Hey guys! Love this AMA panel and the subject. Threw up a crosspost on /r/IndianCountry as well.

My questions: The Ghost Dance movement was feared and seen by the United States government as a threat and a potential point for Native Americans to reignite the Indian Wars on the Plains and potentially other areas of the country. Was this perceived threat actually credible enough to warrant the response it received?

The summary for /u/RioAbajo states that pre-colonial Native American history strongly influenced the course of European colonialism. Perhaps in a general explanation, how is this so?

Love this sub, love its mods. (Another /r/IndianCountry voice chiming in with questions.)

Confession

My community is Pamunkey and I've tended to overspecialize in Virginia both in my undergraduate years and as to my personal studies before and thereafter. Some of this knowledge is almost mandatory to not sound like an idiot in some settings.

That said, between my biases, focus, and thin scholarship, I have a weak understanding of Native American Revolt, Rebellion, and Resistance among modern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and DC.

Question

Could your panel provide guidance as to becoming more conversant on the aforementioned areas?

Bonus Question

How would you summarize Piscataway Presence, Revolt, Rebellion, and Resistance in the Pre-modern Period? (Sources and research guidance please!)

I've read the works of Dr. Gabrielle Tayac (including her self-cited thesis: "To Speak with One Voice": Supra-tribal American Indian Collective Identity Incorporation Among the Piscataway, 1500-1998), the works of Dr. Helen Rountree (Powhatan Foreign Relations, et al.), and I've taken selective deep dives into primary source documentation. This community is particularly challenging because of factionalism, bias and partisanship among community sources, liberties with the record, and the gaping void in the records (save contested church records) between the Piscataway polity's (and arguably main body of the Tribe) exodus from MD in the late 1600s and their 20th Century reorganization. I found the Fallen Timbers account questionable to the point of being mind-bending and I'm still reeling from having read it.

Thank you for hosting this and apologies for occasionally rambling.

Let's flip things slightly and talk about resistance's bedmate, collaboration. I've found that, at the extremes at least, it can sometimes be hard to tell the two apart.

So how did native societies and populations adjust to the European presence? Were local elites able to preserve their positions? What compromises were made with colonial officials (or that the latter were forced to make)? How much of the subsequent colonial society was a product of such interactions, as opposed to simply being imposed by Europeans?

And so on. Those questions are a bit broad but hopefully you get the gist.

Did the Iberian conquistadores appeal to ideas of Just War to justify their enslavement of native populations?

One of the arguments that Peter Silver makes in Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America is that Native Americans in Pennsylvania practiced a form of "terrorism" (for lack of a better word) in their conflicts with colonists that was designed to target and play into the colonists' fears and anxieties about native Americans. For example, they would target isolated settlements and farmsteads and deliberately arrange the corpses in grotesque tableaus for other colonists to find. Silver argues that this ultimately backfired as it created an "anti-Indian sublime" that encouraged increasingly violent attacks on ALL native Americans, leading to incidents like the Paxton boys murdering praying Indians.

I have two questions - is Silver's argument credible? And do you see this kind of "creativity" in indigenous-colonial conflict elsewhere in space and time?

How did life on Jesuit/Franciscan missions in Latin America and the U.S. Southwest affect various Native peoples' ideas of gender/men's and women's roles? I'm especially interested in ways that in retrospect we can see gender being used as a force for control (political or religious) or resistance, regardless of conscious intention at the time. But since I know so very little about this topic, I'm interested in everything!

Why was no Native American group able to establish a state in North America? It would seem that it would heavily behoove the British to build and support buffer states between the United States and Canada, especially in area of relatively politically advanced and densely populated areas such as the Great Lakes area and the Pacific Northwest.

Did any Native American groups attempt to establish such states on their own? If so, did they appeal to European powers for support?

I'm curious: I am not familiar with some of the examples that were mentioned in the bios above. Could you expand on the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 for me? My familiarity with successful revolts of the subaltern in the Americas begins and ends with the Haitian Revolution so I am very curious to hear more about this and other similar examples.

Also, thank you for doing this! This is such a fascinating topic, I can't wait to read all the answers!

Two questions about the Indian Wars of 1811-1815.

1. How broad was Tecumseh's coalition? How wide a base of geographical support did he have? Was there a clear territorial goal in his mind on the level of British proposals for an Indian buffer state in the Ghent negotiations?

2. Similarly, who were the Red Stick Creeks? My impression is that their support was far narrower than Tecumseh's was.

/u/itsalrightwithme, we read conquistador relacions that seem full of bravado, claims of great deeds, and a sense of inevitable conquest. I'm wondering if in your research you see behind the veneer of colonial control, and what that inside perspective looks like. Were Spain and Portugal ever worried this whole colony/empire thing might come crashing down? When did it seem most tenuous? What would keep investors and wannabe conquistadors up at night, plagued with worry?

/u/Yawarpoma, reading las Casas A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is absolutely gut-wrenching. What is the consensus on it's accuracy? Should we read it as a realistic insight into the carnage in the Caribbean (and beyond), or does he intentionally sensationalize to the point that one must be wary of using him as a source?

So growing up in and going to university in Southeastern New England, we were constantly taught about King Phillip's (or Metacomet if you want to be an originalist about it) War and it's effects on the New England colonies in the 17th century.

The way the war was always presented to us is that Metacomet and his allies came perilously close to expelling the Europeans from New England, though they failed to do so, and the explanations we were given always varied. I know the war was extremely devastating to the colonist population in New England (proportionally speaking), but was the war really that devastating? How close was Metacomet in actually wiping out the colonists presence in New England?

TLDR: Did King Philip's War actually come close to expelling the colonists from New England? And if so, why did it ultimately fail?

