Question

In minimum 200 words, answer this question: From your readings in the First Week, could American Indians have done better in the face of European encroachment? If so, how could they have done better for themselves?

Answer 1

American Indians are a tricky subject for serious alternate history. On the one hand, they represent a very dramatic and colorful “lost cause”. On the other hand, there are good reasons that Indians have historically not been as popular as say the Confederate States of America as subjects of alternate history. First, they generally lost out against European encroachment for some very impressive and hard-to-reverse reasons. The large impersonal forces of history ran against the Indians to a far greater extent than they did against say the Axis in World War II, or the South in the American Civil War. Second, it is hard to do a realistic Indian alternate history that has much to do with the Indian tribes that most people have heard of, or with the picture most people have of Indians.

Why the Indians lost—Epidemics: Indian battlefield victories tended to be meaningless in the face of a cruel bit of arithmetic. In almost every case, contact with European settlers led to at least 100 years of relentless Indian population decline from European diseases—a decline that usually left those populations at a tiny fraction of their pre-contact levels. Think the equivalent of the European Black Death every fifteen to twenty years for a hundred to one hundred and fifty years and you get some idea of what Indian groups went through. The resulting population declines left even relatively lucky Indian tribes with somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of their pre-contact populations.

Those epidemics didn’t just kill off faceless, replaceable generic Indians. They killed experienced leaders and skilled craftsmen, and undoubtedly men of genius—artists and innovators. The impact of European disease on the Indians was so severe that many alternate history buffs simply write them off for that reason alone.

Why the Indians lost—The technology gap: The most technologically advanced and politically sophisticated of Indian groups were materially and politically thousands of years behind the European cultures they faced. Aztecs and Incas technologically and materially resembled—at best—the Assyrians of 1000 BC more than they did the Europeans of 1500 AD. There was a gap of at least 2500 years, and arguably as much as 5000 years, between the two groups of cultures in terms of how long they had been accumulating the tools and techniques of technologically advanced cultures. That gap was by no means across the board. Indians could and did show Europeans a thing or two in many areas of technology.

Unfortunately for the Indians, the technology gap also extended beyond the physical realm. Europeans had accumulated a much larger playbook of military and political strategies over the years than the Indians had, and that gap was probably just as important as the physical technology.

The technology gap had nothing to do with the intelligence of individual Indians or with the worth of Indian cultures. It came about for at least three reasons. First, Indians started out behind Old World humans because they came over with only part of Old World human culture. Pieces of technology and culture that were useful in cold climate made it. Things that weren’t didn’t make it to the New World. Second, Indians never caught up, and actually fell further and further behind in many ways because they moved into continents that were much smaller than the Old World complex of Asia, Africa and Europe. The smaller continents translated into fewer opportunities to find the right combination of factors that would allow high technology cultures to develop. Third, North and South America had far fewer animal resources to work with. By the time Indian cultures developed to the point where they might have domesticated animals, most of the best candidates--like North American horses and camels--had already died off.

Why the Indians lost—the Indian wars: American Indians were at a major disadvantage against Europeans from the start, but they often fought hard and well. They often, indeed almost always, lost their wars against European settlers and conquistadors because they were more worried about fighting old Indian enemies than about fighting Europeans. Try to think of a war between European settlers and Indians where no Indians fought on the side of the Europeans. There may be some, but I can’t think of any. Indians often fought each other for one European power or another even when no Europeans were present at the battles.

Indians came to the New World with a subset of the Old World human toolkit, a subset of Old World human genetic diversity, and very small subset of the diseases that afflicted Old World humans. As a result, when regular contact between the Old and New Worlds began again, Spaniards quickly seized the most heavily populated areas, like Mexico and Peru, and installed themselves as the top echelon of society. They found that position difficult to maintain because the people they ruled died off so quickly from European diseases.

Spain and other European colonizers imported African slaves to replace the missing workers. That made the problem even worse from the Indian point of view, because African ones like the really deadly types of malaria and yellow fever joined European diseases in the New World. In the worst hit areas, Indians were essentially wiped out. In other areas, populations dropped to 10 to 25 percent of pre-contact levels over a period of 150 to 200 years before bottoming out and starting to rise. In a very few areas, Indian populations appear to have actually grown throughout the period, or through most of it. I’ll look at those areas more carefully later.

The diseases that started in the more populated areas spread to less populated areas, leaving those areas much more open to European colonization. That colonization in turn brought more diseases, which made the process of colonization easier, which brought more diseases, which made colonization even easier...and so.

Finally, if someone starts looking seriously at the development of Indian societies, they realize that many if not most of the Indian tribes that most people have heard of developed or at least became prominent as the result of direct or indirect interactions with Europeans. Tribes like the Creeks, Choctaws, Seminoles, and many others did not exist as distinct ethnic units before European contact, and probably would never have existed given a different pattern of European settlement. The horse-riding nomadic plains Indians that most people think of when they think of American Indians were also the product of interaction with Europeans. That makes it hard to write a serious Alternate History scenario that involves Indians recognizable to most readers.

Given those problems, I can understand alternate history buffs writing off Indians as a subject for serious alternate history. I beg to differ with that opinion though, and will present a series of exercises in alternate history that will illustrate why. The scenarios range from serious to whimsical. I enjoyed writing all of them and I hope you enjoy reading them.

The title promises Indian victories. What do I mean by that? The alternate history scenarios in this book will have American Indian cultures surviving in significantly larger numbers than in our time-line, for a significantly longer time than in our time-line, and/or with significantly more of the core of their cultures intact than in our time-line.

How could Indians have achieved those kinds of victories? Their best chance would be to not fight the war. If for some reason Europeans were unwilling or unable to invade the New World, Indians would presumably ‘win’. That could have happened due to European conditions or conditions in the New World. Scenarios in the first section will look at both possibilities.

Assuming that the Europeans are in a position to settle the New World, the Indians have to somehow reduce or eliminate the reasons they lost in our time-line. If something made European and African diseases less deadly to American Indians, Indians would have a better shot at winning. Scenarios in section two look at those possibilities.

If somehow Indians closed the technology gap, either before or after contact with the Europeans, they would have a better chance at winning. Section three looks at some of those possibilities.

If Indians managed to avoid ruinous wars between the tribes, they would have a better chance at winning. Section four looks at some of those possibilities.

In some cases, seemingly minor variations in the patterns of European settlements or the geography of the New World would make a huge difference in how well Indian cultures survived. Section five looks at some of those scenarios.

Section six groups together information that doesn’t really fit anywhere else. It contains a Book Review and a whimsical attempt to use alternate history to generate Rider Haggard/Edgar Rice Burroughs-style ‘lost cities’.