Explaining Native American History

Summary

History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett Episode Summary: Explaining Native American History Release Date: April 21, 2025
Host: Turpentine
Guests: Rudyard Lynch, Austin Padgett

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Introduction and Educational Narratives

The episode begins with Rudyard Lynch expressing frustration with the limited and often inaccurate representation of Native American history in the traditional education system. He reflects on his own schooling experience, highlighting the repetitive and superficial coverage of topics like the American Revolution and World Wars, while Native American history received scant attention.

Rudyard Lynch [00:46]: "I learned about the Native Americans like four times in school... the narrative of the Native Americans I was fed multiple times in school versus the actual reality that I got from history books... they’re diametrically opposite."

Genetic Ancestry and Misconceptions

Lynch delves into the complexities of Native American genetic ancestry, challenging the oversimplified narratives commonly presented. He discusses the diverse genetic components that make up Native American populations, including significant Polynesian and Australian Aboriginal influences, contradicting the earlier belief of a homogeneous group migrating solely through the Bering Strait.

Rudyard Lynch [02:20]: "There are at least five distinct Ice Age racial groups in the genetics of modern Native Americans."

The conversation touches on the misuse of genetic testing for ethnic claims, referencing public figures like Elizabeth Warren and emphasizing the inaccuracy and potential harm of such practices.

Unnamed Speaker [07:14]: "It's statistically actually impossible for me to be 1000th Pacific Islander... it's from a long Ice Age migration."

Colonial Impact and Warfare

A significant portion of the episode explores the impact of European colonization on Native American societies. Lynch highlights the high fatality rates from diseases introduced by Europeans, drastically reducing Native populations and enabling easier territorial expansion by settlers.

Rudyard Lynch [16:05]: "Native Americans make up less than half of America’s population... they were almost all hunter-gatherers with very few population centers beforehand."

The discussion extends to the military resistance mounted by various Native tribes, comparing it to global historical conflicts. Lynch emphasizes the valor and strategic acumen of Native warriors, noting their effective guerrilla tactics against technologically superior forces.

Rudyard Lynch [45:26]: "The natives fought incredibly heroically in the world wars... they really gave the Europeans a run for their money."

Cultural Misrepresentations: The Noble Savage

Lynch critically examines the "noble savage" trope perpetuated in Western narratives, arguing that it misrepresents the true nature of many Native American societies. He asserts that many tribes were highly militaristic and valorized courage, countering the image of peaceful, nature-loving indigenous peoples.

Rudyard Lynch [37:31]: "The reality is the exact opposite. It’s actually deeply insulting to Native Americans because you look at Native American society and they were hyper militaristic warrior cultures."

Formation and Decline of Native Civilizations

The episode delves into the rise and fall of pre-colonial Native American civilizations such as the Mound Builders and the Pueblo. Lynch explains how these societies developed complex social structures and advanced agricultural practices but eventually declined due to internal conflicts and external pressures from invading tribes and European diseases.

Rudyard Lynch [74:14]: "There was actually barbarian invasions among neighboring peoples trying to conquer the Mound Builders; they went into decline."

European Alliances and Native Conflicts

Lynch discusses the strategic alliances between various Native American tribes and European powers, particularly during conflicts like the French and Indian Wars and the War of 1812. He highlights figures like Tecumseh, who unified Native tribes to resist American expansion, only to be ultimately defeated due to superior American military technology and tactics.

Rudyard Lynch [90:44]: "Tecumseh’s armies were ultimately wiped out at the Battle of Thames River... Americans could just completely wipe out the Natives from the plains."

Forced Assimilation and Modern Consequences

The conversation shifts to the forced assimilation policies imposed on Native Americans, such as boarding schools and relocation to reservations. Lynch critiques these policies as immoral attempts to eradicate indigenous cultures, leading to long-lasting social and economic issues within Native communities.

Rudyard Lynch [113:17]: "They are dependents on the US Government, where they're dependent on welfare, they're stuck in the same lands, they have horrible drug issues."

Conclusion: The Tragedy of Native Displacement

Lynch concludes by lamenting the ongoing struggles of Native American populations, drawing parallels to other groups that have faced similar fates through forced assimilation and cultural suppression. He underscores the importance of recognizing the resilience and historical significance of Native societies beyond the distorted narratives perpetuated by mainstream discourse.

Rudyard Lynch [114:35]: "It's a tragedy... you can't just expect a population to learn and develop all the traits that industrial civilization has."

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Rudyard Lynch [00:46]: "I learned about the Native Americans like four times in school... the narrative of the Native Americans I was fed multiple times in school versus the actual reality that I got from history books... they’re diametrically opposite."

• Rudyard Lynch [02:20]: "There are at least five distinct Ice Age racial groups in the genetics of modern Native Americans."

• Rudyard Lynch [37:31]: "The reality is the exact opposite. It’s actually deeply insulting to Native Americans because you look at Native American society and they were hyper militaristic warrior cultures."

• Rudyard Lynch [74:14]: "There was actually barbarian invasions among neighboring peoples trying to conquer the Mound Builders; they went into decline."

• Rudyard Lynch [90:44]: "Tecumseh’s armies were ultimately wiped out at the Battle of Thames River... Americans could just completely wipe out the Natives from the plains."

• Rudyard Lynch [113:17]: "They are dependents on the US Government, where they're dependent on welfare, they're stuck in the same lands, they have horrible drug issues."

Key Insights and Conclusions

1. Educational Gaps: Traditional education systems have historically underrepresented Native American history, often presenting oversimplified and inaccurate narratives.

2. Genetic Diversity: Native American ancestry is far more complex than commonly portrayed, incorporating diverse genetic influences from ancient migrations and intermixing with other populations.

3. Colonial Impact: European colonization had a devastating impact on Native American populations through disease, warfare, and forced assimilation, leading to significant loss of life and cultural erosion.

4. Misrepresentation: The "noble savage" stereotype fails to capture the true nature of Native American societies, many of which were highly organized, militaristic, and valorized courage and honor.

5. Resistance and Resilience: Native American tribes exhibited remarkable resistance against European and American expansion, employing effective guerrilla tactics despite technological disadvantages.

6. Forced Assimilation: Policies aimed at assimilating Native Americans into Western society have had lasting negative effects, perpetuating social and economic challenges within indigenous communities.

7. Historical Tragedy: The displacement and suppression of Native American cultures represent a profound tragedy, with ongoing implications for their communities today.

This episode of History 102 provides a critical examination of Native American history, challenging prevailing myths and emphasizing the need for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of indigenous cultures and their historical experiences.

Transcript

[Rudyard Lynch]

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[Austin Padgett]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hey everybody. I'm Redyard lynch with co host Austin Padgett. And today we're going to cover the Native Americans. And by that I mean the indigenous inhabitants of the modern United States. And it's funny, I learned about the Native Americans like four times in school, where the school system when I was growing up had weird eccentric bugs. And there was very little assessment of the actual quality of teaching, although I went to some of the teachers were good, some of the classes were well taught. So I learned at the American Revolution four or five times and learned at the Native Americans four or five times. I learned at the Fertile Crescent multiple times. We read four books in the Vietnam War and then only one book on any other war, that being the American Revolution. And it's fascinating, as I grew up as an adult, to compare the narrative of the Native Americans I was fed multiple times in school versus the actual reality that I got from history books. Because the funny thing is that they're diametrically opposite.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yes, that is a classic misconception. And we think of the kind of retelling of the Native American story along as happening along the same period as we started using that language instead of Indian and the political correctness around it. But it was actually kind of a long process of building guilt around the situation. So burst out now.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I promised myself when I started this podcast that we would not talk about the use of Amerindian versus Native American until 15 minutes into the podcast. We need some more time. We need some more time to seduce the audience and make sure they feel comfortable. And I'm just going to throw this out. It annoys me that I know practically nothing about the Native peoples of South America, where there are certain biases in how histories are written, where this is why I studied Latin America or India or Southeast Asia, because histories will, world histories will never cover those countries. And for whatever the way we write about the Native Americans. You either get histories of the Native Americans of America and we'll briefly touch on Canada in this video. They were almost all hunter gatherers and there were very few people in Canada before Columbus. And then you see, you cover America and the natives there because we are the world's hegemon. And then you look at the Aztecs and the Peruvians or the, the Mesoamericans and the Peruvians because they're the great civilizations. And I will continue this trend because I don't know anything of the natives of Brazil or Argentina. I have like a wall of books on Brazil I haven't read. But I find it annoying when there are gaps in my. In my knowledge.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, I was thinking about that too for this episode. I feel more unprepared for this episode than any other because there's so many different tribes and I don't really have a good mental model. Sorry, what was that?

[Rudyard Lynch]

