napoleon IV
Sheer Animal Cunning of the Groundhog
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I love New Age race science. Wait, not love, the opposite of love.
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AHC: Native majority Americas after 1492
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The Planck Multiverse
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You cannot escape reality, in this context. You cannot build an advanced civilization, in absence of Modern and Futuristic Technology (and a set of people evolved enough to do so, sitting behind it and controlling it), in such a cold region, without people adapting and evolving necessary advantageous traits for the survival and prospering, in such locations.
Even if it was Han Chinese or Koreans or Japanese in place of Tibetans on the Tibetan Plateau, they will need to and will inevitably evolve the Natural Selection that selected the Ancient Gene set of the Denisovans, to be more expressive and prevalent among the Tibetans and the surrounding populations. Denisovans died out and were assimilated several hundreds of thousands years ago. Their admixture exists equally in the Han Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, and even a lot other Asian people, too. But in the last 2000 years, after the Tibetans and other high Altitude peoples like Lepcha, Kirati, Sherpa, Gurung, Tamang, etc split off from the Proto-Sinitic people (who became the Han Chinese), this Denisovan gene got selected and spread through these populations rapidly, giving them an edge to survive high altitudes. This is integral for the existence of these populations.
Without evolving to build Civilizations in such cold climates, it isn't possible, especially, living there for a few thousands of years, to have such large populations in such cold areas. That's an impossible task.
No race denialist doctor will tell you to ascend to very high altitudes where Oxygen is scarce, and imitate a native Tibetic, Kirati or a Lepcha person who lives there. That's accepted there because the harm is quick and deadly because one will suffer from High Altitude Pulmonary Edema and land up in an ER under Oxygen masks, pretty quickly. Except the Tibetic and those populations related, mentioned above, others will need to acclamatize and ascend quite slowly, especially going above 4,000 metres (even those populations tend to follow the acclamatization protocols even if they find it very easy to blend into, unlike others). Even then, imitating those natives, who even play sports at that altitude, could be difficult, impossible or dangerous.
So in this case of a North Canadian Civilization on the scale of China, I will wrap up by saying it will only be possible if these Evolutionary changes are evolved in a few centuries time (and it's possible and proven by Science that this can happen), in any Neanderthal, North Asian or Ainu or any other population, be it from Europe, West Asia, Africa, Pacific Islands, etc, migrating there and settling there for a few Centuries. I wrap up by saying this. I think I have clearly made the point that communities tend to be adapted to their environments and will take some time and changes, to adapt in a new environment.
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This is just straight-up race science nonsense and not acceptable here. You clearly aren't going to contribute constructively, and so are banned from the SLP forum.
Not terribly plausible with a POD after 1492, though. That's the main problem, and I'm not sure how to possibly remedy it, short of setting back the Old World, and Colonialists from Europe in particular, by at least a couple of hundred years- buying the Native population of the Americas enough time to recover and rebound from the 'Columbian Super-pandemic' (at least as much as it took Europe & Asia to recover from the Black Death).
What if the problem was approached from the other end? The Alternate Historian recently shared on their FB page a map that depicts an alternate Columbian exchange that goes horribly wrong for the Old World, with catastrophic population collapses across vast swathes of Eurasia and Africa. In such a TL it would be a couple of centuries until the Old World has enough demographic surplus to send settlers to the new one.
(Credit to AP246 on DeviantArt)
(Credit to AP246 on DeviantArt)
JesterBL
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What if the problem was approached from the other end? The Alternate Historian recently shared on their FB page a map that depicts an alternate Columbian exchange that goes horribly wrong for the Old World, with catastrophic population collapses across vast swathes of Eurasia and Africa. In such a TL it would be a couple of centuries until the Old World has enough demographic surplus to send settlers to the new one.
(Credit to AP246 on DeviantArt)
Requires a POD well before 1492, but I honestly think a biological POD of some kind is honestly your best chance. There wasn't one single epidemic which burned out the North American continent- it was a continuous cycle played out across centuries and massive distances, and continued to be played out into the 20th century.
