cannon. Forts however were very effective against Natives and they used them with roads digging ever further into Indian territory.

originally posted by: Hefficide
a reply to: LDragonFire

Eastern tribes seem to have utilized wooden walls. Some western tribes used natural caves elevated above the ground. This could be equally seen as protection from natural predators as for protection from invasion by other tribes.

Using a cave and/or throwing a few sticks in the ground is far different than constructing a giant palisade of 2 ft thick lumber. We are talking about complete overkill if it were meant for animals. Something that would take hours to take out of the ground if the idea was an attack, when a few planks positioned the right way can redirect animals.

I won't argue that European influence and conflict exacerbated the problem, but the idea that the native cultures didn't know what war was before the white man came and showed them is absurd:

Before the French arrived, the Huron had already been in conflict with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy ("Five Nations") to the south. Several thousand Huron lived as far south as present-day central West Virginia along the Kanawha River by the late 16th century, but they were driven out by the Haudenosaunee, who invaded from present-day New York in the 17th century to secure more hunting grounds for the beaver trade.[18] Once the European powers became involved in trading, the conflict among natives intensified significantly as they struggled to control the fur trade. The French allied with the Huron, because they were the most advanced trading nation at the time. The Haudenosaunee tended to ally with the Dutch and later English, who settled at Albany and in the Mohawk Valley of their New York territory.

Introduction of European weapons and the fur trade increased competition and the severity of inter-tribal warfare. On March 16, 1649, a Haudenosaunee war party of about 1000 burned the Huron mission villages of St. Ignace and St. Louis in present-day Simcoe County, Ontario, killing about 300 people. They also killed many of the Jesuit missionaries, who have since been honored as North American Martyrs. The surviving Jesuits burned the mission after abandoning it to prevent its capture. The Iroquois attack shocked the Huron.

By May 1, 1649, the Huron burned 15 of their villages to prevent their stores from being taken and fled as refugees to surrounding tribes. About 10,000 fled to Gahoendoe (Christian Island). Most who fled to the island starved over the winter, as it was a non-productive settlement and could not provide for them. Those who survived were believed to have resorted to cannibalism to do so. After spending the bitter winter of 1649–50 on Gahoendoe, surviving Huron relocated near Quebec City, where they settled at Wendake. Absorbing other refugees, they became the Huron-Wendat Nation. Some Huron, along with the surviving Petun, whose villages the Iroquois attacked in the fall of 1649, fled to the upper Lake Michigan region, settling first at Green Bay, then at Michilimackinac.

en.wikipedia.org...

50-100 MILLION????? Jesus dude, use your brain. There weren't even that many Native Americans in ALL of the Americas...

Roughly 50-100 thousand were killed. Thousand.

a reply to: anicetus

a reply to: raymundoko

50 to 100 million is currently considered the historically accurate figure.

Since several posters were requesting instances of fortifications, torture, scalping and massacres in pre-Columbian North American, specifically the Great Plains:

At Crow Creek - a large Initial Coalescent village in South Dakota with a terminal occupation around AD 1325 - a mass-burial deposit containing the remains of a minimum 486 men, women and children was discovered in a fortification ditch that partially surrounded the village. Most of the bodies had been mutilated and showed signs of exposure before interment. At least 89 percent 415 identified frontal bones had cut marks indicative of scalping, and 41 percent of 101 skulls identified had round or ellipsoid depression fractures from round or axelike clubbing implements. Decapitation and possible tongue removal by humans was also evident by anatomical placement of cut marks on occipital bones, cervical vertebrae and mandibles. North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence Page 213

Notice the date, types of atrocities committed and disposition of the remains. This is an act on par with similar massacres by other cultures and indisputably shows that wonton violence was not a foreign concept to the Plains Indians as is being claimed.

originally posted by: LDragonFire
Look at the French and Indian war and the use of cannon really made the fort obsolete...

Is that so? I could give you example after example of fixed fortifications holding out against artillery bombardments right up to World War II and beyond.

a reply to: solemind4


numbers 1 & 2 reflect the Aborigional Tribes/Nations to have a good deal of Wiccan attitude/worldview

but the rest of the list is completely muddied with the social necessities of living in a nomadic tribe setting and the Politics of inter-Tribal encounters

a reply to: Hefficide

That's population. Read your link...

The post I replied to said that many were killed. I was pointing out that was the entire population, if that.

Genocides in History

20th century scholarly estimates ranged from 8.4 million to 112.5 million.[39] However, Robert Royal stated, "estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe and/or Western civilization often favoring wildly higher figures."[40]

originally posted by: Hefficide
a reply to: raymundoko

50 to 100 million is currently considered the historically accurate figure.

I guess that just means yet another reason to believe other people's lying lies

a reply to: BasementWarriorKryptonite

See my edit. That is not the accepted view.

Indian Population

While it is difficult to determine exactly how many Natives lived in North America before Columbus,[6] estimates range from a low of 2.1 million (Ubelaker 1976) to 7 million people (Russell Thornton) to a high of 18 million (Dobyns 1983).[7]

And did "The white man" come in and intentionally kill "the Indians"?