You're a racist for not knowing it. The natives.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right, Exactly. There's just so many tribes and I don't have a mental model. I'm theoretically 1 32nd Cherokee. Although never been tested. So I'll use that as my protection.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I am like 1000th Cherokee.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Where that's because you got tested.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, everyone in my. So you can pretend to be 132nd because you're not tested yet. Once you actually get the number it'll be 1000th because so I. Everyone in my family, my mom, dad, sister took 23 and me tests. And so we compared the results and I am 100% Northwestern European, but my mom and my sister are 1000 Pacific Islander. And the reasoning for that is that there is. This is actually a great tendency to start. There's multiple genetic racial groups that mix together in the last Ice Age to form Native Americans. One of the biggest ones is the inhabitants of the modern Pacific Islands who originally came from Taiwan and China during the Ice Age. So they crossed over the Arctic. And so Native Americans in America for complex cultural reasons that bled into cultural reasons. Native Americans in America don't like doing genetics tests where we have this huge gap in North America in US Native genetics results which you don't have for Canada or Mexico or Brazil, where if you look at the genetic charts we have of Amerindian populations, we literally have huge samples. Canada, Mexico, nothing North America because a handful of the tribes had tribal customs that they that considered taking genetics results to be insulting, like the, the vitality and blood of their ancestors and Then liberal culture popularized this originally relatively small belief across the national scale, so that it became mainstream among North America, among American American Indians. And so when we get genetics results from Native Americans, we assort them into neighboring racial groups which have similarities, which is why it's statistically actually impossible for me to be 1000th Pacific Islander, because the Europeans were not aware of the existence of the Pacific Islands that long ago. And I had a. I had a Scottish ancestor who fought for the Jacobites, who was sent over to South Carolina in 1703 for. For rebelling against the English. And he married a Cherokee woman. And so he. Then my ancestors in the 1800s used their 18 Cherokee ancestry to cheaply buy up land in Oklahoma when it was a native reservation. And they made an oil company there which failed, or they sold that too early. And I think that being like 1000th Native American makes you even whiter because I have multiple people within two family relations of me who claims to be Native Americans for stuff like school admissions or census result. And I'm like, that's so cringe. Like, if you're a thousandth Native American and you're claiming that for some kind of DEI purpose, that's just cringe.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Well, yeah, we thought about that, especially with my little brother, because he had the highest grades in the history of the school, not just in his class, but he had no chance of getting into an Ivy League. So we were like, do we use the 132nd? Because that's what Elizabeth Warren did. I think she was. She claimed 1 32nd and then tested one for 1,000. Yeah, like you said, the problem with genetics test is you need other genetic data to bounce off of to get matches. And the tribes discouraged, pretty much all discouraged their members pretty aggressively for taking the tests for the reasons you said, but also because they don't want federal benefits to become associated with a test. And they claim that they're insulted and they're not ethnostates, but they're nations of peoples with, yeah, whatever value. So they use that language. But I think we're gonna. You know, it's like the Irish thing, right? Like, everybody's Irish, everybody's a Native American. It's part true because a lot of people have little bits of genetics. I think now in the next 10 years, we're going to see increasingly people claim that their ancestors fought in the revolution, or we're here in the 1600s.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Or something like that. Yeah, so a few points there. The first is that I am genuinely half Irish Catholic, and it Annoys me. So many Americans, if you ask them, are there ethnicity, they'll be like, oh, I'm Irish and they're from Texas and their Last name is McAllister and they're Protestant. And I'm like, no, you're not. You're the people who conquer and try to genocide the Irish. And so many people who are ostensibly English or Scots Irish or whatever, they'll know they have some distant Irish ancestor. Then they'll say they're Irish. And then you have the genuine Irish people who survived the Potato famine and they lived in the Irish ghetto. And I don't know, they're like, back in Pennsylvania, in the Northeast, you have this huge genuinely Irish population. And then you go out across the rest of the country and you have lots of people who say they're Irish as a sort of like, I don't want to say I'm English. And it's a complete different cultural context. And second point is, it's funny where when we set out all these civil rights laws in the fifth in the 60s, people didn't think that these would end up creating these bizarre dystopian social hierarchies based off federal funding. Because the reality is that Native Americans make up less than half of America, 0.5% of America's genetics, and Amerindians make up a significantly higher percentage of America's genetics. But it's almost all Mexican Amerindians. Our Amerindians are 0.5% of our genetics. And what's often the case is that among the natives, their majority European ancestry. But they can't, because the average white American is 98.7% European. The average white American is as European as the average European. And so you're looking at like thousandth native ancestry. And most white Americans who have native ancestry, it's from the Seven Civilized Tribes, which is where you, me and Elizabeth Warren's native ancestry comes from. Because the tribes of the American Southeast were the predominant and biggest ones before European colonialism. And they were also the ones who interbred with Europeans, mostly concentrated around southern Appalachia with the Cherokee and like Tennessee and in Tennessee. But so we established these weird dystopian social hierarchies where people are have to pretend to be a racial group, they're not to get ahead in the bureaucratic system. And this is one of those things where someone should have stopped this process by now and said, you guys are stupid. This is going to end in a weird bad place and we need to stop as a society but bureaucracy machine go burr.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yes, well, it's tricky too because if you expanded the membership to genetic testing and then, then the whole system could come under question. So it prevents evolution. I think the, the best thing for the tribal areas would just be to make them special economic zones and see if they, they take on the opportunity or not.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They already are.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, that is the, that is the direction that a lot of it is trending. But, and then, and then the funny thing with the, you know, oppression dynamic like you mentioned with the Irish, is I have a friend who's Korean, so he makes fun of me when I say I'm 1-32- Cherokee is like, oh well you like, you know, your ancestors took them over and you know, abused them and took them as slaves or something and that's why they're part of your family or something. And so I make fun of him because like you said, the North American Indians came from the coastal East Asian populations which were the Hokkaido like a long, a long time ago. The Hokkaido in northern Japan are a close, closer remnant of that. And so I joke with him that his Korean ancestors kicked the Hokkaido onto the North American plane and then the Europeans came in from the other direction. So he's just as responsible the other thing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And I hate the, the culture of various groups criticizing Anglos for being oppressive because if you actually knew the histories of those countries, ostensibly in every single case they also have their own skilled in the closet. Where Korea was practicing legitimate slavery until the 1950s. Almost every single upper class Korean had a slave until last World War II. Yeah, go ahead.

[Unnamed Speaker]

It gets worse than that. There was a joke with Bobby Lee, that Korean comedian, talking to his redheaded friend and doing the same line, telling him how he's racist for being white or something, his ancestors abused people, et cetera. So he's like, let me look up slavery in Korea. And it gets the result. Korea has the longest continual slave trade in human history lasting for 2500 years. And everybody just cracks up.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, it's, it's lots of things where these are not serious arguments and I'm unclear why I'm supposed to take them seriously because in lots of interactions there's just situations where someone says something and you need to laugh and then not reply and change the conversation. There are certain contexts where just the underlying frame of the argument is so stupid that it's just like, why are we having this discussion? And comparing which sub demographics of the population, in a Marxist dialectical theory established by propagandists, committed the most atrocities 200 years ago is just stupid. There's layer of stupid. There's firstly the leftist bias, there's secondly the lack of knowledge of the history of any other culture. Thirdly, there's the removal of any degree of context. And so you're ending up with situations where the James Lindsay has got this hilarious story where this Spaniard was criticizing Americans for conquering the natives and that stuff. And I forget if it was either James Lindsay or one of his friends said, you're friggin Spanish. You killed so many more natives than the white than the Americans did, where about 15 million people died in the entire conquest of the New World by the Europeans, almost all of which occurred in in the Spanish Empire, whether Mexico or Peru, because that's where the population centers were, where less than a there were like half a million people in the entire North American continent from San Francisco to Pittsburgh in the year 1800. The population of Mexico when the Spaniards first arrived was 20 million. So that's a huge population differential. And so when you look at the history of atrocities, very, very, very few people died in the Anglo colonization of the North American continent because it had a 90% fatality rate and there weren't that big population centers beforehand. So when you're adding a relatively depopulated land with a 90% disease rate, it meant North America was genuinely pretty empty.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. Maybe that's why people were able to settle without a lot of incentive for immediate competition from the east coast natives until the populations got obviously larger and then Mexico is 50% Spanish genetically. Yeah, it's like 56% or something. So it's kind of like the Obama example in a nation where it just identifies the black hat.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So next next episode's Mexican History. So hold that thought.

[Austin Padgett]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

You gave me a beautiful transition. I did not use where looking at the racial makeup of Native Americans is so interesting because the narrative of the colonization of the new world has changed markedly with the discovery of genetics where the idea until like I was age, until I was the end of my adult life are the end until I turned roughly age 18 or like 2019. The narrative was that all Native Americans were a single homogenous genetic group who crossed over the Bering Strait through this Iceland bridge that formed in Alberta. And I always thought this was kind of sus as a child and a teenager, because I had to see all of these textbooks where there is this. There is the Laurentian glacier coming down from Labrador, which reached down to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Chicago, and then you have the British Columbian glacier, and there's this thin strip of land in Alberta. And apparently I have no faith in ancient or prehistoric history's validity. In 15 years, that could turn out to be completely untrue because we're constantly shifting the narratives on prehistory, but we still think they walked through this land bridge, through Alberta, and then they populated the entire continent down to Patagonia in less than a thousand years. So cross Siberia. Siberia. It's also strange that Siberia had no ice while the ice caps went as far south as Paris in Germany, because Siberia was in fact, so cold and so. And so dry in the last Ice age that the winds were so strong and there was so little water that glaciers couldn't form. So the north of Siberia in the last Ice age was still habitable by humans. Well, I don't know. Denmark was under ice. And so humans migrate, hunting the mammoth through Siberia, through Alaska, which also was above ice in the last Ice age. Then they go through the land bridge, and then they go into the Americas, following the Great Plains south until they hit Patagonia within a thousand years. And recent discoveries completely shattered this paradigm, where we thought that migration occurred around 10,000 BC. But first we found records of native habitation in 30,000 BC. And for a frame of reference, humans only populated Europe 50,000 years ago. And then the discovery after that was native habitation 300,000 years ago, where we found a spear point trying to knock out a mammoth in Los Angeles from 300,000 years ago. And for a frame of reference in the older paradigm that existed five years ago, modern humans only evolved 300,000 years ago. We later pushed back to about a million years ago in humans supposedly only left Africa 80,000 years ago. And this is why I don't trust anything in prehistory and why I'm a historian, not a prehistorian, because what just happened with a single discovery is we just blew our entire understanding of the ancient world out of the water. And this is something we keep finding, especially with genetics, where the history of prehistory is looking less so. Like the out of Africa theory, where groups of humans left Africa, they migrated to places, and then they stayed there, and now there was a migration out of Africa, but it's this constant intermixing in warfare and genocide in different subgroups where humans migrate out to the Middle east, the Middle Eastern humans migrated back into Africa. Genocide, those people migrated back out again. And we found at least like five distinct Ice Age racial groups in the genetics of modern Native Americans.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Wow. So basically, we tried to make our narrative a simple extrapolation leading to today, rather than all the very complex steps that happened in between.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And it's interesting to look at this because from it you can kind of see how different the world of the last Ice Age was, where the genetic groups that comprise Native Americans, one of which is Polynesian or Pacific Islander ancestry, because they initially came from Taiwan and South China, and they migrated through Indonesia, Polynesia, genocide in the local population until they sailed into the Pacific through the Polynesians. So there's a significant Polynesian genetic component in Native American ancestry. There's an Australian Aboriginal genetic component because they're the indigenous inhabitants of Southeast Asia. And we found this skull from 9,000 years ago, either 7 or 9,000 years ago in the Amazon that's genetically identical to an Australian Aboriginal. Wow.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And this. This kind of shows. And that. That wasn't even genetics. That's just an archaeological find confirming it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Right. Yeah. I have a game. I have a game. Is this person Mexican or Asian? Where you show a photo? Is this person Indian or Mexican? Is this person Thai or Mexican? And it's oftentimes genuinely difficult to say, especially with the more native ones. And. Oh, yeah. So the Olmec civilization in Mexico, we think there was a long standing theory that they were founded by Africans because the Olmec like the Olmec art. And this is from 3000 years ago in coastal Mexico. Looks like black people. But I realized, wait, it must have been Negritos, where the Negritos are the indigenous pop. They're the Australian Aboriginal population of Southeast Asia, which look a lot like black people. People, but they're genetically distinct. So that means there might have been a Negrito state in Mexico as late as 3,000 years ago.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And, well, with genetic testing, wouldn't we be able to find a link to Africa at this point if it came from there versus South Asia or.

