Debunking Native American Fairy Tales

[BeyondKnowledge]

There were multiple removals, and people didn't want to leave their homes.  (Also, the "bounty" works out to a little less than $1.00 per person.)  Several groups had to be rescued -- one entire group was lost when the "guide" led them into the swamps and everyone died.

Walsh glosses over all of that, making it sound like it was just a vacation and not that they were selling already owned land where generations had lived and farmed and worked -- declaring eminent domain and taking grandparents and parents and kids away from their own land (Matt pretends that they didn't have registered deeds or treaties assigning them these lands) to a place that frankly was fairly barren and completely unlike their own home.

It'd be like yanking your parents and grandparents (if they're alive) from wherever they're living and sending them off to walk to Central Mexico to build (by themselves) their houses and new farms.  Oh...and someone will give them a dollar to start rebuilding with.

My grandfather on my father's side had that happen. His home town is now in a lake in Tennessee. The government still does that with imminent domain.

[Byrd]

My grandfather on my father's side had that happen. His home town is now in a lake in Tennessee. The government still does that with imminent domain.

Yep.  But I bet he and his family didn't have to walk to a new designated reservation and carry all their belongings with them (or take all they could carry and leave others behind)... in winter.

[BeyondKnowledge]

I don't know about in winter but he did say they loaded up everything in a horse drawn wagon and left while they were building the dam.

[Byrd]

No, those people died out.

Most of them, that is, leaving the place empty and nearly undefended for probably quite a few generations. There was at least a risk the place would have started to fill up with non-state actors or even pirates and escaped deck hands and other desperadoes. There is some evidence that it was starting to happen.

Settlers were moving into the area, but the tribes were still there.  It wasn't "empty", as the numerous wars and skirmishes between the British, French, and Native Americans shows.  We do have evidence of settler incursion.  There is no evidence that some (or any) of them were pirates.
 

This 400 Year Old Cold Case Mystery Solved

Not sure how this is supposed to relate, since it is about the "Croatan" mystery and Europeans were involved.  

Do you not get it?  The only question is who would have taken the Americas if not Europe.  The Ottomans, the Mughals, the Ming, or non-state actors without the power or will to prevent the place from becoming a haven for criminals and pirates.  The people you claim lived in "big cities like Cahokia with its farms and roads" were mostly dead.  

So...being from a non-European culture makes your civilization automatically full of criminals and pirates and the only civilization without pirates and criminals is the European civilization?

I'm finding that hard to believe.

Also, I am not sure what's so "horrifying/alarming" about non-Europeans conquering the Americas.  One master is just as evil as another one.  And such a change doesn't automatically mean that the Americas would be living under communism or "sharia law" because once you introduce a new variable into history, EVERYTHING changes.

As you can see from the map in this link, the US was completely settled by the 1500s.  They had different ways of living, but these lands were their territories (this map has the correct pronunciations; not the Anglicized ones.) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/anal...ze-history

I'm quite sure the Barbary pirates weren't sailing across the Atlantic to sell slaves.  They sold them in Europe (which was close and didn't require special ships to be outfitted for human cargo) and in many cases they ransomed them.  They didn't have to manage 80 reluctant people at a time, and with no 3 month journey across an ocean, they could quickly sell the goods and go back to pirating.

The math didn't add up.  The transatlantic slave trade existed because they could bring Africans to the Americas and then with the money that they got from the slaves, bring corn and other goods from the US that they could sell in Europe, buy more goods to take to Africa, and buy slaves there before going across again.  They made money at each stop.

Before the US broke from Britain, the British kept the Barbary pirates in check.  After the US broke from Britain, the US government made a treaty with the Sultan of Morocco and basically paid them to leave the Americas alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_co..._centuries

Why steal, when you could make a treaty (at no risk to yourself or anyone else) and have the other side just throw money at you... as long as you didn't attack their ships.  That's basically "money for doing nothing."

