I can imagine another timeline where the settlement of the Americas was more a blending than a displacement and there exist things like Cherokee and Navajo keyboards.
Both keyboards do exist. The Cherokee layout is included in OSX and iOS, while Navajo is available for download. You can find pictures of Cherokee keycaps in use, and I think there were also typewriters and certainly printed type in Cherokee.
The cultural devastation wrought on the indigenous peoples of the Americas was tragic. But it was also largely inevitable. The colonization of Africa left many more Africans alive than the colonization of America because America was biologically isolated from Eurasia while Africa was not. The epidemics, particularly of smallpox, that depopulated the Americas were so brutal largely because the indigenous Americans had neither the biological nor the cultural adaptation to infectious disease that was common among Eurasians and Africans. Most indigenous causes of illness in the Americas were due to parasites rather than viruses and bacteria, allowing the evolution of cultural practices like having the entire extended family of a sick person keep them company and try and comfort them through their illness.
One consequence of this is that the indigenous cultures that we’ve actually had the chance to study don’t really represent the pre-Colombian cultures that well, because by then, there was already substantial disruption from the infectious diseases and wildlife that spread throughout the continent well in advance of explorers and colonists.
This narrative gets trotted out anytime this subject comes up. It's not reflective of the actual literature. Here's an older perspective from 2009 [1]:
> the available evidence clearly indicates that the demographic collapse was not uniform in either timing or magnitude and may have been caused by factors other than epidemic disease. ... Despite the trauma of conquest, Native Americans continued to have their own histories, intertwined with but not entirely determined by Europeans and their pathogens.
Since that was written, the evidence has swung even more strongly towards the idea that disease was intimately associated with the close, persistent contacts needed for the "conquest" and missionary activities of colonial powers.
Not to mention, similar epidemics were observed among indigenous southern africans and siberians during their respective colonizations. The Americas were unique in the scale and completeness of their disruption, but not in the mechanisms.
I suppose if you posit an alternate history where the entire rest of humanity completely left the Americas alone after discovering them and quarantined the entire Western Hemisphere until achieving a 20th century understanding of infectious disease and medicine, the demographic collapse would not have happened. The likelihood of this happening seems fairly remote to me.
Otherwise, it seems that any “close, persistent contacts” would inevitably happen and inevitably lead to the same results.
You're arguing from the quote that 'it's other than disease' and then two sentences later that it was, but due to 'persistent contact needed for conquest'.
None of this adds up to a coherent argument.
If Aboriginals weren't dying en mass from disease, then what from? Because we have crude records of interaction. There were very few violent fights between Aboriginals and newcomers in Canada, for example.
And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa?
I'm all for more nuanced history, we're learning stuff every day, but I think a lot of it is also speculative, and ideologically driven.
> And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa?
In Africa, Europeans died off rapidly due to local diseases. Consequently, the early slave trade was centered in the islands off of Africa itself, and mediated by a mulatto class who were less susceptible.
The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents to be taught at religious schools where they'd be beaten if they spoke their indigenous language. The goal was literal cultural genocide and to erase indigenous nations and cultures from the continent.
This was not "inevitable" but instead an active policy goal the government persued.
> The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents....
By the time a Canadian government even existed, most of the damage had already been done.
One might question why this policy was undertaken in Canada but not the African colonies. Perhaps because Canada’s indigenous population was already a minority. But how did that happen?
If Canada's First Nations had been less susceptible to disease things probably would have played out differently though things would have played out quite a bit differently.
Things also would have played out differently if the Canadian government and/or colonial precursors hadn't engaged in active genocide.
Engaging in genocidal polices is of course not inevitable but an active policy choice.
> Engaging in genocidal polices is of course not inevitable but an active policy choice.
It was an active policy choice, and an abominable one at that, but it was not the primary cause of the destruction of indigenous cultures. If it weren’t for the residential schools, Canada’s First Nations would still be a marginalized minority in their own homeland, displaced by English and French-speaking settlers. Without the wholesale depopulation of North America via infectious disease, English and French-speaking settlers would have never been able to come here in great numbers at the time they did in the first place.
Absolutely First Nations were to varying degrees shrunk massively from pre-contact highs, there's no debate, but the loss of cultural memory, art, music, and language really only happened very recently, in the last 100 years, and was directly related to government and religious orders imposing residential schools and literal government bans on cultural activity and organization (eg. Potlatch).
This is not ancient history. The potlatch ban only came into effect in 1885 and was only removed in 1951. Residential schools were only closed in the 1970s.