[Rudyard Lynch]

All roads lead to Africa. There's very. Because that's where humans evolved. But so there's basically no African ancestry in the New Worlds. Native genetics. But there is significant Negrito or Australian Aboriginal, where the Australian Aboriginals were the first migration out of Africa and they hugged the Indian Ocean region to reach Austria, Australia. But interestingly, there's significant European Genetics in Native Americans. About a third of the genetics of eastern North America, especially so groups like the Ojibwe in around Canada's Great Lakes region, or tribes like the Cherokee or various peoples in the American eastern third of the continent. They have significant ancestry from a racial group that no longer exists called the ancient North Eurasians. And David Reich's book, who We Are and How We Got Here, this is the best book on ancient genetics. And the. The ancient North Eurasians were from Siberia. And the first people with European like genetics is from the Malta boy in Malta, like the island off the coast of Sicily in Siberia, where the Malta boy has the initial ancestral European genetics. And the reason Europeans are so pale is we evolved in Siberia. And one branch of the ancient North Eurasians went west into Europe, colonizing the continent with the Aryan invasions. Then the other side went over the Arctic into America.

[Unnamed Speaker]

So these are basically like, oh, okay. So they went the Asian route, which makes sense because like you said, there was white people in China not that long ago.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

So it's not. Not that unrelated to that. And then there's a few others. Oh, yeah. Just an example of how hard it was to prove things before genetics testing. Like you mentioned the Polynesians, you can just find the genetic link today. In the 80s, it was considered a theory that would get you kicked out of academia. And some Swedish guy who was going so crazy trying to prove it correctly built a boat using ancient techniques and like, only no modern reinforced metal. They brought metal coils in case the ship fell apart, and he tossed them into the ocean halfway through because the crew was getting scared, and they floated all the way to South America. And he's like, see, I told you it was possible. Yeah, it turns out he was right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's interesting you say that because that guy, I think, Thorbin. Thor, his name was like Thor Thorbin or something, I forget he was Norwegian. He looked at how. He looked at the similarities between certain Native American cultures, especially the Inca and Polynesian culture. And he thought that this was due to the Inca sailing out to Easter island and making their. Building Easter Island. But the reality is that most of the genetic links between Polynesians and Native Americans are from the Ice Age. But the Polynesians did actually reach America. We've proven they reached Chile in possibly California. And so the Polynesians did actually make it across, although it was fairly sparse. And so another thing is, we found. Oh, yeah, there was another. There was another controversy in the sciences, like 15 years ago because they found lots of Native Americans had European ancestry going back thousands of years, and people were developing all these theories. Oh, maybe the Celts sailed over in. In the ancient world. But no, it's. It was from the last Ice Age. And we found the skull of a European man from 9,000 years ago in Oregon called the Kennewick Man. And this caused a lot of disturbances in science. He's like, what happened here? But the biggest net of components for Native Americans are the indigenous inhabitants of Japan, the Ainu, who have since been practically genocided off the face of the earth by the Japanese, as well as Mongolians. Actual Siberian or modern East Asian ancestry is relatively absent in Native American ancestry. And it just shows how the racial map of the world in the last Ice Age is so completely different from today.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right, Ainu. I said Hokkaido earlier or something. I mean, I knew.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah. And so what are the conclusions from this? When this causes controversies in academia? Are they basically coming to the conclusion that you said? And it was from Western Europe, Eastern European expansion all the way around.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So academia largely deals with things they don't want to think about. By ignoring them, academia has kind of stopped actually dealing with topics, make them feel uncomfortable because we've hit thresholds where the existence of biological race has been so genetically proven that you can't really argue against it. Academia has resolved this by not talking about it. Or there's lots of weird research in fields like. There's lots of weird research in fields like. Like, I mean, I talk at the US Government's research with the spirit world and psychics and that stuff. Academia doesn't care about that. Academia doesn't care about how physics research stopped in the 70s and the US government forced it to stop. They don't care about the blank slate. They don't care about. They just. They have no feedback loop of disproving their incorrect theories. So academia kind of just stopped caring. And the only author who really integrated this material is David Reich, who hosts the Harvard Anthropology. The Harvard Anthropology chair. And practically no one else. No one else talks about it.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, I've seen him talk about it. And the way he deals with the subject is extremely sensitively.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

But it's. He's found a way to kind of bully the narrative through in a way that's, like, laced with just very basic, one small truth after another layered with caveats about this doesn't mean xyz. And that's. That's basically the best we can get in academia right now. But fortunately, we have the Internet where we can share and talk about this. Information. I met another. Yeah, go ahead. Is it your? Yours is going to be more on topic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I met his staff when I visited Harvard. Some of them were woodifultist fans.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Oh that's awesome.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hey guys, they recognized me. I walked in and said, wait, you're Rudyard? And they brought me around the anthropology department and like most of them knew who I was. It's if the Harvard Anthropology Department are fans of right wing anthropology content, it means we've already won the culture war.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yep, there's so many people just desperate to do science that are in those environments but starting to like, find their ways to assert themselves.

[Austin Padgett]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

[Unnamed Speaker]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Other thing is that I have like six friends who have PhDs in genetics, human genetics, and at this point every single one of them says the evidence for race is completely irrefutable. And so if you're part of a job where you're looking at your frigging PCA charts, you because you look at there's lots of ways to assess genetic diversity where you have the PCA charts, which are basically certain genetic components compared against other genetic components, and you naturally see these clusters around certain biological races for a variety of traits. If you look at the fucking piece, if you look at thousands of PCH arts, then you have to end up in a society that tells you that your scientific experience is wrong. You're going to get pretty resentful pretty quickly.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, because they're way too connected to undeniable reality and the most granular scientific way. So it's probably maddening.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Practically no one in anthropology today doesn't think genetics influences the world. Even different anthropologists who work at Harvard have agreed with this. There have been multiple books written by socialists about how multiple books written by socialists about how we should still have socialism even though we've genetically proved people are not equal. Where they're like it's not your fault, you had a smarter parent, so the state should give you more money if you were born stupider. And that's not going to happen because once people realized people are not genetically equal, the entire idea for socialism falls apart. Because socialism can only work through a blank slate framework.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. Because the explanation for the difference in results comes down to oppression.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And yeah. When anything else will result in different results, even on a preference level, then they have a that breaks their paradigm.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I promise to go back to history soon, but I saw this hilarious meme a few days ago where it said it's not that the left can't meme is that the left's worldview requires so much removal from reality they have to hold your hand through every statement. Where a joke is, humor comes from a disbalance between the perceived reality and the actual reality. Almost everything in humor is someone poking through the layers of convention to touch an underlying truth people are uncomfortable about. And, and so the left can't do that because there are too many layers of obfuscation.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. And if they try and kind of hold this all in and prevent pretend that this reality doesn't exist, then there and prevent us from dealing with it in a mature way, then all they're doing is setting up people to be deterministic about it in the opposite direction.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, my friend biology likes to say that. So communism is to real economics. What wokeness is to real biology where both of them are basically flat earthers who hold these positions literally no one who has studied these fields believes. And they basically just grapple onto it where 200 years ago it was easier to believe the things Marx said because we hadn't had over a century of experience with Marxism. And now we've hit a threshold where the Marxists first shot was economics that failed because capitalism got the working classes to be richer. And then the second shot of the Marxists was with women in racial minorities. And then what happened was that in each case they hurt every single demographic they were supposed to help.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. And for a lot of these myths they actually called back on the Native Americans because they pretended that they lived in this Rousseau mythical society where there was equality and there was gender fluidity. Fluidity, and there was no warfare and all that was false.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I feel bad that whenever people talk about the Native Americans, they're using them as a foil for today's politics. And we just did it. So there's two points I want to hit. Then we're actually going to get to the history. So to get the modern political discourse out of my system. First thing is that I don't really care about the Amerindian versus Native American terminology. I alternate between both of them for different contexts. And most Native Americans, when polled, prefer the term American Indian. And most Native Americans actually like Chief Wahoo. So this is not something Native Americans care about, because Native Americans are people with their own lives and dreams and hopes in history who are unrelated to what shit libs say most. Nate. I think Native Americans might vote majority Republican at this point. And so I slightly prefer the term Native American because Amerindian or American Indian is just. It's a term that was developed because when Columbus founds the New World, he, He, he called. He thought they were in India, and so we called them Indians and the name caught on. And that just seems like bad branding. It's just inaccurate branding that we should have changed in like the 16th century. But at the same time, a word exists to propound a concept. And I'm not going to be really autistic about saying one word is better than another because just that's. It's silly. And the second thing is that the Native Americans have been used as a foil for the. The hopes and aspirations of various powers over history, where in the era of colonialism, the natives were treated as savages who were innately barbaric and innately whatever. And by the same time, they had significantly more respect than Native Americans than we do, because we see the Native Americans as weak and as noble savages. And that was an idea that went back surprisingly far. Rousseau in the 18th century was the popularizer of the concept of the noble savage. And that had been a theme in European writing going back to Columbus, because Columbus found the very peaceful Taino people first, followed by the cannibalistic, genocidal Caribbean people. And so he sent back letters to Europe talking about how peaceful and healthy and happy the Native Americans were. And so the left has popularized this idea of the Native Americans being peaceful and one with nature and loving. And the reality is the exact opposite. And it's actually deeply insulting to Native Americans because you look at Native American society and they were hyper militaristic warrior cultures. For most Native Americans, the highest good was courage. And it was a man's duty to be a warrior and a Native society. The highest honor a man could receive would be to be captured by his opponents and be tortured for several days and then show no pain in the course, which would bring honor on both himself and his torturers. It was a net benefit to the human race. And so the natives were this hyper masculine warrior people. And the Europeans actually had profound respect for the natives at the time. Where authors of the time would. It was just commonly understood that the natives were an honorable, noble people. And de Tocqueville said that there are three races to North America. The whites, who are the dominance, the natives who have started in a noble place and are degrading, and the black, who started in a slave place and are gradually moving up. And the Germans and the Nazis, they actually loved the Native Americans, where the natives. The Nazis saw the Native Americans as this noble warrior people. Because Westerns are super popular in Germany. And we used to have this archetype of person in the American West. And there's an archetype I called the Red State dad. And the Red State dad is this kind of dad, you see in conservative states who has some boring job that makes a decent amount of money. He has kids, but then he obsessively studies World War II as his hobby, or he builds dams in his backyard, or he likes, I don't know, is the biggest stamp collection. There's this demographic of rural dads who are incredibly good at whatever hobby they do. And there was this demographic of Red State dad before, like, let's say 1960, who was obsessed with Native Americans in the western part of the country where there was this huge demographic of people who were completely obsessed with Native American culture, partly due to the popularity of the Western genre. And those people have unilaterally, completely stop to exist. Practically. No one is actually interested in the different sub tribes and what Native ways of life were, because we need to project the noble savage onto the Native Americans.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. So instead of genuinely being curious about the history, we already kind of have our narrative.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Oh, wow. I feel like Jim Thorpe is also a big connector part between the 60s and the 1790s of. Jim Thorpe was big in Pennsylvania because he's from Poconos.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And so there's a vacation town called Jim Thorpe that I've been to and a lot of other people into.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, but he's a. He's a good connector of the noble or not, not in the noble savage, but the warrior spirit and the warrior prowess. And it's really funny you mentioned the Nazis liked him because I was thinking of your description earlier. This sounds like like Indo Aryan culture or something. Something that evolved into like a Viking culture. Yeah. But yeah, Jim, Jim Thorpe, amazing legendary athlete, kind of maybe one of the, the most freakish athlete recorded to this day in a sense where you, you can't actually. It's hard to parse the mythology from the reality, although he had some like, recorded statistics and that's connected to, you know, the strong Indian on all the, the sports teams and everything like that. And it's just funny to see the remnant of that understanding clash with the new understanding in a way that obviously does not please the Native Americans themselves.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. This Mother's Day, show the moms in your life just how much they mean to you. With a stunning bouquet from 1-800-flowers.com for almost 50 years, 1-800-flowers has set the standard for high quality bouquets. Right now, order early from 1-800-FLOWERS and save up to 40% on gorgeous bouquets and one of a kind arrangements guaranteed to make her day. Save up to 40% today at 1-800-Flowers.com Spotify. That's 1-800-Flowers. Com Spotify, the official florist of Mother's Day. This episode is brought to you by Selectquote. Life insurance can have a huge impact on our family's future with Selectquote, getting covered with the right policy for you is simple and affordable. Selectquote's licensed insurance agents will tailor your experience to find a life insurance policy for your needs in as little as 15 minutes. And selectquote partners with carriers that provide policies for many conditions. Selectquote they shop, you save. Go to selectquote.com Spotifypod today to get started. The natives fought incredibly heroically in the world wars, actually.

