I consider the near extermination of the native races in Americas to be one of the biggest tragedies in human history, as it constitutes one of the biggest, if not the biggest, genocides in human history. Is there any way this could be prevented with a POD after the arrival of Christopher Columbus? Is it possible for entire population of the Americas to be ~75% Native American?
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AHC: Native majority Americas after 1492
- Thread starter lerk
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I mean honestly, it seems possible for New Spain/Peru* if you don't have the conquest and mass enslavement coincide with plagues, which is probably easy-have the Spanish get massacred during La Nocha Triste, Atalhualpa doesn't go to Cajamarca in person, Pizarro gets delayed due to shenanigans in Tenochitlan and butterflies so he invades only after the rebuilding post-Inca Civil War, take your pick. Or just have Spain collapse into (handwave) a century of civil war post-1492 at some point. Anything like this probably either just derails Spanish conquest period or slows it and makes it more reliant on indirect concessions and piecemeal co-optation of natives in a way that looks a lot more like British India. Hell, tinker with the Bourbon Reforms and whatever the Portugese do to get more literate administration in non-Spanish languages such that post-independence *Mexico and *South America default to Nahuatl and Quecha/Aymara as the predominant prestige languages and 19th century nationalists lean much more on indigenismo-type stuff in the way that early 20th century Mexico did.
For the future US and Canada**, I think the problem is you really need to prevent the creation of European states east of the Mississippi, on the principle that the 18th and 19th century is just a bad time everywhere for steppe nomadic empires like what you have by the 18th century*** dealing with settled states. What that looks like probably means you have a much slower trickle of Europeans into the continent, such that there's much less pressure to seize and acquire land and more of a tendency of Europeans to form trade colonies and integrate with natives or otherwise be incorporated into native polities. Possibly an alteration in the revolutionary situation of 17th century England means there's less need to export excess people abroad, or France becomes less reliant on extraction of resources from New France. Again, the Core Point is that either you're shifting from a settler colonial model to something that looks a lot more like pure resource extraction via native proxies or just derailing colonialism wholesale by giving native states more time and breathing room to recover demographically and develop the resource base to block European territorial expansion.
*Caveat that these areas are much more heavily indigenous than the mainland US and Canada and prior to 19th century nationalists promoting Spanish were even more pronouncedly indigenous.
**Defined here as CONUS, I think probably the non-California Mexican Cession is a special case and it's notable that this is probably the area of the US with the highest indigenous population, although it's like 10-20%.
***yes I know this really only true of specific areas of the American west and that those areas did have historical agricultural traditions that were disrupted or destroyed by colonization. I think a divergence early enough to avert "it is 1850 and not a fun time to be a Horse Guy whether you're a horse guy on the Amur, Syr Darya, or on the Upper Missouri" would probably mean more of the west is in some kind of agrarian state.
For the future US and Canada**, I think the problem is you really need to prevent the creation of European states east of the Mississippi, on the principle that the 18th and 19th century is just a bad time everywhere for steppe nomadic empires like what you have by the 18th century*** dealing with settled states. What that looks like probably means you have a much slower trickle of Europeans into the continent, such that there's much less pressure to seize and acquire land and more of a tendency of Europeans to form trade colonies and integrate with natives or otherwise be incorporated into native polities. Possibly an alteration in the revolutionary situation of 17th century England means there's less need to export excess people abroad, or France becomes less reliant on extraction of resources from New France. Again, the Core Point is that either you're shifting from a settler colonial model to something that looks a lot more like pure resource extraction via native proxies or just derailing colonialism wholesale by giving native states more time and breathing room to recover demographically and develop the resource base to block European territorial expansion.
*Caveat that these areas are much more heavily indigenous than the mainland US and Canada and prior to 19th century nationalists promoting Spanish were even more pronouncedly indigenous.
**Defined here as CONUS, I think probably the non-California Mexican Cession is a special case and it's notable that this is probably the area of the US with the highest indigenous population, although it's like 10-20%.
***yes I know this really only true of specific areas of the American west and that those areas did have historical agricultural traditions that were disrupted or destroyed by colonization. I think a divergence early enough to avert "it is 1850 and not a fun time to be a Horse Guy whether you're a horse guy on the Amur, Syr Darya, or on the Upper Missouri" would probably mean more of the west is in some kind of agrarian state.
frustrated progressive
SLPing Through the Cracks
Interesting suggestions, seemingly quite possible south of the Rio Grande at least. How prominent were Quechua/Aymara as prestige languages in Spanish Peru OTL? I know Nahuatl actually grew post-conquest as a language of trade and administration within Mexico, so expanding upon that to where it could become the lingua franca of a nationalist project sounds plausible, but did things happen to that extent down south?