Not necessarily a question, just wanted to say to /u/anthropology_nerd how much I loved his myth-busting of the Americas and how informative it was, I link to that thread fairly often for its usefulness!

To what extent did native americans turn to banditry as a form of resistance? If they did was it romanticized in any way and did any such romanticization feed back into the motivations of later bandits?

/u/Mictlantecuhtli, you know I stink at Mexican history, but I'm trying to learn. Can you set the stage for me for the Mixton War? How does this relate to the growing Spanish influence and spread out of the capital? What Native allies joined the Spanish and how did the Mixton conflict influence further wars of conquest in greater Mexico?

Were the mining operations of Potosi or Zacatecas ever under threat of work stoppages or open indigenous revolt prior to the 19th century?

Were anything vaguely like work strikes or slowdowns something that the administrations could accommodate without getting all murdery?

What exactly is Texcoco de Mora does have anything to do with the chichimec tribes of Northern Mexico and would my last name be influenced by it?

How badly outnumbered were Indian tribes during the settlement of, say, California, or Oklahoma? When we discuss "Indian removal," just how many white settlers are we talking about versus the number of Indians already living there?

negotiate their position in an emerging global economy

So, about that.

The basic (old world centric) narrative about the new world economy for non area experts has usually been about the region's importance in the world economy as an exporter of specie (and eventually cash crops). But my intuition about the whole thing, as a total neophyte, is that direct participation in such activities, on the part of natives, must be heavily overstated, and probably leads one to think of the new world economy as being far more monolithic than it actually is.

So can someone, particularly wrt central mexico or northern south america, speak more about the internal economy of the Americas before and after contact? For example, in the initial decades of conquest, Spanish colonists had only very tenuous control over the territory they claimed on paper and essentially had no presence in the hinterlands. But surely the massive economic restructuring of areas that were under Spanish control had knock on effects on economies even at the periphery? Changes regarding what kind of things were produced, who they were traded to, what they were traded for, how production decisions are made and by who, which regions prospered and which declined, etc.

Considering that French colonialism is the Americas (with the exception of places like Haiti) is much different than English or Spanish, how did the natives use the French? From the (very little) I've read (since in focused on the national picture than colonial) the French and Natives were much nicer to each other because the French never looked to outright own all the land and actively worked on trade.

I believe South America is still largely Catholic. How important were independent (of the Catholic Church) churches to indigenous revolts? Do any of the revolt era churches survive to today?

Was there ever a Pan-Native movement that attempted to develop a unified American Native identity?

What factors played a role in the natives' failure to resist US and European expansion in north america?

Were there instances of male indigenous elite marrying European women during the early colonial period?

We hear about Aztec or Andean princesses marrying Spaniards, but how about the princes? How were these and other such matches in other territories received?

This question comes as a result of the answers of /u/drylaw and /u/400-Rabbits in this thread, but I hope anyone can shed light on it.

How much autonomy did the Tlaxcalans end up with in the aftermath of the fall of Tenochtitlan? Did they become politically less or more independent of the Spanish than they had been of the Aztecs?

How did Kateri Tekakwitha become a saint? Does she blend local beliefs in with christian ones?

What's the story behind the massacre at Mystic? How did it happen? Was it seen as justified by the white settlers?

Is the myth of the walking purchase true? Did both side uphold their end of the bargain fairly?

Ok, this is a general question coming from much ignorance, and is probably best suited to /u/Reedstilt though anyone can chime in.

It is my layman's impression that relations between French settlers in Quebec and Canada generally were better than those between the English colonies that would make up the future US. I'm thinking in particular of the French and Indian Wars of the mid-1700s, which (I'm sure this is a gross over-simplification) were between the French and their Native allies and the English colonists.

So my question is: if this is true (big if), why were there such better relations further north than in the British colonies?

More broadly for the entire panel, do we seen any differences in how native polities interact with different European groups? There's obviously only a few places where we might be able to see natives in contact with two (or more) European powers, but can they grant us any insights into the native view of the Europeans?

(I'm thinking in what is now the Gulf coast of the US might be somewhere you'd find rival empires; maybe Dutch vs English in early New York; Spanish vs Portuguese in South America or the Caribbean? But I know nothing about this topic, so please educate me with whatever you know best!)

Did Native polities ever have access to gun and gunpowder making technology prior to the 19th century? Did they ever make their own?

Can you say a few words on the choice of the name "Haiti" for post-revolution Saint-Domingue?

What was a Peace and Friendship Treaty as understood by the English and how was it understood by the indigenous people who also signed? I know there were several groups here in Canada that signed them, but for the sake of place and people, let's say the one of those signed with the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet.

Also, do we know how linguistic differences / translation errors affected understanding, in accidental or deliberate ways? I remember reading some garbled translation for "high treason" given as "knocking off the Queen's bonnet" on display at the Museum of Civilization, with the indigenous accused protesting his innocence, owing to the fact he'd never MET the Queen, let alone did anything to her hat.

Thanks for this. If any of yous read The Tribes and The States, how would you comment on it?

This question is a bit of a general, probably large one, but I'm curious about the colonization efforts of the Spanish in northern South America (the countries of Columbia and Venezuela). This is the area that will lead to Bolivar and the fight for independence, but how did natives fare in this region before, during, and after Spanish colonization?

Hi, I'm very interested in native history. Does anyone know of any European or conquistadors that denounce their ruler to join or fight with the natives population. Thanks!

Thanks for the info!

I would like some specific examples concerning European rule and ways indigenous people resisted rule, also how they negotiated and accommodated European rule? Thank you for any information over this specific topic of 16th Century Colonial Latin America.