[Austin Padgett]

Right?

[Rudyard Lynch]

And it's funny you say the thing similar to Aryan culture because with, because my background's in anthropology, I look at a variety of different cultural metrics to assess a society. And the Native Americans, the people they are anthropologically closest to elsewhere in the world are the Europeans. Which is interesting because the natives of the modern United States and the Europeans, they're practically the only two individualist populations in the world where there's a huge amount of cultural distinction. Inside the Americas, where the Peruvians are probably the most collectivist society ever. The Mesoamericans were also highly collectivist. But the natives of the current U.S. they, they believed in personal freedom. They were individualistic, they were warrior cultures. They honor was their dominant moral, was their dominant moral concept. They, they lived, they had republics where the Cherokee and the Iroquois and many other native states were federalized republics. The natives also, like the Europeans, treated women well. And the natives of the current eastern US Were the society in the world where women had the highest social status. Because warrior societies tend to give women very. Out of any societies, the ones that treat women the best will always be warrior societies. And so. And when you look at as an example, the Scots Irish fighting against the Cherokee in the Indian wars, and both of these populations had a sort of mutual respect for the other, because these are both clan warrior honor societies. And you see lots of cultural intermixing where a lot of natives had partial European ancestry, where in the war between, between Andrew Jackson and the Creek Confederacy, the Creek commander was 80% European ancestry. And so there was more stuff like that than we think, where there was a demographic of white guys who just didn't like working and they didn't like being part of white society, move to the tribes, marry a native woman, become a member of the community. And on top of that, the Scots Irish would get all these technologies or the other frontiersmen would get all these technologies from the natives. Between the canoe, the moccasin, they started wearing native clothing, they ate corn, they started using native combat systems. So there was this cultural intermixing and some degree of mutual respect.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Wow, that's really fascinating because I was going to ask about the federalized republic aspect and how, you know, accurate that is, for how much it was able to translate to our systems. And I was going to ask about the psychological motivations, and I did not expect it to be actually, you know, potentially connected to a rarely individualistic culture. Yeah, that's super interesting because I'm going.

[Rudyard Lynch]

To say this, then run to the bathroom. But the thing with Native Americans and Europeans is that they're one of the least like domesticated populations. And what I mean by that is that civilization and agriculture is a naturally domesticating force where if you operate through agriculture and through agriculture and cities, is that you push these cultural conventions that reward group cooperation, that reward conformity, that reward tradition. And you look at India or China, which are these rice farming cultures, they venerate tradition and harmony above everything else. And they were incapable of changing as European colonialism destroyed them. And with both the Europeans and the Native Americans, they're not predominantly a farmer ancestry. They're of hunter gatherer or herder for Europe, Europe has more hunter gatherer or Herder ancestry than any of the big four Eurasian civilizations. And among the Native Americans, none of these were, except for in the core civilized area of the American south is none of them were pure agriculturalists. Even there, where every major Native American agricultural society of the pre colonial period, they would do a combination of slash and burn and hunting. Where they would farm a certain area, deplete the soil, migrate somewhere else after a 20 year period, restart the process. And they got all their calories from hunting. So the woman would farm in. Farming was seen as women's work and the men would hunt and fight each other. And so neither the Europeans nor the Native Americans saw these long standing evolutionary pressures towards conformity.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right, that makes sense. Yeah. Like you said, even if they're farming, it's partial and it's also not as long of a period of history.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. Also, I forgot to say I have a native T shirt. I bought this in Mexico. And I have a native mug. I also bought this in Mexico. Much like America's only native culture is from Mexico. Oh yeah, history 102.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I have the mug that disrupted all of Mexico with a ship.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We have great merch. You need to buy the merch. Remind me to shout out the merch at the end. Link is in the description. This will make you cool. But.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And adventurous.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. So the current narrative, does the natives really an injustice? Because the thing with the noble savage and I. My great gripe with modernity is dehumanization. Is that then one thing you can't say about the natives is that they weren't men. The natives were incredibly manly and they were incredibly, they were incredibly heroic. Where the current narrative treats them as like peaceful, noble savages. But the thing with the Native Americans is that I think seeing European colonialism as a Native American would be one of the most traumatizing things ever in human history. Because the Europeans showed up, you see this completely distinct culture. And for the Aztecs, they saw them as gods. And when you hear God in a society like that, God is like. Like the creek can be a God or the stream can be. Or the mountains can be gods or you can have the Deer God. And so they saw these Europeans in the magical terms initially because their entire worldview was magical. And then 90% of the natives died. And in some places, like the Pacific northwest, it was 95%. And that's something where it's. It's Mad Max. And so Mad Max is a TV show about if the native. About nuclear war, where a nuclear war would kill roughly that many people and the thing that's insane is that even with all of this and this shattered the Native American worldview, think of what this does to someone's psyche. Just have this happen. And there were rolling plagues over the course of centuries. You recover a little psych. Two thirds are dead now. And the Natives fought back. Where the one thing you can't see at the Natives that they didn't fight back with. Even with the enormous losses, even with the massive European numeric and technological superiority, the Natives really gave the Europeans a run for their money. Where there were many Native confederacies, they were actively able to caused the US serious damage. The longest war in American history is not Afghanistan or Iraq. It's the Seminole war in Florida. That took 30 years, where it took the US 30 years to conquer Florida from the local guerrilla. The local guerrilla confederacies, or the Cherokee and the Iroquois, they fought the US for decades. And I said before, I have five ancestors died in the Indian wars where this was a constant element on the US frontier. And there's an interesting argument by the historian Peter Turchin that a lot of America's dynamic character comes from fighting the natives. Where, where some of the native confederacies in America really were hard to fight between the Iroquois, the Comanche, the Cherokee, the Apache, the Seminole. And when you look at Canada, Australia, New Zealand, they didn't really have Indian wars because Canada was barely populated by Natives. Only the Laurentian region was. Was populated by. By farmers in Canada, so the rest was hunter gatherers. And in Australia and New Zealand, they had such stark population loss that they didn't really have Indian wars because the Europeans showed up. They told the natives, you can keep a quarter of the land or whatever, and we're just going to take the rest. And then there were few enough natives, they accepted those deals. And in America we had a lot of Indian wars. And the argument Turchin uses is that part of America's dynamic, more aggressive character than the rest of the Anglophone is from having to band together to fight greater Natives. And as an example of this, the term white person stems from the natives. Natives called us the whites because they just saw the color of our skin. And. And so white people took that idea. Wait, we're all Europeans. That gives us some commonality from the Native Americans.