You can see evidence of this in NW Coast art, where post contact, pre 1900s, there was actually a renaissance in art production and development, as superior iron tooling made it easier than ever to make art, and creation of carvings for the tourist market opened up all sorts of new economic opportunities for First Nations people.
Then in the late 1800s the government imposes literal bans on cultural activity and brings in residential schools. Enormous loss of cultural memory occurs.
By 1969 no one on Haida Gwaii had raised a totem pole in living memory, but Robert Davidson carved one and raised it. He couldn't speak Haida. No one even knew what to do at a totem raising. Luckily there were a handful of old timers that vaguely knew enough to kick start this cultural revitalization.
If indigenous art and culture was already dead due "inevitable" disease, then why would the government feel any need to actively try to ban it, police it and arrest indigenous people for taking part? So you can see here that no, despite population decreases, indigenous customs were quite alive and well. The destruction required a brutal government clamp down to try to snuff it out.
I’m not denying or minimizing these policies. But your argument relies on a survivorship bias. You think, “well, I know that potlatches and totem poles are indigenous cultural practices, and the Canadian government banned those around the turn of the 20th century, so 100% of the lost cultural practices are due to the Canadian government”. But we don’t even know the cultural practices of the majority of indigenous people who were killed by infectious disease between 1492 and maybe 1800 or so. And we barely know how the cultural practices of their survivors were fundamentally altered by those changes.
When you think about potlatches and totem poles, you should consider that these are the culture of a remnant of survivors of a vast cultural collapse that utterly eradicated entire civilizations across two continents. That doesn’t minimize their value; if anything, it makes them more rare and precious, and hence makes it even more fundamentally evil, if such a thing is possible, for the Canadian government to have attempted to destroy these things.
That blending largely occurred in Latin America, but languages rarely survive such things both in the Americas and generally throughout history. Communication is important enough that the language of whichever group is technologically superior becomes the lingua franca, and the other slowly disappears.
That undersells the situation in Latin America, to put it mildly. There are almost two million native speakers of Nahuatl languages in Mexico, six million Maya speakers in Central America, 25% of Peru speaks Quechua at home (around ten million in total throughout the Andes). Guaraní has official status in Paraguay, half of the population is monolingual in it, substantial numbers of people of partial or complete European ancestry speak it every day, we're talking about 6.5 million people.
As a point of comparison, there are 2.9 million registered Native Americans, and 5.2 million people who check that box, sometimes along with others, on the latest census.
I'm not sure what you mean? You named a handful of languages that have survived, most of which are still in decline even if they still have substantial numbers of active speakers. The only one that seems possibly positioned to 'win out' in the long run is Guaraní, and even in Paraguay Spanish is steadily making inroads.
You've basically proved the point of the commenter you are responding to.
By your very own evidence - Spanish and Portuguese utterly dominate Central and South America.
There are 650M people there, if ~10% of the population speaks another language, that helps prove the case of 'language from more advanced languages win'.
Even where there is relative parity, systems definitely favour the language of the more powerful entity.
All over Europe there are 'niche languages' dying out, which is sad, but it's materially the case.
Go to Nice, France, and the street signs are in 'Nicoise' - not French. In Monaco if you listen carefully you can hear 'Monegasque'.
The decline of those languages is hinted at in the fact my spellchecker doesn't even recognize those words, unfortunately.
I'm being downvoted here, I think mainly because frank admission of facts is considered mean. For reference, I'm speaking as a member of a tiny ethnic group that survived well into the 20th century, including a period of strong repression. What we couldn't survive was modernization. The need for work led to embracing the English language as the only way forward, and mass media, mobility, and exogamy have all contributed to extremely rapid cultural disintegration. This is the way the world works.
Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards.
That should be a signal as to how 'far apart' colonialists and aboriginals were with respect to development of cultural institutions.
The writing you see in this post is invented by a Canadian-English Methodist Priest in the mid 10th (Edit: 19th century obviously!) century for the benefit of the aboriginals. The system, in current terms is itself 'firmly colonialist' (I'm sure someone will cynically characterize it as a form of oppression).
That said, it'd be cool to see Cree keyboards.
In fact, making a 'Cree Keyboard' might have been a much more practical use of the authors time, and might have actually more materially affected young people's ability to learn Cree.
Come to think of it, there really should be such keyboards available ...
> Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards.