Also, Barbary ships were not suitable for ocean voyages -- they used galiots (fast attack ships) which had both sails and oars and didn't have much of a hold for people or treasure.  By the time you added rations and gear for 50-150 men (the size of their crew), there was not much left for hauling anything with bulk... including humans:  https://warhistory.org/article/piracy-ga...ling-ships  

Slave ships were large and slow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_ship  Really large -- here's the slaver ship Parr, which had a crew of 100 and carried 700 slaves and was 120 feet long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parr_(1797_ship)

Barbary pirates weren't interested in that kind of expense and danger and long wait for profits.

[Solvedit]

Settlers were moving into the area, but the tribes were still there.  It wasn't "empty", as the numerous wars and skirmishes between the British, French, and Native Americans shows.  

You might be thinking of 200 years after 1492. 

Plus, even the oldest paintings and woodcuts don't seem to show natives with Siberian features like the ones from the Northwest.  The "Native Americans" you mention could in part be old world newcomers who had already partially replaced the natives and adopted much of their culture.  With enough research, they could probably find when the non-native DNA entered the native genome.  After all, MTG looks like Qadaffi and Colin Kaepernick looks like Imane Khelif.  Maybe the descendants of European or North African sailors drifted back into Colonial or American society when it suited them. 

Not sure how this is supposed to relate, since it is about the "Croatan" mystery and Europeans were involved.  

No, nobody knows who left the hammer scale.  It is near the Roanoke colony but not necessarily connected.  It was a native American site. 

Plus, while the Roanoke colony had a blacksmith, where did they get thousands of pounds of iron in order to produce hundreds of pounds of hammer scale as a byproduct?   Could they have generated hundreds of pounds of hammer scale by repairing the few metal goods which the colonists had?

How long would it have taken Roanoke's one blacksmith to produce hundreds of pounds of sparks, had he been captured by the natives of "Croatoan" or Hatteras Island?

So...being from a non-European culture makes your civilization automatically full of criminals and pirates and the only civilization without pirates and criminals is the European civilization?

I'm finding that hard to believe.

Where does it say "non-European non-state actors?"

How do you get that from "non-state actors without the power or will to prevent the place from becoming a haven for criminals and pirates.????" Please explain. The Americas could definitely have filled up with untaxable foraging squatters with no intention or ability to police the place, even if they came from Europe. And who said the pirates or criminals the non-state actors would have failed to keep out had to be non-European?

Also, I am not sure what's so "horrifying/alarming" about non-Europeans conquering the Americas. 

The Ottomans were definitely in the process of invading Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. What if they had used the resources of the new world to buy better weapons?

And what would it have saved the natives from if they had been subjugated by some other empire?

As you can see from the map in this link, the US was completely settled by the 1500s.  They had different ways of living, but these lands were their territories (this map has the correct pronunciations; not the Anglicized ones.) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/anal...ze-history

And, in the early 1500s, they didn't have the numbers to resist being conquered by the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Ming, or various (not necessarily non-European) non-state actors.

I'm quite sure the Barbary pirates weren't sailing across the Atlantic to sell slaves.  They sold them in Europe (which was close and didn't require special ships to be outfitted for human cargo) and in many cases they ransomed them.  They didn't have to manage 80 reluctant people at a time, and with no 3 month journey across an ocean, they could quickly sell the goods and go back to pirating.

Would you rather negotiate with a European for gold or with someone who didn't know what it could buy in the old world?

Plus, there's the possibility of outright plunder by the Ottoman navy. Perhaps the Spanish discovered them sailing west and competed with them to plunder the natives to fund the Reconquista, then manipulated or paid off Columbus into "discovering" the place when they were ready to unveil and colonize it, at which point it would have been impossible to hide their discovery of the new world.

The math didn't add up.  The transatlantic slave trade existed because they could bring Africans to the Americas and then with the money that they got from the slaves, bring corn and other goods from the US that they could sell in Europe, buy more goods to take to Africa, and buy slaves there before going across again.  They made money at each stop.

The slaves from the transatlantic trade were used for labor. My hypothesis is that the Ottomans or their Barbary vassals sent slaves which could teach a culture old world knowledge. Before you say "why didn't they become just as advanced as the old world," consider that the Ottomans probably would have carefully controlled how much knowledge they were selling and probably ensured the slaves were sterile so the natives would need a steady supply. The overall point which you are sure to ignore is that they would have gotten more money due to being able to name their price and due to the higher value of the few slaves they would have had to bring because they were essentially selling education, not labor.