[Unnamed Speaker]

That is fascinating and also just really comical how it ties in to the modern left's use of the concept of whiteness, which is tied with their, their, their characterization of the Indians is really funny.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And like you said, I Think in, in the north you didn't have as much of the, as clear of a situation where they thought the Spanish like they thought the Spanish were gods in the South.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

But I think there were a few examples of this mysterious force kind of fitting into a cultural mythology. I think it was a Northern American Indian account, first hand account, first meeting with white people where they kind of saw the, the leader of the group dressed in red with gold embroidery and assumed he was the Great Mojito or something, which was, which was their God and that the other guys with him were kind of serving him. And they said this is a direct first hand account from a Native American was. So he must be the Great Mojito because we can't explain all this stuff on him. I don't know why he's white. And like they mentioned the color of his skin, which is interesting because like why would you expect a God to be anything? Especially when you've never seen a white person. This maybe, I mean I expect a weird creature to maybe have blue skin or something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. One of the things people don't get about societies that are before the Axial Age. The Axial Age or actually no, it's the masculine revolution. Before a time like a thousand BC Societies do not have a way to understand things that are not magical, they're entire. So before a thousand BC societies literally did not have a concept of rationality or objectivity. The world is just what you interact with. And due to the way that their neurology was framed, they would literally see spirits and ghosts in their real lives. So they took these religious understandings of oh, the creek is a God, the forest is a living spirit. Because that was their actual perceptual frame of reality. They would walk into the forest and then feel the forest spirit, literally. And our frame of reference is something that we developed over thousands of years and it's etched into our neurology from the historic context. But to get to native history itself, when you look at the pre colonial period, a lot more was happening in North America than we think where the, the first principle that allowed large populations in North America was the move of corn agriculture north from Mexico. And the Mexicans developed agriculture on 7,000 BC. And so for a lot of North America they only got agriculture fairly recently, I'd say like 500 BC in the Midwest. And it's actually remarkable how rapidly they developed civilizations after they developed after they had agriculture. Because in Eurasia There was a 5,000 year lag in development of agriculture. Sorry. After the development of agriculture in Eurasia, there was a 5,000 year lag till they built cities because there were this huge disease gradient from humans first interacting with domesticated animals. So the disease we got from domesticated animals, they killed off population growth for 5,000 years. And that didn't happen in the New World. So they started building cities in the New World relatively quickly after the development of agriculture. But then also what happened is that that 5,000 year period is what gave the Europeans the genetic immunity that gave them diseases that could wipe out the 90% of the native population. That going through that gradient meant Europeans had a much stronger genetic pool as well as the unification of the entire Eurasian genetic pool around the time of the Classical period. And so when the Europeans came to the New World, they were dropping this just genetic bomb on the local population where the locals had not gone through the same degree of genetic conflict. And the Europeans, even stuff like the common cold could kill natives. The common cold was deadlier than the Black Death is to Europeans for natives. And the only thing that went back in reverse was syphilis, which is from New World monkeys. And it ended up in Europe causing mass cultural changes due to around the time of the Renaissance.

[Unnamed Speaker]

What were those New World monkeys up to?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Gay.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, that's, that's another really funny example of how winning now is losing later. You know, it's like, oh, we, we don't have all these diseases that they dealt with in Eurasia, so now we're going to deal with them in 500 years.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, facts show up. And I have seen the map of the different native subcultures in North America so many times because I saw it so many times in school and I'm not sure how much I trust the map. And if you're American, you've probably seen it where you have the native tribes of the Northeast, you have the native tribes of the Southeast, you have the tribes of the Great Plains, the Pacific Northwest, the mountain system, the, and then the desert. It's basically a geographic map of America because different geographic sub regions of America need different kinds of culture. And then on top of that you have different native linguistic, ethnic, genetic and racial groups. Where you have the Sioux language, you have the Iroquoian language, you have the Algonquin, you have the Creek, you have the Ute. And just general patterns that I can tell you about the ethnography of pre colonial North America is over time, you saw the unification of the different genetic groups we talked about before. But also to go west to east, there's a huge dividing line, Arizona Northeast to Quebec. East of that line was agriculture. West of it was all hunter gatherers. So the American west was very lightly populated because it was all hunter gatherers. However, the American west coast also had the highest concentration of hunter gatherers of anywhere in the world because the seafood was so plentiful. Along the west coast you saw the development of the most advanced hunter gatherer communities in the world. Where in the Pacific Northwest we have records of them using iron in the pre colonial period, which suggests they probably had contacts with China, which is then we actually have significant evidence for especially in Mexico that lots of early elements of Mesoamerican history stem from contact with China or Vietnam. But that's next video and they the totem pole is from this region, the Pacific Northwest. And they would throw these events called potlatches where the upper class and every society is a class structure. The idea that it doesn't is a leftist lie. They would get resources and then they would burn them in front of their friends and villages to show off their enormous wealth. So people would and this is used in anthropology textbooks as one of the edge cases of human societies where their main form of competition was was gathering resources and then burning it in front of other tribes and their friends so that we can just get rid of stuff and to show how rich we are.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Sounds like a wedding ring.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Sounds like the federal government.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Everything bad. Does.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. So then you get to California and they also had highly populous hunter gatherer communities from fishing. And there was the highest concentration of hunter gatherers of anywhere in the world 500 years ago around Los Angeles. And they the entire west coast had enormous lingual and ethnic diversity. If you look at a native map of California or British Columbia, every single friggin like neighborhood is a different ethnicity and language. And so there's been a rapid decrease in ethnic and lingual diversity over the last 500 years. And some vastly disproportionate amount is from just the natives of the American west getting wiped off the face of the earth. Because the American West coast had a 95% fatality rate from European diseases. It was the highest of anywhere in the continent. And then after the colonization of California there was a legitimate slave trade inside California of the remaining natives. And so practically none of the natives in the west coast are still there.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Did the west coast natives get hit by the diseases before the Europeans made it out there?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, by about a century.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Okay, right, yeah. The virus travels faster and yeah, these the kind of the coast was the way that you get down into South America so quickly because like you said, people don't people think of mammoths and bison, etc. But a huge like the bread and butter of hunter gatherers is the ocean. And like the biggest, I think the most populous native groups in Texas were all on just collecting shellfish. Yes, huge stretch of land by the, by the water.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Funnily enough, this was one of my mom's schizo obsessions. My mom was obsessed with how hunter gatherer people' relied off the ocean. And she also thought a lot of the aquatic ape theory. And so she, she would like study what the dietary consumption of an ocean based diet was for its health versus other diets. It was one of her hobbies. And so west coast. Another fact here is that there was three times as much ethnic and genetic, ethnic and linguistic diversity in the New World as the Old World combined. Because the Old world went through all these mass genocide events like the spread of agriculture from the Middle east, the Aryan invasions, the Semitic invasions, the Bantu migrations, etc. So most. When you will talk about languages declining today or like languages going extinct, the reasoning for it is that in a lot of cases is that there's languages in British Columbia that two people speak, those two people die and then the British Columbian language is dead. Then east of the west coast you saw Native American hunter gatherers who are very lightly populated. And the area of the Rockies, the upper plains, was hunter gatherers. And barbarian invasions were a big part of Native American life. Where much like the rest of the world, barbarians start in the north or mountains, then conquer south. And the Apache, who are the most ferocious of the hunter gatherer peoples, the Apache, the Spanish, the Spanish colonizers literally called them demons. And the Apache were the last native people to be defeated by the Americans in the 1890s. They were incredible warriors, especially when they got horses. And the Apache were originally from Alaska and the, and the Yukon region and they migrated south to Arizona, then by the Mexican border.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And were they the ones who replaced the Comanche or did the Comanche come after them, replace their territory?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Comanche are further east. The Apache were also a distinct racial group that migrated from Siberia thousands of years later. So like 5,000 years after the rest of the natives, they crossed over from Siberia, went down to Arizona. Same thing as the Inuit, where the Inuit are genetically much closer to modern East Asians. And they were a later racial group that populated the Canadian Arctic from Siberia. And interestingly in parts of Greenland, the Vikings were there before the Inuit were, because it took the Inuit a while to cross over the Canadian Arctic.

[Unnamed Speaker]

So the Apaches were basically Mongolians and it was a mistake to give them horses.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Good point. The Comanche are in Texas, so Apache are in Arizona, Comanche are in Texas. And the Navajo were another people who when they got horses they started herding. And the Navajo got a huge reservation, one of their reservations bigger than east coast states. I drove across it in Arizona and you saw wide scale barbarian migrations where the Aztecs were part of the Sioux religious, the Sioux lingual family. And so we think the Aztecs might have come from the current United States states, migrated south because their language family is big and it's similar to the Comanche. And the Comanche were themselves from Colorado then migrating down into Texas. And the Comanche had a native kingdom in central Texas that was larger than a lot of European countries. And it's to the west of the area where we are in Austin, out in the Texan Great Plains. The Cherokee, who were the lords of the upper of lower Appalachia, they were from the Great Lakes region. And, and so just all the same dynamics you see in the old world in barbarian invasions and civilized stuff, you also see in the new world.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. Basically that it's not a direct progression, it's a big chaotic mix of back and forth. I even heard that there was some like Mayan civilization that went up into the Cherokee area. Some people were speculating about that. Maybe that was their excuse for why they went to agriculture so fast. But you have a different explanation.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is one of those things where there's this huge box of knowledge I think people would find interesting. But I also don't think academia or the general public is mature enough to do it. Because academia is so curmudgeonly they purposely ignore evidence that forces them to change their theories. And the general public are basically irrational children. And so you have lots of stuff where the Cherokee, for example, have a myth that before the Europeans, pale skins, moon eyed people built a hill fort in Appalachia. And people are inclined to think that's the Vikings, but we don't know. There's another theory that there's a pygmy population in Central America where we see some trace of their genetics in that area, but we don't know. I mean you have these huge copper mines in Michigan from thousands of years ago. We don't know what that was with. We found a Viking runestone in Minnesota which. From carbon. From carbon. It's centuries old. But I don't actually think it's Viking because Minnesota is too Convenient, because it's the biggest Scandinavian population in America. If it was in Michigan, I think it was authentic. But when you see a Viking thing in Minnesota, you're like, some Norwegian guy knew how to fake this. And so you have. You have this sort of industry of archaeological discoveries that suggest that very interesting things were happening in North America. Or you throw out the myth that the Irish or the Welsh or the Chinese reached America or the Phoenicians, whatever, and the public and academia are not really ready to put the pieces together. And I think it would be nigh impossible because the entire context is gone. Where we only barely know what happened in the Middle east in a thousand bc, Let alone America in a society with no literacy.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. And there's not a lot of recorded information. Yeah, yeah. It's just. It's just the chaos of history. And it's funny how you can invent stuff and it gets lost. Like you said, spear points. 300,000 years ago. There's. They're discovering more and more examples of baskets or, sorry, pottery. Before we had pottery.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

