What Why How

New script! Native America

Added 2024-07-04 10:53:07 +0000 UTC

What if the Native Americans won?

Today, Native Americans make up less than 3% of the total population of the United States. They once made up the total, but after a wave of smallpox their numbers plummeted; next, Europeans colonized the shores and drove Native Americans into smaller and smaller reservations in wars of destruction.

But this wasn’t inevitable. Even in real life, across Central and South America, the denser populations of indigenous people survived and intermarried with European settlers, creating Mestizo, or mixed societies. There are also areas that still hold onto their indigenous cultures and languages today.

But what if the many indigenous peoples, with dozens of millions of people across North and South America, weren’t destroyed or absorbed by European colonists? What if the Americas were like Africa—covered in independent indigenous nation states?

Well, this is What Why How, and that’s what the video’s about.

Okay, so first of all, if we want the indigenous people from Alaska to Patagonia to completely beat European conquerors right from the start, you’d need divine intervention; the technological gap was just too large. Some degree of European colonialism is going to happen no matter what. The key is to prevent the mass death of indigenous people by smallpox after contact; large populations would then remain. They’d probably get conquered by Europeans but eventually overthrow those empires.

So, how could this happen?

Well, there was actually an earlier chance for smallpox to spread to the Americas: the Vikings. In roughly 1,000 CE, Norsemen from Greenland launched several expeditions to a land they called Vinland, which archaeologists have since proven is Newfoundland. Now, the known Norse settlement in North America was very small, but the Norsemen did contact Native Americans—they called them Skraelings—who they traded with and battled. But, not much came of this.

If these adventurous Norsemen, driven by hunger for resources, explored further south along the coast and in greater numbers, and if they brought with them the common Old World disease of smallpox, there’s a significant chance that disease would then have spread to the Skraelings, especially if they reach the Mississippi or the Caribbean.

From then it enters the vast Native American trade network, burning like wildfire across the continent. It devastates the various societies across the Americas, scattering the peoples of the Mississippi, emptying the halls of the Toltec and Maya—a wave of pestilence, the world’s most devastating plague. Over two thirds of the indigenous population is dead by the year 1200.

But, thanks to natural selection, the survivors are more likely to have stronger genetic immunity to diseases. The smallpox also doesn’t completely disappear; with later, smaller outbreaks—therefore, survivors also are more likely to have acquired immunity too.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5116069/

What happens next?

Well, with the Skraelings wiped out, the Vikings exploring the coast of North America find little opposition to the establishment of new villages. By 1300, a constellation of small Norse colonies dot the coast. Stories of idyllic Vinland draw more Scandinavians to Greenland; they repel Inuit invaders, keeping the pathway open between Europe and North America. The Scandinavians also bring with them various farm animals, including horses. Horses quickly spread across the plains of North America.

But Native Americans aren’t completely wiped out. After the devastation of the initial smallpox plague, their population bounces back quickly. A Renaissance occurs; the Quechua people forge the gigantic Inca Empire across the Andes and the Mexica conquer their neighbors, forging the Aztec Empire. In the Great Plains of North America, the Numunuu, known by their enemies as the Comanche, form a vast horseback empire. On the ruins of the mound-builders of the Mississippi, new villages rise, fed by crops and animals purchased from the small Norse colonies.

But, in 1492, Christopher Columbus arrives in the Caribbean.

While the Spanish conquistadors conquer Cuba, they find greater difficulty on the shores of Central America. For one, locals aren’t shocked to see men on horseback. They also don’t fall quickly to smallpox brought by the Spaniards. So, when Hernán Cortés and his men land on the coast of Mexico, they’re unable to hijack the ongoing war against the Aztec Empire. They instead play second fiddle, lending aid and support to the Confederacy of Tlaxcala. Tenochtitlan, the great capital of the Aztec Empire, still falls, but the Aztec Empire is simply divided into different warring Nahua states rather than falling fully to Spain.

Soon afterward, Francisco Pizarro arrives at the doorstep of the Inca Empire, ruled by Sapa Inca Huayna Capac, scarred by smallpox but alive. Pizarro and his men attempt to overthrow Huayna Capac in a coup, their gunfire weapons nearly scattering the Inca warriors, but they’re surrounded and butchered.

So, entering the mid-1500s, Spain has only successfully planted colonies along the shores of America, like the fading Norse colonies to the north. Compare this to contemporary European ports in West Africa and, soon, India.

While Europeans don’t conquer Mexico or Peru, they do trade extensively with los Indios. In exchange for gold and silver, the Spaniards and soon Portuguese and French sell the Nahua and Quechua muskets. Other Europeans, like the English and Dutch, soon join too. This leads to a diffusion of European technology across the Americas. In turn, natives use these tools to repel overzealous European expeditions, limiting colonization.

While beneficial for repelling European invasions, the introduction of the musket leads to an arms race in the Americas: in the Musket Wars, coastal Native tribes conquer their inland neighbors. The first Gunpowder Empires arise in the Americas, including the Tarascan Empire of Central America and the Haudenosaunee of the north, called the Iroquois by the French.