One of the more interesting vectors of any such disease is actually sea lions and other marine mammals- apparently they may have actually introduced Tb to the American continent before Columbus, not sure how well they would work for some alternate disease.
Harking back to what I suggested the other day...
Regarding the tb suggestion, wasn't the disease vector supposed to have been squirrels in North America? No, wait, sorry, that was typhus. But that could still mutate into a pretty deadly and infectious pathogen in an ATL. Not to mention some sort of human-transmissible variant of squirrel-pox (which, yes, is actually a thing IRL)...
yea, the problem with this is the flip side of why I'm reluctant to chalk everything in the Americas up to disease-you don't have the same kind of societal turmoil and collapse from the whole "Being invaded and/or outbreak of general regional war"* thing you did in the Americas that exacerbated the cost of disease massively.
*The line between these being thin in the case of the Spanish conquest of Mexico given how much it relied on recruiting indigenous states with an axe to grind against the Aztecs and later recruiting *other* indigenous mercenaries to expand into OTL New Mexico and Texas. Dunno about the case in Brazil and the Andes.
*The line between these being thin in the case of the Spanish conquest of Mexico given how much it relied on recruiting indigenous states with an axe to grind against the Aztecs and later recruiting *other* indigenous mercenaries to expand into OTL New Mexico and Texas. Dunno about the case in Brazil and the Andes.
I wonder- could one conceivably achieve this by simply inducing greater "levels of societal collapse and turmoil from the whole being invaded and/or outbreak of general regional war" over in Europe itself, stymieing any interest in faraway colonial endeavors?
JesterBL
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That sort of follows in the Valley of Mexico and the Andes, but it doesn't really help when looking at the Great Plains or the Old Midwest or the Pacific Northwest or the first major die off in the Southeast where disease still wiped entire societies out even without any major European participation.
JesterBL
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Social determinants of health doesn't hugely help as a concept when none of the parties involved, indigenous or non, have anything resembling a modern understanding of disease or any effective prevention or treatment measures.
AIUI a lot of more recent work actually has pushed back on "no major European participation" in the Southeast at least, because while there was less direct European seizure or rule in the inland Southeast there *was* a major slave trade to Europeans that created a lot of the same social effects. See for example https://www.amazon.com/Epidemics-En...dcf5ebe2e7fafb508a24801631afa0&language=en_US, which discusses how the major epidemics happened well after any sort of initial European contact. In general, it's pretty telling that (for instance) Mandans and other great plains peoples were devastated by smallpox and measles epidemics in the 19th century at more or less the point of heavy American colonial involvement but had been in contact with Europeans and European-connected natives for centuries.
JesterBL
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The Mandans had experienced a devastating smallpox epidemic in the 1780s (following smallpox epidemics in Northern Mexico and the Southwest that were noted for being deadly to both Europeans and Natives) a full 20 years before even the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The later 1837 epidemic also played its part and Americans certainly played their part there (although there were actually variolation efforts by Americans and by the Hudson Bay Company in the interim, complicating the argument somewhat) but by the time of any considerable American presence in the West the Mandan had been laid low by an earlier pandemic.
As to the slave raids in the Southeast- if they had that outsized of an impact then we are either right on the money for the impact of disease or we need to drastically reduce our understanding of the size of pre-Columbian societies in the Southeast, which is to me contrary to the archaeological evidence and to contemporary accounts. There's nothing like the mass European and native alliance waging war in the Valley of Mexico to explain such a collapse in the Southeast if we are to accept that it caused a similar such collapse.
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JesterBL
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I went ahead and just spun up some back of the envelope numbers.
For N. America (US+Canada) you have by the most expansive definition from Census data possible (including those who identify as two or more races from US data and combining First Nations, Metis and Inuit in Canada), a Native American/First Nations/Indigenous N. American population of ~11.295 million, in a combined population of 364.6 million, roughly 3.1%.
It doesn't get much better when you add Mexico- depending on the count either the second or third most indigenous country (behind Peru or Bolivia) in the New World. They don't actually gather racial categories, so I went for the estimate offered by an Indigenous Mexican advocacy group of ~25 million Indigenous Mexicans or 19.41%. That gets you 36.31 million in a combined population of 493.5 million, or about 7.36%.