Nearly all scholars now believe that widespread epidemic disease, to which the natives had no prior exposure or resistance, was the overwhelming cause of the massive population decline of the Native Americans

Edit: And before anyone goes off on the Smallpox blanket route:

Deliberate infection[edit]
One of the most contentious issues relating to disease depopulation in the Americas concerns the degree to which Europeans deliberately infected indigenous peoples with diseases such as smallpox.

Letters exist between two British officers, General Jeffrey Amherst (later Lord Amherst) and Colonel Henry Bouquet, that explicitly advocate the idea of using smallpox-infested blankets to kill Indians at the Siege of Fort Pitt.[29] Bouquet suggests the distribution of blankets to "inocculate the Indians." Amherst approves this plan and suggests "to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." Also cited by this source is an entry in the Journal of William Trent, who was the local militia commander: "we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."

While no existing evidence supports that this attempt was successful, a preponderance of documented evidence suggests that the smallpox among the natives preceded the exchange, was contracted from a different source, and the attempt to "inoculate" the recipients, Turtle's Heart and Mamaltee,[30] was unsuccessful.

Cook asserts that there is no evidence that the Spanish attempted to infect the American natives.[31] The cattle introduced by the Spanish polluted the water reserves which Native Americans dug in the fields to accumulate rain water. In response, the Franciscans and Dominicans created public fountains and aqueducts to guarantee access to drinking water.[5] But when the Franciscans lost their privileges in 1572, many of these fountains were not guarded any more and deliberate well poisoning may have happened.[5] Although no proof of such poisoning has been found, some historians believe the decrease of the population correlates with the end of religious orders' control of the water.[5]

originally posted by: raymundoko

See my edit. That is not the accepted view.

You can bet your ass I read it. I'm appalled that some people actually believe there were 100 million native americans. Thank you for your link.

a reply to: BasementWarriorKryptonite

Can you provide any evidence to the contrary other than what appears to be your opinion?

This PDF may help clafify things and explain why early population counts ( which are being cited here, from the seventies and early eighties, were lowballed )

How close will scholars ever come to the real numbers? A recent effort by ge- ographer William Denevan to reconcile the many conflicting estimates, by using the best findings of various scholars, concludes that 54 million people inhab- ited the Americas in 1492, including 3.8 million above the Rio Grande.

a reply to: Hefficide

I think the confusion my be that some posters mistaking the phrase 'Native Americans' with the entire indigenous population of the Americas when they seem to be referring to just North America. I find the 50,000,000 to be on the higher side estimate-wise but your sources do show that the bulk of the population was skewed to Central and South America and from how I interpret the Original Post it seemed to be referring to the North American Indian population.

Ah, the old native american peace and love argument. People who use this as an argument for world peace are never seeing the whole picture. The tribes who lived peacefully (debatable, as well, since there were definitely minor skirmishes and raids) generally lived in very small, separate communities of extremely small populations (several people was normal).

Not all tribes lived this. But it's true that cooperation led the more cooperative tribes to success and, in some cases, large expansion. Cooperation is also responsible for the success of ancient and modern civilization.

But there is more to it than that.

When civilizations arose, social hierarchies *naturally* formed, and thus social strife and problems arose. The stuff people find most ugly about the human condition is a part of our natural condition as well. The bottom line is that social behavior is not going to disappear because some naturally passive and peaceful individuals want it to. Temperament is different person to person. Psychopaths and sociopaths are born every day and have been since the beginning of human history, and may serve an important link in our evolution no matter how abhorrent that idea is to people who don't understand it. Nature has it's own morality, and sometimes it has very little if nothing to do with our own.

Suggesting that certain native american tribal philosophy is the key to utopia is the stuff of half-baked ideologies and sci-fi fantasy. Religion tried to bring about peace too. Look at where they took us. Good luck, but this sort of thinking is not the truth, and passive, peaceful human beings living together in passive, peaceful sci-fi civilizations of the future is a deluded, even misguided, fantasy.

Collectively, we are we are, social primates that exhibit social dominance behavior that is natural to all mammals. Even your vaunted peaceful native american tribes (and others) could not escape aspects of this behavior.

To say that our hilariously arbitrary and confused perspectives on morality and ethics, and our equally confused ideologies about the human condition, are not meshing well would be an understatement.

The best you could hope for is to genetically modify our behavior, to gentle us in some way. Probably not too smart when dealing with a mammal that is a natural predatory and has MILLIONS of years of genetic and mind evolutionary programming.

Maybe a lot of the stuff people are so afraid about our own behavior is fundamental in our survival and evolution. Maybe this sort of peace-and-love thinking, and trying to make us all 'equal', is the real weakness and possibly a dangerous way of thinking for our species.

a reply to: LDragonFire

So you would admit that the colonists needed forts to keep attacking Indians at bay... certainly that is consistent with pre-revisionist history.

Revisionist history?

You do realize that Europeans came to the Americas and not the other way around. That's like saying that a person committing home invasion had to hide behind a wall because the evil homeowner was shooting at him.

Of course the Native Americans fought for their lands, just as any and all other nations and peoples would and still do.