Before the US broke from Britain, the British kept the Barbary pirates in check.  After the US broke from Britain, the US government made a treaty with the Sultan of Morocco and basically paid them to leave the Americas alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_co..._centuries

You are conflating my point about the time period around and possibly even before 1492 with the 18th and 19th centuries.

Why steal, when you could make a treaty (at no risk to yourself or anyone else) and have the other side just throw money at you... as long as you didn't attack their ships.  That's basically "money for doing nothing."

That's relevant to later centuries. If the Ottomans or pirates had discovered two continents where many of the natives didn't gather gold and the rest didn't know old world exchange rates, and had less advanced war waging capabilities to boot, they would have found a way to exploit it.

Also, Barbary ships were not suitable for ocean voyages -- they used galiots (fast attack ships) which had both sails and oars and didn't have much of a hold for people or treasure.  By the time you added rations and gear for 50-150 men (the size of their crew), there was not much left for hauling anything with bulk... including humans:  https://warhistory.org/article/piracy-ga...ling-ships  

Slave ships were large and slow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_ship  Really large -- here's the slaver ship Parr, which had a crew of 100 and carried 700 slaves and was 120 feet long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parr_(1797_ship)

You play the race card then blithely assume the Ottomans or their Barbary vassals had so little imagination that they couldn't have used different ships suitable for what they were trying to do.

Barbary pirates weren't interested in that kind of expense and danger and long wait for profits.

Of course they weren't and I didn't say they were. They may have brought a few high-value slaves educated in administration or some other skill the natives would pay for. 

Please bear in mind that no part of my hypothesis requires the Barbary pirates or the Ottomans to have used an exact copy (or presagement) of the later transatlantic trade.

[SteamyAmerican]

Not sure if it’s been “debunked” but I wanna know what he says about the 13 months of Northern Natives American calendars being represented by animals.

Specifically since it sometimes incorporates Bigfoot alongside beaver, deer, eagle, etc.

Plain as day.

Also am a bit curious why he chose to hone in on the population as opposed to other native cultures and/or fairy tales in general.

[rickymouse]

I learned a lot about Native American history, and some of what the guy in the video said is true, but he is not telling the whole story about things, and is more talking about their dealings with the government but not telling about what some of the settlers did to stir up the native Americans and triggered them to fight the people coming in and taking over.  The law often took the word of the white people over the word of the natives, because those white people had lots of input into the local towns and cities in areas.

Yes, the native tribes did fight each other, and when someone did something against the tribe, they banished those Indians, who then built their own tribes then attacked the tribes they came from.  They did not kill the disruptive people in their tribes, and then those people gained in numbers and attacked their old tribes and took the women.  It is like leaving all the prisoners out of prison and they go after those that put them there.

So, their legal system was flawed, just likee the way we are going these days.

And I bet the people in the tribes that got all the money for that land, did not use all of it to take care of their tribe members to start over...seems that they had a problem with people up high taking the cream off the top too.  

I have known a lot of native Americans over the years, and have learned both the good and bad that happened back then.  But it seems like the liberal activists made it worse....they were not even Native Americans and stirred up sentiment from many people against the native Americans by protesting and trying to get them more than agreed on. 

I read lots of articles written by one of the biggest surveyers in this country long ago, can't remember his name off hand anymore.  He said most of the tribes were very friendly, but some were very dangerous and full of hate from being badgered by some bad greedy settlers.  It might have been the Lewis and Clark stuff that talked about this, but I am lousy at remembering who wrote what.

There is a big difference between people of this country, there are good people and bad people, does anyone expect that is not a human trait?