Ricardolindo
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Simply because of the diseases and the sparse population of parts of the Americas, I'd say this is Alien Space Bats without a pre-Columbian point of divergence. You could keep a Native American majority in certain regions of the Americas, indeed some small regions still have one, but not in the entire Americas.
Ricardolindo
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As @Indicus said at https://forum.sealionpress.co.uk/index.php?threads/spain-keeps-mexico.5376/post-1136609, before the Quechua and Aymara rebellions of Tupac Amaru II and Tupac Katari respectively in the 1780s, there was a coopted Native American aristocracy in the Vice-Royalty of Peru.
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Well and north of the Rio Grande your main issues are going to be lower population densities/the Europeans showing up during a "deurbanization cycle" for lack of a better word IMO-if you have a situation where European adventurers are running into a surviving Cahokia (or more Mississippian states other than the Natchez are around) I think the early colonization trajectory is very different.
The flip side of this is that sparse population areas often were that way because of disease or being in the Wrong Part of A Climactic Cycle at a point where dispersion or migration was a more attractive survival strategy and that colonization massively exacerbated the impact of disease.* If you can have a situation where colonization is stalled or reverses you can get more time for population immunity to build or where the disease burden isn't exacerbated by Other Shite White People are Doing. Ditto re: urbanization, if you get Europeans showing up at a different time they'll be in contact with a different set of social structures.
*c.f. the worst epidemics in New Spain being i think in the 1560/70s range or at least the 1540s, i.e. quite a long time after the initial contact period but at a point where Spanish colonization/Spanish induced warfare had majorly disrupted existing social structures.
The Planck Multiverse
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Unless you're talking about a POD before Columbus landed in the Americas, this is a subject that only MD and above Doctors or Biology PhDs can answer with some amount of certainty.
However being a non Doctor or a non Biology researcher and hence focusing on the PODs before Columbus, I think the best idea for this is to have a Native American Civilization on the scale of China, in a region around Canada, which gathers capability for seafaring and maintains connections with a Classical Age Empires in the Old World. That choice could be it.
However, I don't know if this would count as a tragedy but even such a Civilization will assimilate the Native Americans living in the other regions, most likely through the use and of force and conquest.
However being a non Doctor or a non Biology researcher and hence focusing on the PODs before Columbus, I think the best idea for this is to have a Native American Civilization on the scale of China, in a region around Canada, which gathers capability for seafaring and maintains connections with a Classical Age Empires in the Old World. That choice could be it.
However, I don't know if this would count as a tragedy but even such a Civilization will assimilate the Native Americans living in the other regions, most likely through the use and of force and conquest.
I think focusing on North America might be a mistake if you don't want to mess with the epidemics.
I believe there were enough touch and go moments in the conquistator conquests to keep some kind of native led Mexican basin polity and Incan empire while shaking them up enough to engineer reform that will let them take the lead on resisting encroachment. The diseases are still going to reduce their population drastically but the population should bounce back in time and the next round of explorers won't find them as weakened. The ones who reform the most quickly could also easily go on an expansionist consolidation spree, denying more room to European encroachment.
So native majority South/Central America seems doable without cancelling out the diseases, if not the most likely outcome (and history often defies expectations that way so that's fine). Now, the question is whether we can engineer a population boom big enough to outweight European settlement in the areas where native civilization didn't retain enough strength to stop it (probably North America and the east coast of South America?).
I believe there were enough touch and go moments in the conquistator conquests to keep some kind of native led Mexican basin polity and Incan empire while shaking them up enough to engineer reform that will let them take the lead on resisting encroachment. The diseases are still going to reduce their population drastically but the population should bounce back in time and the next round of explorers won't find them as weakened. The ones who reform the most quickly could also easily go on an expansionist consolidation spree, denying more room to European encroachment.
So native majority South/Central America seems doable without cancelling out the diseases, if not the most likely outcome (and history often defies expectations that way so that's fine). Now, the question is whether we can engineer a population boom big enough to outweight European settlement in the areas where native civilization didn't retain enough strength to stop it (probably North America and the east coast of South America?).