It is a massive change to get to 75%. If we are going ex-Mexico you would need a 25× population increase and including Mexico you would need a 10× population increase in a population which is already one of the most "successful" Indigenous populations in the Western Hemisphere (and home to multiple cradles of civilization in the New World, to boot). That's why I think it is really something that can't be tackled by smaller What-Ifs- the Columbian Exchange was a massive event that occurred and reoccurred and had deadly consequences across vast geographical distances and across centuries. It isn't something where you can tweak some small part of history- you need to change millenia of disease evolution in the Old World or the New World to change it. By 1492 the die is cast. Change the material realities of the New World at the point of contact so that they have a better chance against European disease or give the Europeans something worse (which given what we know of the genesis of disease, would likely require a change in material realities before contact).
(It's interesting too in the Canadian/US example because there has actually been an increase in both Indigenous self-identification and in birth rates, with some places and peoples actually hitting their highest population levels since being decimated by epidemics. Less clear in Mexico where the Indigenous share of the population has actually been declining even as self-identification has increased. Also interesting because if you pull earlier Mexico is even smaller by comparison so the numbers are likely worse).
For N. America (US+Canada) you have by the most expansive definition from Census data possible (including those who identify as two or more races from US data and combining First Nations, Metis and Inuit in Canada), a Native American/First Nations/Indigenous N. American population of ~11.295 million, in a combined population of 364.6 million, roughly 3.1%.
It doesn't get much better when you add Mexico- depending on the count either the second or third most indigenous country (behind Peru or Bolivia) in the New World. They don't actually gather racial categories, so I went for the estimate offered by an Indigenous Mexican advocacy group of ~25 million Indigenous Mexicans or 19.41%. That gets you 36.31 million in a combined population of 493.5 million, or about 7.36%.
It is a massive change to get to 75%. If we are going ex-Mexico you would need a 25× population increase and including Mexico you would need a 10× population increase in a population which is already one of the most "successful" Indigenous populations in the Western Hemisphere (and home to multiple cradles of civilization in the New World, to boot). That's why I think it is really something that can't be tackled by smaller What-Ifs- the Columbian Exchange was a massive event that occurred and reoccurred and had deadly consequences across vast geographical distances and across centuries. It isn't something where you can tweak some small part of history- you need to change millenia of disease evolution in the Old World or the New World to change it. By 1492 the die is cast. Change the material realities of the New World at the point of contact so that they have a better chance against European disease or give the Europeans something worse (which given what we know of the genesis of disease, would likely require a change in material realities before contact).
(It's interesting too in the Canadian/US example because there has actually been an increase in both Indigenous self-identification and in birth rates, with some places and peoples actually hitting their highest population levels since being decimated by epidemics. Less clear in Mexico where the Indigenous share of the population has actually been declining even as self-identification has increased. Also interesting because if you pull earlier Mexico is even smaller by comparison so the numbers are likely worse).
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Yea, I mean practically speaking less indigenous genocide probably also means fewer europeans just because the americas are less appealing as a dumping ground for excess population/Free Real Estate. I guess my frustration is that a lot of popular narratives really spin up the effect of disease to like ominicidal bioweapon levels and treat it as something that would have been permanently omnicidal *even with absolutely nothing else Europeans did"
Is the same true of the Americas as a whole, though? Adding South America and the Caribbean? And is it entirely honest, when this explicitly excludes any and all mixed-race people, in accordance with the USA's traditional 'one-drop rule'? If one counts the Métis people of Canada, for instance, then by the same standard, all of the mixed race Mestizos and Zambos across Hispanic America (along with the Caboclos and Cafuzos in Brazil), could and should also be categorized as 'Native American' by the same token. But none of these groups are, specifically BECAUSE of their larger populations (which, in most Latin-American countries, constitute either outright majorities, pluralities, or at the least large minorities), and their identification, both by themselves and by their historical rulers, as subsets of the European-derived Hispanic or Brazilian (or African-derived 'Afro-Hispanic' or 'Afro-Brazilian') peoplehoods in their culture and ethnicity.