I watched part of his video, and sure there is some truth there, but because he set the parameters of the video to show one side, he is not looking at the other side.  Everyone in this country has equal rights, but that does not mean that is happening, I know lots of people who believe they have more rights than others, and it seems that over the last fifteen years or so it is getting much worse.  When the schools started trying to get rid of the bullies, which there were not many of, they created bullies out of most of the students who are abusing the new rights they were given.  Kids cannot say anything about others without someone saying they are racist, sexist, ora pile of other disphoria issues.  They are calling kids or people trying to advise them to act appropriatly as rude and mean, saying they are causing them stress that makes them have problems.  Constructive criticism is not rude, it is the best way to teach people to see their own faults and fix them...but they are calling constructive criticism bad.  When the people at the school scold them for doing something wrong they call those people bad, that their behavior is inappropriate for punnishing them.  It is not all the kids that are doing this, but there are lots of them doing this.  Parents seem to be lost now, they are afraid of their kids telling someone they are being mentally abused, the kids are gaining too much power at a young age.  I may be seventy, but I hear this from others who have grandkids in school, and sometimes the parents of these kids are afraid of punishing their kids or even taking away their priviledges because they are cautious of protective services being notified if the kid says they were not allowed to do things because they were being punished for doing something other kids do.

So, I have strayed away from Native Americans, but I needed examples of how things do wrong and it also did happen with native Americans as I noted about banishing disruptive indians and later they came back at them...which possibly can happen in this society we created now.

Just my opinion, I do not remember the names of all the native Americans I have known over the years, but do remember, back in the eighties, if you were not a native, don't go into Georges bar in L'anse, I learned that from going into a bar that Indians went to, in fact, back then they all called themselves Indians or by their tribe's name...not Native Americans.  I still have maybe a dozen friends that are Natives, but rarely see them anymore, don't live close anymore, most are forty to a hundred miles away now that I moved to this area.

[Byrd]

Not sure if it’s been “debunked” but I wanna know what he says about the 13 months of Northern Natives American calendars being represented by animals.

Specifically since it sometimes incorporates Bigfoot alongside beaver, deer, eagle, etc.

Plain as day.

Also am a bit curious why he chose to hone in on the population as opposed to other native cultures and/or fairy tales in general.

Not accurate that the moons were represented by animals.  

Many times the name of the Moon references climate or resources.  One group of Ojibwe, for example, calls February "Naabni-giizis" (Crust-on-the-snow Moon).  No tribe has ever named a month for bigfoot or anything like bigfoot.  Bigfoot is not really a figure that appears in most Native American lore.

[Byrd]

You might be thinking of 200 years after 1492. 

It's sometimes hard to answer you since your sources lump a lot of history together, as though it all happened at once.
 

Plus, even the oldest paintings and woodcuts don't seem to show natives with Siberian features like the ones from the Northwest.  The "Native Americans" you mention could in part be old world newcomers who had already partially replaced the natives and adopted much of their culture.  With enough research, they could probably find when the non-native DNA entered the native genome.  After all, MTG looks like Qadaffi and Colin Kaepernick looks like Imane Khelif.  Maybe the descendants of European or North African sailors drifted back into Colonial or American society when it suited them. 

Paintings and woodcuts were done by people who had never seen any Native American.  They're not photographs.  And yes, DNA does show that the peopling of America came from Siberia and (in a very small part) from northern people like the Lapps.  Somebody "looking like" someone else isn't anything to base an idea on.  If you lighten the skin of someone from India (by quite a bit) and compare them to a photo of me, we "kind of" look like each other (in spite of the fact that DNA shows I'm a Germanic-British mutt.

No, nobody knows who left the hammer scale.  It is near the Roanoke colony but not necessarily connected.  It was a native American site. 
 

That doesn't mean it was only a Native American site or even the result of one blacksmith.  There were no fences or barriers saying "Indigenous People Only!  No dumping!"   When we do digs, we are always aware that sites tend to be layers of multiple cultures.  It's not that unusual to find something modern mixed in with ancient trash.

 

 The Americas could definitely have filled up with untaxable foraging squatters with no intention or ability to police the place, even if they came from Europe. And who said the pirates or criminals the non-state actors would have failed to keep out had to be non-European?

"filled up with untaxable foraging squatters"?  Nope.

In order to get to the Americas, you had to buy passage or were sent under some sort of bondage contract (slave or indentured servant.) 

One of the big flaws in the idea in the video is that the Americas were basically uninhabited -- it's not true.  The entire country was filled with many different tribes (the "Five Hundred Nations") who claimed land areas.  They didn't use fences but they did have treaties and agreements with other tribes about hunting grounds, fishing grounds, agriculture and gathering grounds, etc.