Well the flip side is that this also is affected-Spanish collapse in the New World makes it much harder for them to try to eke out even nominal control over northern New Mexico and probably means there's less geopolitical incentive for other European powers to try to get colonies in the New World as a competition thing. Although I think messing with epidemics is fine honestly-AIUI a lot of the newer historical work has proposed that the epidemics were *dramatically* exacerbated by the sociopolitical effects of European conquest and military activity (e.g. the encomienda system making enslaved natives much more vulnerable to any kind of serious disease with overwork and hunger). So with weaker Spanish military activity you my still get very bad virgin field epidemics but not apocalyptic ones.
Oh, I meant not messing with the biological side of epidemics. I absolutely agree not losing to invading Europeans will make it much easier to manage said epidemics and it would be a big part of stabilizing those two centers of population and getting them growing again.
I agree, I guess my point is that the biological side is more fungible than people tend to treat it as on here because We Live in A Society With Social Determinants of Health-to use kind of a comparable example, COVID-19 was a virgin field epidemic of sorts (in the sense of being a novel and easily transmissible disease) but we saw how much its health effects varied and were limited by social conditions like poverty, crowding, lack of ability to take time off work etc. Obviously covid isn't cocoliztli in terms of severity but it is I think a good general illustration of how much existing social determinants can make a epidemic or similar crisis "bad but manageable" or "apocalyptic"
e.g. it's pretty easy to imagine a situation where (say) the Spanish never make it past isolated costal trade ports and a few petty kingdoms on the coast and the epidemic diseases that spread propagate much more slowly without an invading army, so everyone getting affected is generally healthier and there isn't a kind of "nobody available to care for people or make sure food gets harvested" social collapse so overall population decline is closer to say 25-40% (bad but Black Death or Justinianic Plague bad, not OTL bad) and not upwards of that. It's also pretty easy to imagine a situation where with smaller incursions that don't get the backing to become serious military expeditions disease overall spreads more slowly with similar results.
Question mark- considering that the Na-Dene peoples' ancestors are now known to have crossed the Bering Strait and begun their colonization of the Americas c.8000BCE (with shared common ancestry with the rulers of the Xiongnu Empire, and the Jie rulers of the later Zhao state), when's the cut-off point?
And if the Na-Dene are considered to be before the arbitrary 'cut-off point', and are categorized as 'Native Americans' in the same manner that all of the peoples on the map above are today, then couldn't we simply make this historical (/pre-historical) migration bigger, and more enduring- enough to paint everything between Alaska, Oasisamerica and coastal California in overlapping swathes to a similar extent as Alaska and the Yukon Territory IOTL, and perhaps to even establish that "Native American Civilization on the scale of China, in a region around Canada, which gathers capability for seafaring and maintains connections with a Classical Age Empires in the Old World" you were talking about (or at least some sort of tribal confederacy/assortment of kingdom states warring for dominion)? Lending them increased genetic diversity, and resistance to introduced diseases, as well as establishing its own indigenous disease centers (in its urban centers), for diseases which non-Americans would themselves have little to no immunity against?
EDIT: Oh, right, POD states this has to be 'after the arrival of Christopher Columbus'. Maybe if A) Columbus' expedition never makes it BACK to Europe, and B), some sort of highly infectious and highly deadly disease spontaneously pops up among the Taino and/or Caribs in the Caribbean, against which the Europeans themselves have little to no immune defences against (given that the latter group practiced cannibalism, perhaps some form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, akin to Kuru in origin and effect, but being equally transmissible between humans as Scrapie is between sheeps and goats, rather than only being transmissible via blood transfusion and ingestion of the bodies of those infected)?
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The Planck Multiverse
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Yes, that could be done. More amount of Genetic diversity could help, however, with a Civilization on the scale of China around Canada and Northern USA of the now, wouldn't count as isolated. They will quickly develop the needed capabilities and stay connected with Old World Asia and the Europe. To an extent that you could later on, start seeing even some European admixture along the Northeast, as you would see Native Canadian admixture in parts of Europe (these empires will keep exchanging people in either peaceful or warlike manner).
I don't know but I will add this because I like the idea of more and more Old Asian phenotypes being alive, so how about add some Neanderthals and the Proto-Ainu to this mix?
The most likely Native American survival would look like this. This China like Empire based in Canada and, the Northern and Mediterranean parts of USA will most likely be fierce to the Native American tribes living on subsistence agriculture, further South, who will be attacked and assimilated, as I said, most likely through the use of force.