As such, probably the easiest way to do this would be to simply have the Mestizos, Zambos, Caboclos and Cafuzos all identify/be classified as 'Native American' (in a manner akin to the definition of a Métis, in law under the Métis Settlements Act (MSA), as "a person of Aboriginal ancestry who identifies with Métis history and culture"). Especially if one looks at the demography of the 'pure/undiluted' Native American population, in the context of the far, far higher 'part-indigenous' population of the Americas. Looking at the Canadian/US examples, there's been an marked increase in indigenous self-identification in the past few years precisely for this reason- because of the emphasis on self-identification, whereas previously it would've been the case that the state would simply decide for them- "Oh, you're not on a native reservation, and we're a European nation, so you're European!"
And the same goes for Bolivia, where 62% of residents over the age of 15 identified as belonging to an Indigenous people, and being 'Native American', when in actuality, both if one went by the 'one-drop rule' and if one included 'part-indigenous' people, Bolivia'd only be the 5th most Native American nation in the Americas, and 3rd in South America (behind Ecuador and Peru by the first criteria, and behind both Ecuador and Paraguay by the second- with Paraguay's population being 96.7% Native or part-Native American, but only 1.7% deemed to be fully 'Native American', since 'Indigenous' is reserved by them exclusively for people who have maintained a separate Indigenous ethnic and cultural identity, language, tribal affiliation, community engagement, etc, and thus explicitly excludes anyone with access to 'Euramerican institutions', such as banks and schools). And looking at how Paraguay achieved this, couldn't a different approach be to simply have Francia's policy be implemented on a larger scale, by more nations upon declaring independence from their European colonial rulers (which don't subsequently have 75-90% of their male population wiped out, as Paraguay's was in the War of the Triple Alliance)?
Or, given that IOTL, in the mid to late 17th century, local authorities across Spanish America requested, and were granted, royal provisos to categorize their mixed-race descendants as legitimate American-born Spaniards- with succeeding generations, also classified as Spaniards, being granted the same privileges as European-born Spaniards, and thus forming a ruling mixed-race, non-colonial elite- what if they weren't granted these royal provisos? And if instead, only 'pure' European-born Spaniards were granted these ruling privileges? Could we see this POD entrenching the perceptions and categorizations of the Mestizos and such-like as explicitly non-European Native Americans? And see OTL's Latin Americans' gaining their independence by rebelling and overthrowing the colonial European-born elites, and thus consolidating their identification (both by themselves and the colonial Europeans) as Native American, non-European ‘Mestizo Nations’, in a manner akin to Haiti's identification as an 'African Nation'?
JesterBL
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So it was an entirely back of the envelope number but I used the US numbers for anyone claiming Native American as part of their racial identity even if selecting 2 or more racial identities, so mixed race individuals were absolutely included (personally I think that likely overinflates the numbers because of how many people falsely, well intentioned or not, claim native ancestry*). I only looked at North America because that was what the OP was looking at. South America and Central America are definitely easier lifts.
*my own extended family claims Cherokee ancestry when it actually appears from documentary evidence and genetic evidence that our supposed Cherokee ancestor was a Sephardic Jew who passed as an Indian/Native American because it had more social capital in frontier Kentucky than being swarthy and indeterminate
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Yea, a lot of this boils down to how the US went much more racial and one-drop in how settler governments classified people as "native", either because that's the mental map they had or just intentionally trying to paper genocide natives.* Anyhow, I think the better way to do this is to shoot for a TL where 75% of the population of North America would 1) identify as native and 2) have a specific affiliation to a specific nation.
*See: Walter Plecker in VA
*See: Walter Plecker in VA
JesterBL
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My understanding is that genetic testing doesn't seem to move the numbers much in the United States. Cornell IIRC did a genetic study and it came out to really only around 5% of their studied population having identifiable native ancestry (1/32) but if you have seen higher numbers, I would be interested to know.