If you drive around in West Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico/Arizona, you can drive for more than 50 miles or so and not see anything but scrub brush and landscape.  This doesn't mean this part of the US is uninhabited.  All the land in the US is currently owned by someone (or the government)... and the same was true back before the Europeans showed up.  What the Native Americans did NOT have was European lawyers and printing presses and written documents (they did have some types of documents and boundary markers, however.)
 

The Ottomans were definitely in the process of invading Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. What if they had used the resources of the new world to buy better weapons?
 

Why would they do that, when they could get the gold more quickly by simply raiding in Europe?  No long and risky sea voyages, and they simply took the better weapons that they found when they raided European towns and cities.

Plus, there's the possibility of outright plunder by the Ottoman navy. Perhaps the Spanish discovered them sailing west and competed with them to plunder the natives to fund the Reconquista, then manipulated or paid off Columbus into "discovering" the place when they were ready to unveil and colonize it, at which point it would have been impossible to hide their discovery of the new world.
 

Columbus actually wasn't the first European to discover America (that would be Lief Erikson) -- and what he discovered was the Caribbean (Bahamas and Cuba); not North America.

John Cabot's the one who discovered the continent of North America on June 24, 1497, sailing under the commission of Henry VII of England.

My hypothesis is that the Ottomans or their Barbary vassals sent slaves which could teach a culture old world knowledge. Before you say "why didn't they become just as advanced as the old world," consider that the Ottomans probably would have carefully controlled how much knowledge they were selling and probably ensured the slaves were sterile so the natives would need a steady supply. The overall point which you are sure to ignore is that they would have gotten more money due to being able to name their price and due to the higher value of the few slaves they would have had to bring because they were essentially selling education, not labor.

When would this have been?

And who were they going to sell these slaves to?   Native Americans in the area of the United States didn't have or collect gold.  They did in Central/South America (some areas) but it wasn't of much use to the Algonquins, Lumbee, Choctaws, etc. 

If you do a search to see where gold is found in the US (the geology of where gold is found), you will see that very little of it comes from the eastern US (and what's there is in quartz veins and not as easily collected).  Copper was more valuable.

Nevada, Alaska, and California are the main places where gold is found. 

Without European technology and materials, what good would an "educated slave" have been -- someone who couldn't speak the local language, who didn't eat local foods, who couldn't get access to tools and raw materials that are available in Europe/Africa?
 

You play the race card then blithely assume the Ottomans or their Barbary vassals had so little imagination that they couldn't have used different ships suitable for what they were trying to do.

 Not the race card... the historical records of what types of ships they owned and sailed.   Fighting ships are different than cargo ships, just as jet fighters are very different from passenger planes and both of those are different than cargo planes.

[Solvedit]

It's sometimes hard to answer you since your sources lump a lot of history together, as though it all happened at once.

No, you seem to want to push the false narrative that large, well-organized tribes were replaced by carefully managed European settlement. You seem to want to gloss over the period after epidemics wiped them almost out and the Americas could have started to fill up with squatters or escaped pirate deck hands or other non-state actors. Tell me, can you sense deep down inside that you would have been persecuted where you live if you had not adopted this false narrative?

Paintings and woodcuts were done by people who had never seen any Native American.  They're not photographs.  And yes, DNA does show that the peopling of America came from Siberia and (in a very small part) from northern people like the Lapps. 

The original folk surely came from Siberia across the land bridge but they could have absorbed or even been conquered by escaped pirate crewmen or desperate folk from the old world who got shipped across any way they could so they could get a piece of the new world. They may have heard that illness had emptied the place.  They may have drifted back into the fringes of American society when the actual natives got deported to Oklahoma.

Can you cite a study which is thorough enough to tell when old world DNA entered the genome? Of course there's Siberian DNA but when did Europeans enter the picture?

There were surely painters whose job it was to accurately record plants, animals, and indigenous people.

That doesn't mean it was only a Native American site or even the result of one blacksmith. 

