My buddy and colleague Caleb Howe did a very nice job on dismantling the dolts who can’t tell an alternate history map of hypothetical Native American tribes in the modern day with an actual map of pre-Columbian Native American nations:
You want to complain about education? Here is my complaint: we don’t teach attention to detail or critical thinking. People accept as true something that confirms the beliefs they already bitterly cling to. So this work of fiction becomes an indictment of the racist nature of education in America because some people never saw it and, once they did, just accepted as true a premise that comes from … well who knows? As I said, the date is literally directly on it.
…especially the point that there is at least one actual map that tries to work out who was where at the time Columbus showed up; and that it turns out that it’s far more complex than said alternate history map*. But I wanted to really drill down on the incurious dolts who passed this one along with out looking at it. Let’s take a look at two things there (both circled).
Caleb saw the ‘2015’ and immediately twigged to it being made up. Good: that’s exactly why the person who put the map together put the date there. However, note the other circled name. ‘Anasazi.’
:pause:
The Anasazi disappeared several centuries prior to the appearance of Christopher Columbus (which means that they wouldn’t actually be on a hypothetical 1491 map anyway). Nobody really knows what happened to them, but it’s probably the most well-known mystery about the Native American nations: sufficiently so that I would actually expect that the people crying smug tears over the lost Arcadias of pre-Columbian North America would actually, you know, know about it. For Heaven’s sake: UFOlogists knew about it, people**. Which is to say: I judge you, ye over-sensitive cultural sin-eaters.
I judge.
Moe Lane
*Which is not the alternate history map’s fault. It was meant to entertain, not justify new and exciting levels of smug. Heck, it might have even been drawn deliberately wrong, in order to provoke an edifying debate in the appropriate forum. This is done all the time.
**I apologize for UFOlogists for making this comparison. I don’t know where the Hell is everybody, either.
The Olmec had disappeared by 300 BC. No one knows why their culture declined either. Probably UFOs too
Whereas, I saw the Chumash label and my brain immediately went to
“His penis got diseases from a Chumash tribe”.
My inner cartogra-nerd weeps. It is, as the kids say, all about Teh Feeeeeels.
This particular lefty meme hasn’t yet graced my FB feed. Perhaps it got shot down before my usual suspect friends got a hold of it.
So glad I stopped checking Facebook.
^ this
ditto
I shall keep this in mind if I need to club this particular fallacy like a baby harp seal.
.
Mew
I already focused in on the Iroquois.* I knew they were not the tribes in Michigan, they were in the upper New York state area.
Now, if you wanted to do a game set in 2015 with this map, then – hey, lots of fun!
*I’m in Michigan, so I went to the Great Lakes first.
If it’s any consolation, I was surprised to see Montana tribes dominating Shoshone-Bannock territory.
I don’t know why I should be so surprised by small, relatively peaceful forest dwelling tribes crossing three mountain ranges not known for useful passes and completely displacing a large, warlike desert dwelling tribe.
When Columbus arrived, various tribes of the Mississippian culture dominated the, er, Mississippi valley and southeast. Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi were NOT Cherokee territory. In fact, when the Cherokee were later asked about the earthworks along the Etowah river, they said they’d “always been there” and “no one ever lived there”.
.
Except Hernando de Soto had camped either at that site or one remarkably like it, when it was occupied by people who quite clearly had built it.
.
After the French exterminated the last Mississippian tribe, the Natchez, the survivors fled to the Cherokee, but the Cherokee were newcomers to the region in comparison.
The idea of borders is the giveaway.
According to the book The Empire of the Summer Moon, the lives of the Comanche were nasty, brutish & short before Columbus arrived — bringing horses with him. They were a mountain-dwelling tribe in modern-day Colorado. Their mastery of mounted warfare allowed them to turn the tables on the Plains tribes who had previously dominated them. Only then did they move to the southern Plains.