So they would. You could make pottery out of weaving. So you'd weave something and then you could stick the clay onto it. So that kind of technology has popped up and disappeared all over the place. It's not crazy that a community could have figured out how to chip out some copper and then that. That get lost. So it's pretty interesting to see. And just on the. The Apache and their resistance, I think they were the last tribe to officially be fighting or resisting. I think they were Apache still raiding and living in the caves up to the 1970s.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Interesting. Yeah, we forget this, but the time we defeated the last natives was pretty close to World War I, because my mom's side of the family, my grandparents are from Nebraska, and they knew people who lived in the Old West. That's how recent this is. And to keep going further east, we. Oh, no, we'd have to touch the Puebla. The Pueblo were the only big agricultural population west of the. West of the Great Plains. And they're based out of New Mexico, where the Puebla had this pretty advanced society, where if you go to Chaco Canyon or their sites, it's huge. And New Mexico, after the white man populated the region, has consistently been the only state in the American west with a large native population. Because the Pueblo were a farming people and they were a theocracy, and they built up these huge sites. And interestingly, when the Pueblo started building, they. The entire American Southwest was covered in trees. And then they denuded the American Southwest, almost completely of trees, which goes against our belief. The natives were innately environmentalist. And much like all the native civilizations, every major native civilization besides the Andes went into decline at around the time of the 14th century. So they all the native societies hit their peak around the high medieval period. And the Pueblo, like the Mississippian civilizations, started to go into decline around the time of the Black Death.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And the Pueblo civilizations might have been some of those mud houses that Kit Carlson and his team stumbled upon that we talked about. And then it's funny to think about the, like, how long these trends lasted, like with the Apache and the caves. And I. There's like, you can make a funny joke or conspiracy because they're the map of disappeared people. Yeah. If you map that on to cave systems, it matches perfectly. So the areas where people disappear matches perfectly with the map of cave systems within the U.S. so maybe that's where the rest of the Apache are. Maybe they're the ones living in the caves kidnapping people.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Still, there's this whole conspiracy theory that there's this archaeological site in the Grand Canyon that shows this ancient civilization with metal and that it's covered up. I've seen some evidence for it, but I still don't believe it. The entire people can't just disappear into a cave. Like that doesn't make sense.

[Unnamed Speaker]

No, it's a joke. It's a joke.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay. But so east, the main population center of America before Columbus was the American south, where you had multiple cities of notable size, where Cahokia in. Across the river from St. Louis in Illinois that had 20,000 people, which was more than London's population at the same time in the year 1200. So you had cities clustered around the greater Mississippi Valley. And they stretched from like Iowa down through the Mississippi Basin towards Louisiana, I think east Texas, then out to Panhandle Florida and Alabama, then up the Appalachians to Ohio, Michigan, Ontario. There was a society called the Mound Builders. And my dad and I were driving around rural Mississippi. We stumbled upon this enormous place called the Serpent Mound without knowing where it was. And this place was this huge mound the natives built. And it was multiple football fields long where they built these huge mounds where they established their religious sites. And the Mound Builders had predominance from like 600 A.D. until like 1200 A.D. and then they fell into a dark age. And we don't know why. We think they might have. Some of the Mound Builders spoke a Sioux language. They had a caste system. They had a highly complex religious system. And there was actually barbarian invasions among Neighboring peoples trying to conquer the Mound Builders, they went into decline, where we actually found this enormous genocide of 700 people in a mass grave in Iowa as the hunter gatherer started to destroy and burn the cities of the upper Mound Builders. And the Cherokee were originally from Appalachia. Sorry, they were originally from the Great Lakes. So I would imagine the Cherokee conquered that region as the Mound Builders fell. And the Cherokee and the Seven Civilized Tribes, they were building on top of the decayed, fallen Roman civilization that the Mound Builders had.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. So you see all the similar trends as you see in the rest of world history, with the nomads conquering the farmers and mountain people versus valley people, etc.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And to finally reach the East Coast. The east coast had a lot of Algonquin. And they were more like the German barbarians. If the Mound Builders were the, the Romans, they were, they were hunter gatherer, mixed agriculture peoples. They never built up large cities, but they had, they. They had like fenced, fenced forts. And we'll talk about the Cherokee later after European. The Europeans arrive. But that's the entire continent. And with the first Europeans, they were the Spanish in the south of the country where Hernando de Soto was looking for the Fountain of Youth in Florida. And so he traipsed across the entire southern US Through Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana. And there was a Spanish expression, explorer who actually was. Was stuck, stuck along the coast. And he had to walk across Texas and New Mexico in the north of Mexico to get back to Spanish population centers in Mexico. In the first Spanish explorers, they saw these large native societies where the natives would muster armies of thousands of people. And the natives initially beat the Spanish. They were forced. They forced DeSoto to flee and to keep moving and to finally leave the American South. So you could hypothetically say the natives of the American south actually beat the Spanish, which very rarely happened. And what happened after is that when the Spanish came back decades later, that entire populations were wiped out. It was completely empty. And it was this eerie moment where the Spanish said, our previous records, these huge bustling cities and complex government, and it's all empty, barely a person.

[Unnamed Speaker]

But. Well, that probably delayed the Spanish from investing in the region earlier than they could have, leaving the opportunity open for the English, because they probably didn't. They would have had to recalculate.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, good point. And so the three European empires are the four European empires in modern America. You have the Spanish who had colonies in Florida, Texas, California and New Mexico. And in Florida, as an example, the Spanish held three forts along the coast. And the entire rest of Florida was inhabited by the warlike Seminole peoples. And with that, the, the, the, the Spanish weren't able to really project power. And the conquest of Florida was intensely difficult because it was all this huge SW and people could only move to Florida en masse after World War II when we developed technology to level the swamp to make Florida habitable, especially to throw disease on top of it. And then you had the French who had two population centers in Quebec and in Louisiana. And the French had these huge networks of forts between Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, and they had a big population center in, down in downstate Illinois called, I think it was Cass Cascania or something. I'm getting that wrong. And the French were mostly doing fur trading and they didn't really have an intention of settling the land. So lots of native peoples were in the French as good graces, but they, they were, they saw the French as a useful ally to have because the French weren't actively trying to depopulate their land. And that was mostly due to. Due to French self interest. And the French claim this huge region from the Rockies, the entire Great Plains, through most of Canada, out to the area around the Appalachian Mountains. And the British and the French fought over western Pennsylvania and upstate New York and loads of those areas. But inside the French region, you had large native confederacies that were allies with the British. For example, the two biggest native confederacies inside the area that was technically French territory were the Cherokee and the Iroquois. And they were both British allies for most of the 18 century.

[Unnamed Speaker]

That is interesting. Why do you think they went with the British over the French? Because the British were living more in the areas that they had either occupied or previously occupied.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Good question. So for the Iroquois. And the Iroquois are a fascinating people. When the French first settled in Quebec, they had no concept of the local tribal wars. So they were allied with one of the local Algonquin peoples. And the Algonquins happened to be at war with the Mohawk. And so French guys are with the Algonquins. They fired on the Mohawk. This war escalated and the French didn't realize that the Mohawk were a subdivision of the powerful Iroquois confederacy.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Oh, right. So it makes sense. The same thing was happening on both sides where you have splits in the. Well, and obviously we know some Indians fought with the French and some with English, but it was kind of more of a. They waded into entangling alliances and that's what kind of triggered the sorting.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Iroquois are one of the most interesting Native American peoples, where they're based out of upstate New York, your homeland. And the reason Albany, New York, was built was that it was across the river from one of the most important Iroquois centers. And the Iroquois were the people of the Longhouse. And either in the 12th or the 15th centuries, they had a great leader named Hiawatha who unified the Iroquois Confederacy to stop their decades of horrific tribal warfare. And the Iroquois were a democracy, and they had multiple tribes where each tribe had the right to vote. And they had a thing called the Great Peace, which was submitting to them. And so they externalized their aggression onto the rest of the continent. And they would tell other groups, do you accept the Great Peace, which is conquest by us? And they stretched from Quebec down to Erie, Pennsylvania. And the Iroquois were by far the most militarily effective of any of the native kingdoms. And they genocided an enormous region from Buffalo to St. Louis. The Iroquois genocided the entire American Midwest because Europe wanted a lot of beaver pelts for fashion purposes. And that region had beavers. And so the natives, in order to get guns and alcohol, just killed off the entire population of. Or the Iroquois killed off the entire population of the Midwest to remove the people from that land in order to kill the beavers there. And this was called the Beaver Wars. And it opened up the Midwest for American settlement because the Iroquois had already depopulated it. And the crazy thing is, Iroquois army has got as far as Missouri and Tennessee. Only the Cherokee were able to stop them from taking the lower Appalachians, because the Cherokee were an equivalently powerful military confederacy.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And so what was the exact connection with the beavers?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Europe wanted to buy beaver pelts. And similarly to how the conquest of Siberia was pushed also by the beaver trade, Europeans set up these forts along the coast, like Albany, where they told the natives, if you can buy get up US beavers, we'll pay you a lot of money. And the natives very rapidly became dependent on trade with the Europeans, where the natives really loved guns, because it radically changed how they fought war. And the natives actually developed a lot of the guerrilla tactics that America uses for certain types of operations. And so they needed to buy guns. And after the other natives bought guns, they also had to. There was an arms race deal going on here. The natives also loved beads and iron knives. And there was a degree of mutual humor where the natives initially didn't see the pelts as expensive or important, and the Europeans didn't see beads or iron weapons as important. So you have these stories of explorers going to a people of Eskimo and saying, hey, we'd like your beaver pelts for some iron knives in both sides are chuckling like, we got such a good deal, but yeah. And the natives were also dependent on alcohol, which is a really sad thing where alcoholism completely killed native society because they didn't go through a multi thousand year, multi thousand year period of developing genetic and cultural traits that help you hold your liquor. So the natives would just hang around all day, every day, knocking back shots of vodka or I don't know what other liquors they had, keeping themselves permanently drunk so they couldn't function as a society. This was the greatest ill of the natives. Where the Europeans normally respected the natives for most of their customs, they thought the natives were honorable and clean and intelligent and brave. But the Europeans said, you guys are complete drunks and it's destroying your society. And the religious revival under Tecumseh, we'll get to a lot of that was dealing with alcohol addiction. So to get the guns, beads and alcohol and iron, they knew from the Europeans, the biggest thing the natives could give as leverage was animal pelts. And so there was this horrific competition for animal pelts. And because this is a society that hadn't had to develop various moral revolutions, the Iroquois felt no qualms about genociding five or six different tribes in order to just get more beaver pelts.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. And then, so it's very similar. It's like the African situation, but instead of slaves, it's beaver pelts. So they're racing each other to get more slaves, to get more guns. And I wonder, I was gonna ask, do you think they kind of ever reflected on that once they saw that their society start to disappear and get totally conquered? Do you think they reflected on, like, how they had just done that to the Midwest or how they had done that a few hundred years ago? Was there kind of an understanding of none of. None of that at all?

