You know where I think the Europeans went wrong when they came here and

[madokie]

connived, stole and killed their way into the territory so as to bring their new 'revised' way of doing things from living to governing here. We, or they should have paid more attention to the Native Americans and learned from them then it would have been a break from what they were running from, rather they brought what they were running from with them. What fucking idiots
jus' sayin'

[Kali]

1. ...

1) THE Europeans? they/we certainly weren't an homogeneous group, just like the aboriginal peoples weren't.

2) they did change the way things were from "back home"

3) The Native Americans weren't all a bunch of peaceful basket weavers either. There was slavery, warfare, ecological destruction and all the things you want to associate exclusively with Europeans.

[vadawg]

3. +1 i doubt everything would be utopia if the europeans had followed the OP's idea..

[villager]

10. there was, however, vastly less slavery, warfare and ecological destruction

...than we got with the Europeans.

As witnessed by the fact those cultures lived in place here for thousands of years...

Since "first contact" with Europeans, it's been overrun and ecologically denuded in about 500...

[Kali]

11. eh, its debatable

who knows what would have happened if somehow the technology had been acquired/developed leaving out the European migration? My objection is he myth of the balanced in Nature, peaceful Indian. Not true - humans just like the rest of us - we are ALL capable of good and evil, creativity and destruction. Love and hatred.

[XemaSab]

23. Not to forget:

We're seeing a landscape that was heavily managed before we ever arrived on the scene.

[Spider Jerusalem]

26. Less slavery and warfare? Not so much in some places, actually

you apparently don't know anything about the Aztecs, for instance.

[Double T]

2. White men (and women) nothing but a whole lot of double trouble.

The white man ended up 'stealing' the native American lands, then 'generously' allowed them to live on little land patches known as reservations. Interesting how some things NEVER change and they actually become much worse.

[TwilightGardener]

8. Well, of course, the native tribes stole land off of each other--lots of

warfare and land-grabs from each other. Most every culture has "stolen" land and jockeyed for a better position, better resources. Europeans were just more successful at it.

[GreenStormCloud]

4. Romanization of stone age cultures. FAIL

The OP is based on the idea that the Natives were blissful, peaceful people who sat around and communed as one with nature and had a nature high all the time.

[msongs]

5. well they had to walk everywhere and had inferior weapons lol nt

[KatyMan]

7. +1 nt

nt

[sufrommich]

9. +2 nt

[Dr. Strange]

17. They did!

They were peaceful and pure until the Europeans showed up. They communed with nature, especially the Tree of Souls. Also, they were blue, and rode on birds.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

21. Pfff, well yeah.

When they weren't busy raping pterodactyls with their ponytails. Fucking heathens.

[slackmaster]

6. I agree. My grandfather was born on the Hopi reservation, to German immigrant parents.

They learned a lot from the Hopi, and vice-versa.

K&R

:kick:

[Kali]

12. Really?

Lived a few summers at Polacca as a kid, myself.

[slackmaster]

13. I visited Oraibi once in my teens. There was one woman there who remembered my family personally.

Elizabeth Q. White. I believe she was in her 80s at the time. I'm 52 now.

[Kali]

14. were they mennonites?

I remember a cool old wooden building that was the mennonite mission.

[slackmaster]

16. Affirmative

My great-grandfather was a missionary.

[Kali]

24. that clicked when you said German

have some familiarity with them in Chihuahua, as well.

[slackmaster]

25. My grandfather was born in Oraibi in 1895. He spoke only German and Hopi for several years.

The family's next move was to an Italian immigrant ghetto in Chicago. Grandpa learned Italian at age 11, but still spoke no English.

He learned English at about age 13. He told me he usually thought in German. When he got frustrated with something, he'd swear in a mixture of German and Hopi.

:D

[ThomWV]

15. Amusing

[Throd]

18. Yes, the USA would be a nation of 300,000,000 noble savages

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

19. Learned what from them?

[Green_Lantern]

20. they could've learned human sacrifice from the Aztecs...

Native tribes had just as much violence as the Europeans.

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

22. Pre-European history was pretty brutal

We have some insight into Native American history just before the Europeans showed up en masse, mostly due to archaeological evidence and trappers disappearing into the unexplored parts of the continent and writing about what went on there. Empire building, slavery, wholesale bloodshed were not unknown by any stretch of the imagination. Nor ecological destruction.

Basically, if they hadn't been limited by their Stone Age technology, they would have really torn up the continent on their own.