That's exactly what I'm saying. It could have been pirates who had joined the natives, or the natives were 75% Barbary or Europe, or desperate people or convicts had hired a ship to take them across. I suspect convicts, beggars, or escaped galley slaves would not have minded going native.  
There must have been quite a few of them because where did they get thousands of pounds of iron with which to make hundreds of pounds of sparks?  

"filled up with untaxable foraging squatters"?  Nope.

In order to get to the Americas, you had to buy passage...

Squatters or vagrants could buy passage, perhaps town councils even bought it for them.

...or were sent under some sort of bondage contract (slave or indentured servant.) 

Not in 1500 when the epidemics had emptied the place. Europe had to work and fight for that state of affairs in order to prevent the place from being overrun.

Again, you seem determined to gloss over the period when the Americas had nearly emptied out because of epidemics and no one was in charge.

One of the big flaws in the idea in the video is that the Americas were basically uninhabited -- it's not true.  The entire country was filled with many different tribes (the "Five Hundred Nations") who claimed land areas.  They didn't use fences but they did have treaties and agreements with other tribes about hunting grounds, fishing grounds, agriculture and gathering grounds, etc.

If you drive around in West Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico/Arizona, you can drive for more than 50 miles or so and not see anything but scrub brush and landscape.  This doesn't mean this part of the US is uninhabited.  All the land in the US is currently owned by someone (or the government)... and the same was true back before the Europeans showed up.  What the Native Americans did NOT have was European lawyers and printing presses and written documents (they did have some types of documents and boundary markers, however.)

They had also lost a good 90% of their population. Perhaps pirate groups could push over tribes outright, or perhaps they would meld with a tribe because it needed strength against another tribe.

Why would they do that, when they could get the gold more quickly by simply raiding in Europe?  No long and risky sea voyages, and they simply took the better weapons that they found when they raided European towns and cities.

You're really going to say it's easier for a band of pirates to raid Europe than visit a continent where 90% of the inhabitants are dead and hadn't known to gather the yellow dust from streams? Europe had fortresses and cannon.

Columbus actually wasn't the first European to discover America (that would be Lief Erikson) -- and what he discovered was the Caribbean (Bahamas and Cuba); not North America.

John Cabot's the one who discovered the continent of North America on June 24, 1497, sailing under the commission of Henry VII of England.

Maybe.

When would this have been?

You just said Leif Erickson discovered the Americas, yet there's no way the Vikings could have shared or given up the knowledge to Spain or the Barbary Pirates? It's at least a possibility.

And who were they going to sell these slaves to?   Native Americans in the area of the United States didn't have or collect gold.  They did in Central/South America (some areas) but it wasn't of much use to the Algonquins, Lumbee, Choctaws, etc. 

Exactly, they didn't know what it was worth and it may have been just lying in riverbeds for the picking up.

If you do a search to see where gold is found in the US (the geology of where gold is found), you will see that very little of it comes from the eastern US (and what's there is in quartz veins and not as easily collected).  Copper was more valuable.

Nevada, Alaska, and California are the main places where gold is found. 

The quartz veins had been eroding for many millions of years. If the local natives didn't collect gold, then the streams and rivers probably had some before Europeans.  There have in fact been minor gold rushes in the South after the USA was established.

Without European technology and materials, what good would an "educated slave" have been -- someone who couldn't speak the local language, who didn't eat local foods, who couldn't get access to tools and raw materials that are available in Europe/Africa?

Your comment essentially proves that the natives could have used some slaves. Why would the traders bring slaves who were educated in something the natives wouldn't pay for, or advance them too much so they could stand on their own?  The Ottomans used them in their own society, sometimes for educated roles.

Besides, raiders from the old world could also have enslaved the locals to gather gold, or sold opium or alcohol, and maybe the tribes don't talk about it. Maybe their oral histories sometimes aren't as old as they let on.

 Not the race card... the historical records of what types of ships they owned and sailed.   Fighting ships are different than cargo ships, just as jet fighters are very different from passenger planes and both of those are different than cargo planes.

No, they were not confined to one type of ship. I don't know of any records or proof, but that hardly means they would have heard of the new world from Viking traders, then said to themselves, "you know, we cannot go, because we can only use one type of ship." Even if they had zero insight and imagination, as your comments seem to suggest, they would have seen other ships while they were on the ocean or in ports.