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, didn't happen. So the Iroquois were wiped out in the American Revolution. And this is one of the things I think about relatively frequently that as a side theater that barely gets mentioned in any of the histories of the American Revolution, basically the upstate New York guys wiped out the Iroquois Confederacy. And so for native history, the defeat of the Iroquois Confederacy was one of the most important events. But for American history, or the history of even that war, it's seen as insignificant. And it's sad where it speaks to a certain disbalance where America could wipe out the natives past a certain threshold with almost no effort, because we had Military superiority, technological superiority, organizational superiority, the numeric superiority. Actually, though, a lot of Americans were very impressed at how well the Natives could fight, especially for guerrilla warfare. But the Americans had very key advantages in defensive war, fort maintenance and cavalry, at least up to a certain point with cavalry, where a lot of the enormous European defeats over the Natives between the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru or the defeat of Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames river was due to American cavalry charging in like knights. And also the Americans could fortify key geographic reason regions and put artillery there. And the Natives had zero way to at least except for Pontiac. The Natives really struggled with taking forts. And so the Americans could gradually establish forts with farming and then push the Natives back like a tide.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. It's the same thing with the Scottish and the Normans and the English and the Normans where you don't have the technology to counter forts. And it seems like there was probably a hundred year, 200 year period where it was already over for the Iroquois before it was actually officially done. Like there was no way way back, basically in terms of the numbers and the trends and I guess it's kind of like we replaced their great piece with our great piece.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. Afterwards, the Iroquois moved to Canada because they allied with the British and now they have reservations in the Canadian Arctic, which is one of those sad things that Native history. So many Native people just get batted west. Where the Delaware people from the area around Philadelphia, they ended up in Oklahoma. The Cherokee ended up in Oklahoma, same thing as the Seminoles. Some of the native peoples like Algonquin ended out, ended up in Wisconsin. And so we would frequently shove the natives thousands of miles from their homelands to give them crappy lands that we didn't want. And with Oklahoma in the Indian reservation that was kept as an independent state, that we had carved out the entire rest of the west for native land. And we brought all the natives from the Southeast, the Seven Civilized Tribes, out to Oklahoma in the mid 19th century. And that was called the Trail of Tears. And it only barely passed through Congress through one vote because the north didn't want to give the south extra power by populating a lot of the the South. And so this area called Indian Territory had all of these native tribes. Well, Texas, Arkansas, Kansas were populated by the whites. And my ancestors were actually in the Indian Territory buying up land early because we had partial native ancestry. And then in the 1890s we just said, psych, no, we're sending whites into Oklahoma. So we had, we had double crossed these Native Peoples twice.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. The deal just kept getting worse and worse and worse. Like. Like Darth Vader or something. Yeah. And it is interesting about the Cherokee kind of getting booted out that late, because at that point they had become fairly ingrained with the Western society. Not in that they were Western or anything, but just that they. They had formed relatively stable relationships for a while at that point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, that was true of a lot of the tribes in the Southeast or the Seven Civilized Tribes. And the Cherokee, they were also a federal democracy. They developed their own Alphabet. They also practiced capitalism. They would own slaves and do plantation agriculture. The natives of Oklahoma actually fought for the confederacy in the Civil War because they were also slave owners. And there was more unity and trade between the natives and the whites than we give credit. Where, for example, there's this huge thing called. There was the Carolinas trade, which did involve some slaves or enslaved some natives, but not equivalent to blacks at all in number, which is why I think black people are like. They're like less than 10% Native American ancestry, which is still significantly more than whites. And Carolina trademark. The Cherokee were roped into the British alliance after the Anglo Cherokee wars because they were dependent upon trade from the Carolinas, where you had the Carolinas merchants who went to the south and then you had the Pennsylvania merchants who went to the Midwest. And so the native peoples of the, like, Midwest south region, they became allies of the British and dependent upon the British because they were reliant upon traders from the East Coast.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Okay. Yeah. And like you said, they. They. A lot of them fought against the north in the Civil War, which makes sense, I guess, because it's. They fought with the English against the north during the Revolution. So maybe there's kind of a connection there. Like they. It's the Yankee imperialists versus the Southerners and the Indians teaming up. Kind of like actually in Texas politics, there's a famous allegory about whenever the, like, Scotch Irish and the Mexican kind of Texas independence, kind of whenever those two groups work together, they're able to fight against the government. And when they're split up.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

So it's kind of a continuation of that modern political trend.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's like how Zionists and anti Semites have worked together, or the KKK and the Black Panthers have worked together at different points because they'll often end up with convergent interests. And to finally get to the east coast, the natives gradually lost more and more leverage as the scale of American society grew. Because when the first British settled in the east coast, with areas like Jamestown or, or Plymouth Rock is that in the first few years the natives were genuinely able to put the English on their toes. And there was a significant worry that the natives could just wipe out the English colony colonies where in Jamestown, for example, they were pushing up against the pretty large Wampanoag confederacy which held the entire Great Lakes region. And then as the English society grew and it got exponentially more powerful where keep in mind, America's population doubled every 15 years in the colonial period. And about a million people migrated from England to the American seaboard in the colonial period. And the entire native population was probably like half a million of the entire continent. So the English got a numeric superiority where the Iroquois were able to keep the Americans on the defensive for over about 150 years. And then once we hit critical mass from time, the American Revolution, we crushed them immediately. Same thing with the Cherokee and the tribes of the east coast fell pretty quickly. And the natives were able to establish a line along the Appalachians due to the Iroquois and the confederacy, sorry, the Iroquois and the Cherokee being powerful enough. And then we just steamrolled across the entire continent. 1790 to 1850. Meanwhile, for the Spanish colonies, that was the opposite. The Spanish were actually waging a defensive war because their colonies were so sclerotic and primitive. Where the. Where the Apache and the Comanche had forced the Spanish into this declining position, where they were frequently scared to even leave their walled compounds, where the Alamo was a walled compound because the Comanche were such a terrible threat. Same thing with the Seminoles in Florida. The Pueblo actually launched a successful revolt in New Mexico where the Spanish conquered New Mexico in 1590 and they controlled it for a century. And then the local natives actually drove out the Spanish for I think a decade.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. The, the Spanish colonialism, especially as it got further north into, you know, the borders of. Of Texas, looked like a. It seems like a really kind of sad and low energy expedition. Like there was just a few traces of them kind of spreading up north. Previous conquistadors and they had basically totally lost touch and connection with Spain and they had really kind of brutal living conditions and they were not really expanding very fast. It was, yeah, pretty sparse and, and rough. Rough life kind of got beat down, lost their momentum.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The native wars after America lost into. After America gained independence. None of them were serious wars. The US thought about where the US actually tried to maintain a skeleton military over the time of the 19th century, where people would joke after the US Civil War, where the US mobilized this army of millions of people immediately dismantled all of them. And people would draw cartoons of the American army being populated by skeletons because we were that low government and that very small military is able to wipe out the native confederacies. And the one major resistance was with Tecumseh. And before the American Revolution, Pontiac launched a successful revolt where the French and Indian wars, where most of the natives helped the French. After the British conquered Canada and everything east of the Mississippi, the natives under Pontiac launched a revolt that conquered. It knocked out every British fort west of the Appalachians, except Detroit, I think. And they did it simultaneously by this ambush, because Pontiac had built up a coalition of every Midwestern people against the British. And the British were finally able to put down Pontiac's Revolt in a relatively big battle in central Pennsylvania. That's why the British signed the deal that Americans couldn't populate west of the Appalachians because Pontiac's war was. Was expensive enough that the British didn't want to drop a field army in North America. And the British got more money from fur trading. They did from the Anglo American settlers. And so the British said, anglo Americans, you can't go west of the Appalachians. And it's crazy to see the British actually defending the native interests. And then that was one of the biggest spurs of the American Revolution because fundamentally, the Americans were growing so fast they could not stay east of the Appalachians.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. And if the Americans were out there collecting the furs, they probably would have had a higher margin when they were selling to the British. Yeah, we'd rather make those deals with.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The natives or the French, who were the big fur traders. The British actually treated the French. The British liked the French Canadians more than the British Americans because the French Canadians were obedient. And after Pontiac failed, the Americans pretty quickly conquered most of the territory east of the Mississippi. But then in The War of 1812, a war everyone forgets, the natives put up a really good fight that. That it's sad that no one brings it up. Where Tecumseh was a prophet from modern Illinois or Indiana, I think. And Tecumseh had a spiritual experience where he broke out of his family issues and alcoholism. And he said, we can't keep living like this as natives, the whites are going to take all of our land. And so Tecumseh founded a new religion and he built a place called Prophetstown, Illinois. And he built up a confederacy of all the native peoples from the Gulf of Mexico up to the Canadian Arctic. So all the native peoples of the American Midwest, they were all allied under Tecumseh and Tecumseh put up a genuine fight against the Americans in the War of 1812. And I have an ancestor actually died of fighting Tecumseh's armies in modern Indiana. And Tecumseh's armies were ultimately wiped out at the Battle of Thames river in modern Canada because he had crossed over to Canada to fight with the British against the American invasion of Canada. And I've actually been in the Battle of Thames where the Americans just wiped out Tecumseh's entire army in one battle through using a cavalry charge because the natives didn't know how to fight cavalry.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Wow. So more of that theme that you mentioned earlier.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And it's kind of like when they realize, you know, this is a last gasp chance and everybody gets together is pretty interesting. I definitely don't think about that as a. As a major factor in the War of 1812. I think about fighting the British in Quebec and Andrew Jackson. Fighting the British. Were. Were. Was Tecumseh a bigger part of that war than the English themselves?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So for the course of American history, beating Tecumseh was important because it gave us the entire Midwest. However, it didn't actually cost us that much effort versus fighting the British. And this is. I find it sad. Tecumseh is ostensibly a great man. You look at the course of his life and you're like, if this guy had been born white, he would have probably been president and would have been a renowned cultural figure of the 1800s. But because he was a Native, psych. It's pretty impressive. Founding religion, unifying entire Midwest, allying with the British. Because These are like 12 different native conditions. And the Americans were like, psych. No, one battle. And after Tecumseh, there's lots of Native peoples that resisted very heroically only to lose, such as the Comanche, the Apache, or the Sioux. And these have been remembered in American history, like the Battle of Little Bighorn with where we, the Natives, wiped out Custer's army out in Montana. And the Sioux. The Sioux were a people from the area of Minnesota around Duluth, and they had been batted west by the Americans. No, not by the Americans. This was in the 18th century where the Spanish dropped horses into the New World because the New World didn't have domesticated animals like horses or they didn't have the wheel. And then the natives of the Great Plains started taking a liking to the horses, where their entire society became horse cultures like the Mongols. And they would follow these herds of thousands of buffalo. And they were very advanced hunter, gatherers and they were the tallest and the healthiest populations in the world because their entire diet was meat. And they have this innate dynamism and heroism to. To them that Americans used to think a lot or a lot of our art was based around the Plains Natives, where they have the big feather hats and the spears, and they built up some confederacy, like the Sioux or the Comanche, that put up a fight. But the Sioux started out with Minnesota, and I think they were pushed west because the Iroquois genocided modern Ontario. That was the Huron, and the Huron migrated to Wisconsin. And so there was a ripple migration from the Beaver wars, and the Sioux genocided the area of the Dakotas in Montana, and they moved out to the Great Plains, becoming a Plains people. And it's crazy that people talk about the standing rock being bad because first of all, you know, the whole standing rock controversy with the pipeline.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yes, I do. I know a lot about that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Several things that pipeline is actually important in the context of Canadian politics, where it's. It's part of Alberta's plan to connect with America. But also, first of all, it doesn't actually go through any Native reservations or anything the natives have held for a very long time. And secondarily, the Sioux aren't even from the Black Hills, and they say the Black Hills are holy in the same way the entire country of Israel is holy to Christians. But the Sioux genocide of the Black hills in the 18th century moved out there, and they're not native to that region. And I should probably say, oh, I forgot to say this, but it's important. When I was in fourth grade, we studied Native Americans and our textbook said the Native. The Iroquois were peaceful. I showed it to my dad. My dad burst into laughter. He's been saying this ever since because he's like, if the education system says that the Iroquois are peaceful, it's propaganda. Because the Iroquois genocide at a thousand mile area in most Native American tribes saw 20 to 40% of their men die every generation in warfare. And that's vastly higher than any urbanized, literate society. So this was a very warlike, genocidal society.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And that's. Right. That's like one of the highest rates. And this misconception also ties into this pipeline situation, Right. Because we can only see the natives as oppressed and noble and really caring about the environment. Right. So when they start to complain about the pipeline coming through their land, we take it really seriously. And where they're like, oh, wow, wow. So what they were doing is they didn't care about the pipeline they wanted more money.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Because they. They realized they could leverage the situation. And so when they made a stink about it, so many white people freaked out about the pipeline being built through the Native land that they protested it so hard that they couldn't get any pipeline built. And then so the. The Native started complaining because they're like, no, we actually want a deal. We're trying to. We're trying to generate leverage for more money. And you're making it so that this project isn't going to go through at all and we're not going to get any money. And that was the real situation. And these white people are just like, yeah, water rights. Water rights.

