Quote:
Originally Posted by Checkmarkblue
Native Americans were also killing and enslaving other people too. Native Americans also enslaved blacks too.
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1) Not all Native-Americans. Many were relatively peaceful. Of the ones who weren't, a lot of the uptick in violence was the result of European contact.
I remember watching an Animal Planet where it was following around a group of lions. Each group basically stakes off a territory, and pretty much refuses to leave it even when they're starving. The reason is, leaving that territory basically means war with the neighboring lions. The great herds migrate across these territories, and as the herds travel through each territory the lions there have plenty to eat, but for much of the year the pickings are pretty slim.
Most predators will do just about anything to avoid conflict with other predators, even if they can win, because the risk of getting seriously injured is too high, and serious injury often means death(from disease). When you look at our closest relatives, the Chimpanzee, they don't go to war with neighboring groups. They will only pick off individual chimpanzees who stumble into their territory when they outnumber them like five to one.
As I like to say,
"No one wants a fair fight"... The reason is, in a fair fight you can lose. And more importantly, even if you win, a fair fight is usually a Pyrrhic victory. The cost of winning is greater than the benefits from winning. And primitive tribes waging war against each other would basically be a war of extermination, on both sides.
If you imagine two tribes, both with a hundred able-bodied men fighting a battle to the death. Even the winning side would likely have casualties of 75 percent or more, and those who didn't die in the battle would likely die days later of infection.
If there were only two tribes, you might argue that such losses are acceptable if it means you've completely wiped out your enemy. But there aren't two tribes, there are dozens, hundreds even. So even if you can defeat one tribe, if you lose 80% of your warriors, another tribe can easily take you over, and if they know your history of violence, they will seize the opportunity.
The only reason modern nations engage in war so readily is that their technology gives them massive advantages, or what they call "force multipliers". Thus the cost of war has been reduced to almost nothing(for the more advanced side). They could kill ten, a hundred, a thousand men for every one they lose. And because their populations are so large, the men they do lose are easily replaced.
Now let's go back to the chimpanzees, who generally maintain a kind of balance of power between each group, and imagine Europeans showed up and offered to sell them the chimpanzee equivalent of boomsticks and other implements which would give them massive advantages. And furthermore, imagine if these same people, with their boomsticks, began to take much of the territory for themselves, leaving less territory for everyone else. This was the reality for the Native tribes, who understood that they couldn't defeat the Europeans to retake their territory, which left them only the option of taking territory from other tribes.
Thus they were not given the choice between peace and war, but between war and starvation. And furthermore, the Europeans, with their superior technology, can basically pick the side they want to win by selling them weapons of war. So each tribe must always stay in the good graces of Europeans or be conquered, if not exterminated.
I remember they brought an African Queen before some kind of court to ask her why she was enslaving Africans and selling them to Europeans, and she said something like,
"We had no choice. It was either enslave or be enslaved. The Europeans demanded slaves. Either they would get them from us, or from our rivals."
2) Native-Americans didn't own a single ship that could cross the Atlantic. They didn't enslave blacks, they bought already enslaved blacks from whites. And I'm fairly sure this only happened with the so-called "Civilized tribes". Because generally-speaking, slavery can only exist in civilization. In a primitive setting, slaves can just run away. There is no fugitive-slave act because there is no one to return the slaves, and no real concept of property. In fact, slavery is historically inseparable from agriculture. Where subsistence is agricultural, and where agriculture is done primarily by hand, there is almost always slavery in some form(including serfdom). Other than the Aztecs, pretty much none of the North-American Indians were agricultural.
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