This seems extremely inconsistent with climactic and ecological history and historical prehispanic urbanization and agricultural patterns and sounds like a lot of weird phrenological insanity. Maybe it's easier and more plausible for Cortez to just fall off his horse and break his neck and 500 years later idk a vignette about going to Friday prayers in the muslim quarter of Cochiti or the Tattooed Serpent bored out of his skull gossiping at some interminable diplomatic thing for Statholder whatever the 11th or something
The Planck Multiverse
New member
I think a lot of people underestimate the real power of Evolution. In the fairly recent times, Tibetic, Lepcha, Kirati, Monpa, and some other Sino-Tibetan ethnicities (mix of North Asians and an Ancient Himalayish population), evolved capacity to live in very high altitudes just a few thousand years ago (likely was a rapid evolution). Ashkenazi Jews evolved an IQ averaging well over 12-15 points above the average European (around 99-100), in just a few centuries of taking up intellectual jobs. British Indians are showing rapid evolution in height and IQ, in the last few decades averaging around 97-100+, with increased allele frequencies for intelligence, when their counterparts with similarly good access to nutrition average 84-90 (yes, the same Punjabis, Bengalis, Telugus and Gujaratis who form a large section of the British Indian diaspora, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak being one of them).
These are not random or purposeless changes, unlike what many Evolutionary Biologists put it. I and many other that Evolution is something that is happening deep inside the Quantum and the Relativistic (Spacetime) Realm involving Planck Scale and Sub-Planck scale level of Multidimensional Intelligence, which we will discover in the coming decades (more on this in the chat threads) as we improve our hold and control on Energy Generation and efficiency of use (which is Computation).
Coming back. The Ainu, North Asian and the possible ATL segment of Himalayish migrations into Alaska, Pacific Northwest and, other regions of Canada and Northern USA can easily produce an evolved race fit to build large Civilizations as good as China's, even in Alaska and Canada, eventually expanding into Northern USA, and produce the result that I mentioned.
The only recipe is to generate a situation where there is no other alternative, or just fewer options compared to the OTL. And sustain that situation for a period of 3-4 centuries or a little more. And voila. You have a set of populations as I mentioned, who adapt and evolve to survive in the cold tundra and the steppes of the North America, evolve the strength and intelligence needed to carry forward that Civilization. All this can happen even within 2-3 centuries or a little more, as long as the evolutionary pressure exists. Generating that is the core for this. This isn't a pipedream.
These are not random or purposeless changes, unlike what many Evolutionary Biologists put it. I and many other that Evolution is something that is happening deep inside the Quantum and the Relativistic (Spacetime) Realm involving Planck Scale and Sub-Planck scale level of Multidimensional Intelligence, which we will discover in the coming decades (more on this in the chat threads) as we improve our hold and control on Energy Generation and efficiency of use (which is Computation).
Coming back. The Ainu, North Asian and the possible ATL segment of Himalayish migrations into Alaska, Pacific Northwest and, other regions of Canada and Northern USA can easily produce an evolved race fit to build large Civilizations as good as China's, even in Alaska and Canada, eventually expanding into Northern USA, and produce the result that I mentioned.
The only recipe is to generate a situation where there is no other alternative, or just fewer options compared to the OTL. And sustain that situation for a period of 3-4 centuries or a little more. And voila. You have a set of populations as I mentioned, who adapt and evolve to survive in the cold tundra and the steppes of the North America, evolve the strength and intelligence needed to carry forward that Civilization. All this can happen even within 2-3 centuries or a little more, as long as the evolutionary pressure exists. Generating that is the core for this. This isn't a pipedream.
Setting the rhetoric of "an evolved race" aside, it could make for a good TL, but it doesn't quite fit in with the AHC, which was "Native majority Americas after 1492", and asked "Is there any way this (the huge imbalance in the 'Columbian Exchange' of human pathogens) could be prevented with a POD after the arrival of Christopher Columbus?" As such, the only way this could be prevented, IMHO, would be by 'balancing the books', so to speak; with the POD's being mutations of Native American pathogens, which when carried back to the 'Old World', hit it a lot harder than plagues like syphilis did IOTL. At least as much as the First Cholera Pandemic did, maybe even worse than the Black Death.
Course, TTL's world as a whole would have a markedly lower population, mind you. And it'd probably be set back a fair bit. But it'd also cement the reputation of the Americas as a land of plague and disease for prospective colonialists (much like the tropics across Southern America, Africa, the 'East Indies' and the ROTW, as a direct result of cholera and malaria having "gone global"), de-incentivize further colonial efforts across the Atlantic, and keep the Americas themselves 'majority Native', at least to a similar degree as Melanesia.