In the 1600s, new empires arise in the Americas. The Maya, rejuvenated by trade deals with Spain, reforge their empire in the Yucatan Peninsula. The Choctaw, allied with the French, march up the Mississippi and forge their own empire at gunpoint. And in the south, the Inca conquer Patagonia, forging an empire to rival the Mongols.

Alongside competing for lucrative trade deals with these native societies, Europeans also enter into a religious arms race, with Protestant and Catholic missionaries competing to convert the locals to their church. So, Christianity begins to flow inward from the coasts. The Emperors of the Haudenosaunee, converts to Catholicism, outright promote the religion. The spread of Christianity also comes with written language. While the Central Americans already have one of those, the North and South Americans begin to write their languages in Latin.

Europeans also bring with them enslaved Africans, but not to any large degree, since there remains plenty of indigenous people to use as slave labor on island plantations.

While some wise monarchs are able to use European contact to their advantage, Native Americans’ luck begins to turn in about 1750 thanks to continued advancements in European technology and a series of wars in which the Kingdom of England beats up its rivals.

When Haudenosaunee crumbles into civil war, English troops under the banner of the West Indian Trade Company successfully march inland. Over the next generation, these brutal mercenaries take control of a vast swathe of land stretching from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. But, the majority of the population remains indigenous, with Englishmen making up the majority only in closed cities along the coast and of course in the governing bureaucracy of the Company.

Now, by this point the first European settler colonies arise. In sparsely inhabited Uruguay, for example, Dutch settlers successfully beat back the natives and create the colony of New Holland. We’ll talk about the others later.

Anyways, European power continues to grow in the early 1800s. The Brits, armed with new rifles and carried by new steamships, sail inland along the rivers of the Americas; they raise the Union Jack over the palaces of the Mississippi Empire, they snatch coastal Mexico from Spain, and they put into power a puppet on the throne of the Inca.

But other European kingdoms are eager to get a slice of the American pie before Britain gobbles it all; France takes the Amazon from Portugal, Germany conquers the Guyanas, and Russia marches south from chilly Alaska. By the year 1895, only two independent Native American states remain: the West Mexican empire of Tzintzuntzan and Tawantinsuyu in Peru.

But something changes that year: in an explosion, anarchists assassinate the King of France. Investigations show English radicals were involved in the plot. Before people know it, war erupts across the planet, poising France, Austria, and Russia against Britain, Germany, and Turkey. A generation of bloodshed follows; the European empires harness the labor of their colonies, sending tens of thousands of Native Americans to their deaths in trenches. But this pointless carnage results in the birth of Pan-American identity across the many native peoples.

The world wars comes to an end in 1935, with the British alliance crumbling into revolution. This grants the American colonies a chance for independence; two decades of struggle follow, with the last major European colony freed in 1968.

Since decolonization, the Americas have hardly been stable; the many societies have struggled to find their own path, with most sinking into poverty and strife. But let’s do a tour of the Western Continents in the year 2024.

First, let’s look at the few European majority countries. In the far south is the Commonwealth of South America, which is mainly inhabited by Welsh farmers and British townsfolk. To the north is the Republic of New Holland, a Dutch settler-colony with a brutal history of suppression against the local natives. Then, up on the other side of the continent is the Republic of Hudson, based around the grand city of New York, which has a rich business class of Englishmen and Germans, a large middle class of Italians and Poles, and an impoverished class of sidelined indigenous people. And to the north of that is Newfoundland, which is majority English but still has the occasional village that can trace its origins to the Vikings of a millennium ago.

Now, plenty of other countries have sizeable European populations, and some are even majority mixed race especially in the Caribbean, but once you get inland from the coast each country is majority Native American.

The richest ones are:

· the Iroquois Republic, which has built its economy off of industrial manufacturing

· Mississippi, which has the name suggests controls access to the Mississippi River

· Mexico, which dominates Central America

· Runaland, which was built off the ruins of the old Inca Empire, and

· Tupia, which is the success story of South America

But there are plenty of nightmare cases too. For example, the three states of the old British dominion of Texas—Naadahendia, Wichita, and Karankawa—are in ceaseless war over each others’ oil reserves. The European empires fund these wars in exchange for lucrative petroleum extraction contracts.

Right over the border, in Sonora, famines are common. Yokutia, built in an idyllic environment, is in the midst of civil war between its many different ethnic groups. The same goes for Camancheria, where the Comanche ruling class is struggling to maintain dictatorship. The most extreme dictatorship in the Americas is Level Republic of Aymara, where a totalitarian regime attempts to manage every aspect of its citizens’ lives. This has driven hundreds of thousands of people to flee to the north, to Runaland; Runaland and its allies across South America are considering a major military intervention and are seeking support from the Chinese Empire. It remains to be seen what will come of this, but some critics worry welcoming a foreign power back to the Americas will open a new pandora’s box of colonization.

As for all the other countries of these Western Continents? Well, what do you think they’re like? Which one are you most curious about?

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