Mesoamerica had at least one family of complete writing systems (I'll call this Maya, although whether or not they invented it or adapted it from others is debated), and another proto-writing system that may well evolved into a full writing system (the Aztecs, who at the time of contact appear to have been in the early stages of planning a conquest of the Maya). Andean cultures had a maybe-it's-a-writing-system-unlike-any-other, the quipus.
Of course, positing a less domineering conquest, it is very likely that cultures may well have developed their own indigenous writing systems via contact with Europeans--that is precisely what the Cherokee did. I doubt they would have stubbornly refused to pick up any writing systems.
> That should be a signal as to how 'far apart' colonialists and aboriginals were with respect to development of cultural institutions.
Yeah, Tenochtitlan had public zoos and museums, organized anthropology, universal primary education, ethnic quarters, professional sports leagues at a time when all of those concepts would take another few centuries to be 'invented' in Europe.
Oh, wait, were you suggesting that it was the Americas that was culturally backward?
> The writing you see in this post is invented by a Canadian-English Methodist Priest in the mid 10th century for the benefit of the aboriginals. The system, in current terms is itself 'firmly colonialist' (I'm sure someone will cynically characterize it as a form of oppression).
My understanding is that the modern indigenous groups see the use of the syllabics as less oppressive than being forced to use Latin, as the syllabics are designed to more closely match the language than using the Latin script.
Or, more plausibly, these societies without writing systems might have developed their own writing systems eventually.
Your post could be applied to the Vietnamese writing system, for example. Or to the many other languages that have adopted variants of the Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin writing systems.
That they 'would have, maybe in 1000 years developed a writing system' is definitely true, but the fact is at contact they did not, and even after 100's of years of trade and interaction and availability of Western literature - they still did not, and so that they did not is a meaningful measure of cultural evolution.
It's hard to do most advanced things without writing if you only have oral, just like it's hard to do some things without Iron if you only have Bronze.
And FYI, the same thing would apply to any culture that lacks a writing system i.e. 'Vietnam' as you said.
We refer to stages of cultural development i.e. 'Iron/Bronze/Steel' but we may very well use 'Oral/Written/Printing Press/Digital'.
The same limitations apply: if you can't forge things with Iron (like strong chariots/carts & ploughs), there's a variety of advancements you can't make. Likewise, if you don't have reading/writing, you're equally limited.
You can't do mass farming without high quality carts and ploughs, and you can't build schools without reading and writing. Without those things, you can't get very far.
> Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards.
The Maya and Aztec had writing in the form of hieroglypics. The Inca had persistent communication via Quipu's rope knots.
(I learned this from _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ which is a phenomenal book. I haven't done other research, though, so maybe the book isn't a good source.)
Charles Mann's 1492 is a better book than Guns, Germs, and Steel for anything pre-Columbian Americas.
The Mayans had a complete, complex logosyllabic writing system. (I believe the syllabic components are more common than logographic components, but I'm not certain). Individual syllables (or logograms) could be combined into a single glyph block in a variety of ways. This writing system, I believe, is connected to Zapotec and epi-Olmec writing systems, but disentangling who created what and who borrowed from whom in Mesoamerica is challenging.
The Aztecs had what appears to be a proto-writing system, largely capable of only recording proper nouns (predominantly place names); most of the writing would instead be conveyed pictographically. Before the Aztecs, in Classical Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan (which was the major power in the Central Mexico Valley at that time period) appears to have never used any form of writing, despite having conquered Classic Maya city-states which were in full florescence of their writing systems.
Quipus originate at least as early as the Wari culture in the Andes, although (again) people only recognize the final Andean civilization, the Inca. Whether or not they are a writing system is debatable--it's known they encode more than just numeric values (such as place names), but whether they can convey enough information to be considered writing is unknown.
Post-contact, Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language based only on the knowledge of the existence of the Latin alphabet (he couldn't read English or any European language, but he did have access to European-language materials--that's why several Cherokee letterforms look like Latin ones but have completely different meanings). Missionaries in Canada developed a syllabary for several aboriginal languages that remains in use by many Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut speakers.
I assume the person you're responding to is talking more about the aboriginal peoples of the United States.
GG&S is an interesting book, but extremely conjectural and ideological, and not well-sourced. Some of the evidence is distorted. Off the top of my head, he reproduces a table of grain yields, and when tracking down his sources for this, it turns out that he's omitted results that contradict his theory. The reasoning is sometimes shaky or circular: 'Why do we know X wasn't domesticable? Because it wasn't domesticated.' Etc. etc. I don't find his theory holds up particularly well.