[Rudyard Lynch]

My sister went to a college in Canada, and I was. I was. For graduation or something, they had a speech where they said, because Canada has this whole land acknowledgment thing, which is kind of silly, because Canada didn't really have any Indian wars. They mostly bought out the lands peacefully. And the Mounties, or the Canadian Mounted Police, they were actually fair. The Mounties would defend the rights of the Natives and defend their land. And so white people weren't as rapacious. And there wasn't that much fighting besides a brief rebellion in the 1850s by mixed race for the Metis people in Manitoba. But they said, this land belongs to the Haudenosaunee, which is the Iroquois. And the Haudenosaunee fucking genocide of the region from the Huron in the 17th century. It belongs to the.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I wonder how the Huron would. Would feel about it. Right? The guys that killed them are like, we are the Huron. We are escapos, the land. And the Huron, like, are you kidding me?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And with them. So the final point is, after the railroad especially, it was doomed for the Natives. And something as well for the Natives of the Plains, is that the revolver that can shoot multiple shots at once, that was the death knell of the Natives in the Plains because they used mobile cavalry to counteract white people. And in the muskets, fire one shot, take 15 seconds to reload, fire another. And so the Natives had enough advantage that they could give the whites some hurt before the revolver, after the revolver, white people could just completely wipe out the Natives from the plains. And so there's lots of heroic resistance from people like Geronimo or Crazy Horse, who have become sort of American legends, more so in the past when we cared about the Wild West. But these were not wars the US Exerted a lot of effort into. And there were, frankly, no way the Natives were going to win. And it's really sad to see this once proud people be shoved into these reservations where they're effectively, they're effectively dependents on the US Government, where they're dependent on welfare, they're stuck in the same lands, they have horrible drug issues. And yes, some of the reservations have used casinos to get wealthy. But if you look at statistics, Native Americans are some of the worst off groups where they. A lot of the reservations are practically third world countries. In most statistics they do worse than black people. They have horrific murder and crime rates. And so it's sad to see the former masters of this continent be pushed to this.

[Unnamed Speaker]

It's really sad too because you can see they hit the same trend as basically every other group did when they got stuck in welfare traps. It just happened much, much earlier for them. So it's like you have these people saying they're noble savages, these people saying that they can't live in Western society or whatever. They, they're not capable of it, etc and then we create like a self fulfilling prophecy through dependence that then colors people's image of them in a way that would have been impossible if you actually saw them in their prime.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

One and yeah. The other just quick. The other gun that made a big difference was the 30. 30.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Lever action Winchester. I think there's a stat that it's killed more deer and Indians than any other gun in the In.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Right.

[Unnamed Speaker]

The history is the John Wayne gun. Yeah. That stat might not be true, but when I was. It's the reputation.

[Rudyard Lynch]

When I was a kid I had a toy Winchester. And so one of the points I want to state, and this is something that we don't think about as a society, but it's really important is that you can't automatically change a culture. And so I can empathize with Native Americans because the amount of collective trauma these people have suffered and the amount of just derailment they've faced is so horrifying that if they never recover, I would not blame them because they're like an edge case of one of the populations that suffered the most. Although the US after conquering them has been nicer than most conquerors in history would be. Especially how small a percent of the population they are. And that's why it's an edge case.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, those two things combined.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, that's a good point. And also when you look at certain groups, you even see this with like Irish or Italian or Scottish Americans. Even different groups of white Americans have to go through multi generational or multicentury processes of assimilating. Into modern culture. And if white people struggle with that process, if Indians or Chinese who are still urbanized civilizations going back thousands of years, struggle with that process. Native Americans who were mostly hunter gatherers or petty agriculturalists until 200 years ago, they don't have to bridge a 500 year cultural gap, they have to bridge thousands of years. Because the native kingdoms in North America before the time of European colonization, they were what Europe and the Middle east were at in like 8,000, 7,000 BC. And so you can't just expect a population to learn and develop all the traits that industrial civilization has. And it's, it's kind of a tragedy.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It's very similar to when we talked about the Europeans having these discussions 3,000 years ago. Like there was the tension between the nomadic and the farmer lifestyle and they would glorify the farmers who glorify the nomads as more like connected, you know, noble and their connection with. I don't know, I forget the way you described it. But the, the farmers and, and Neolithic Europe, yeah. Looked up to the hunter gatherers in similar ways that we view the Europe, the natives, 200 years ago.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm going to end on this story. But for example, there was this endeavor in the late 1800s to forcibly assimilate the natives, to put them in white boarding schools and to give them farmland to just farm as independent commercial farmers. And I don't like stuff like that because I think it's innately immoral to hurt a society's folkways and organic culture, that thing modernity struggles with. And we were doing that to white people at the same time as we were doing it to the natives, although the natives had it worse. And the natives would often refuse to farm because they saw using the plow as hurting Mother Earth, because they felt this animistic connection with the earth and they thought it was a moral sin to cut up the earth. And also this was a society where men never farmed and they saw farming as innately feminine. And those who didn't have private property, all of their land was owned by the tribe. And so I'm going to use that to finish to show that this is a people who was stuck in the wrong era of history against, against their own consent. And so catch you next time for Mexico. This video is too long. Okay.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, it was a, it was a bit long. Yeah, they had some conceptions of property like apple tree, you know, that didn't belong to the whole tribe. But in general. Yeah, you're right, it was the same. Oh, right, that too. Or whatever. Whatever crop. And then, you know, the schools in Canada were really, really brutal. As an example. Like they would do medical testing on the Indians and there was one village where you can see there's like tunnels connecting all the houses where they do medical experiments below. Yeah, yeah, the similar. The force of civilization was brutal. Should have just let them trade and develop on their own terms. But yeah, good video.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay, sounds good, man. Bye.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Peace.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Wait, no. And meaning for. Oh yeah. Merch by Merch Link buy merch.

[Austin Padgett]

History102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.