Scottish Independence: Quebec Edition

[Valmy]

Wars of total conquest like in Europe, where you annex one's village to  yours and subdue the new subjects?  Not so much.  Did it happen? Not really.  Was it frequent?  No. Was it the norm? No.

Then how did they get those huge tribal confederations and empires?  Seems like you would have to subdue new subjects to me.

[Tamas]

Could somebody rename this thread to "Two guys from Quebec want independence badly" please?

Well there's two things mongers and Tamas having in common - both live in the UK and both are whiny bitches.

Come on, it is the Scottish Independence thread, and I can summarise almost half of it as follows:

"Viper/Grallon: QUEBEC's INDEPENDENCE IS DESERVED AND NECESSARY
Others: well there are two sides to that argument
Viper/Grallon: NO
Others: yes
Viper/Grallon: NO
etc
"

[garbon]

Could somebody rename this thread to "Two guys from Quebec want independence badly" please?

Well there's two things mongers and Tamas having in common - both live in the UK and both are whiny bitches.

Come on, it is the Scottish Independence thread, and I can summarise almost half of it as follows:

"Viper/Grallon: QUEBEC's INDEPENDENCE IS DESERVED AND NECESSARY
Others: well there are two sides to that argument
Viper/Grallon: NO THERE ISN'T
Others: yes there is
Viper/Grallon: NO THERE ISN'T
etc
"

Tamas is to create summaries as Mart is to creating analogies?

[Tamas]

Being half a page long does not by default makes an argument any more relevant or correct or interesting than a simple yes/no.

[Valmy]

I did like them explaining how Scotland should not be suckered by the British government like they were by Canada's...because the situations are perfectly analogous for some reason.

[Malthus]

Iroquois and Hurons were semi-nomadics, staying in one place for about a decade, until the land production started to decay and game was rarer.  Once that happenned, they moved to another location.
Quite often you would see women managing the fields and men hunting during summer&fall.

And they were using most of the animal.  You wouldn't see north american indians, on the east coast at least, hunting solely for trophy.  Or for just one part of the animal.  Skin, bones, meat, horns, everything was used.  That changed with the European's arrival.


Take the Montagnais (Innus nowadays, for most of them) for example.  Their territory extended from northern Quebec and Labrador, close to the Inuits to the St-Lawrence river, on both side.  They were hunting and fishing all accross the area, established non permament camps, and go back to a winter village.  Once people got to old to follow, they were left behind.

Iroquois and Hurons were semi-nomads, meaning they had agriculture, but instead of using lay-farming, they were simply moving elsewhere, letting the land "heal".  they could move to a place for 10 years, and come back near their original place 10 years later.

This isn't "semi-nomadic". They moved villages to be sure, but that did not stop them from coinsidering a defined territory as their territory, and defending it against outsiders intent on encroaching.

The Innuit of course had a completly different lifestyle, and the pre-columbian Huron or Iroquis were, quite frankly, more "like us" than they were like the Innuit.

Individual property of the land was non existant.  No individual could possess land, land was not seem as a commodity to be traded, unlike, say, a woman, for some tribes.

We have exactly zero evidence that this was the case. We simply do not know how they felt about land ownership.

Relatively modern-day Algonkians certainly have claimed heritary rights to traplines (basically, hunting grounds) - and they were, and are, nore 'primitive'.

Warfare was made for various reasons, most often to capture slaves from other tribes.  Women and children, sometimes warriors.  Sometimes they were adopted in the tribe, sometimes not.  Sometimes they were boiled and eaten.  Sometimes they were burned alive.  Sometimes they were cooked over a great fire, sometimes not.

But examples of one tribe launching a war of extermination, or domination, over another tribe are pretty rare.  I can think of "canniabalistic" raids, when food was scarce, where one tribe would hunt another tribe for food, somewhere around 1100-1200, IIRC, mostly in the southern US.  No such evidence in north east NA, so far.

So, the actual evidence to the contrary - posted above - doesn't change your mind on this point?

Mound culture aside, for wich we don't know much, it was totally different than ancient Israelites, or Hittites, or Egyptians. These people had well defined territories and fortified permanent cities made of stone.  Iroquois, Hurons, Micmacs, Algonquins, Montagnais... they had nothing of the sort.  The best you could expect would be a walled city made of woods. Something that could be easily dismantled.

In the prairies, the introduction of the horses and various epidimics certainly made them nomads, buffalo hunters, mostly.
Prior to the first european contacts, say, 1200-1300, I have no ideas how they lived exactly, if they were semi-nomads like the Hurons of the 1600s*, or if they were totally sedentary like ancient Egyptians.

Of course, they were quick to adapt to Europeans arrivals.  Iroquois tried to establish their own little empire, selling lands of other tribes to English and Dutch merchants, and establishing themselves as intermediaries between the tribes of the Ohio valley and the French&English merchants for the fur trades.  This is what led to the Beaver Wars: control of the resources for the Iroquois to be the sole, exclusive dealers with European buyers.

Specific to warfare, prior to European arrivals, you wouldn't see wars of extermination in eastern north america.  It's not that they lived along merrily, just that there was lots of space for not so many people.  There was ritual cannibalism in some tribes, boiling and eating a captive.  There was torture, it's something anyone with a Catholic education in Quebec will certainly learn in school (torture of the missionaries by the Iroquois tribes).  There were wars to supplement one's tribes with captives from another, but the goal was not to kill everyone of tribe X to take their lands.  Push them out of the way, sure.  Capture women, children, and warriors for torture, sure.  Wars of extermination?  Not so much.  Wars of total conquest like in Europe, where you annex one's village to  yours and subdue the new subjects?  Not so much.  Did it happen? Not really.  Was it frequent?  No. Was it the norm? No.

Again, the evidence that exists demonstrates the contrary - that the "Beaver Wars" were not a unique event, but a continuation of wars that had happened long before Europeans arrived, whivch had been (briefly) interrupted by the creation of mega-villages. See the article on Mantle, above.

[garbon]

Being half a page long does not by default makes an argument any more relevant or correct or interesting than a simple yes/no.

I am bored so I took a quick look. Grallon has made 9 posts in a thread that has 407 replies.

[Eddie Teach]

How do you see how many posts people have in a thread? (Besides manually counting them, which is hardly a "quick look". )

[mongers]

Calling all British patriots and fellow travelers/UK residents, let's rally our forces and invade that long winded devoid of significance of a threat that is the Canadian politics one.

I know it won't be easy, some of us will succumb to the bleakness of the page long multi-quote nested posts, but we'll have the consolation in winning through, that the summer patriots who fell by the wayside in the face of yet another BB/Grallon slugfest will not see.

[garbon]

How do you see how many posts people have in a thread? (Besides manually counting them, which is hardly a "quick look". )

I used control F and changed number of posts shown on a page. Only 9 pages worth of posts, which is pretty quick.

That said, there is a reason I didn't count viper's posts.

[Eddie Teach]

I miss that feature where you could click on the number of posts in the thread and see a breakdown. 

[garbon]

I miss that feature where you could click on the number of posts in the thread and see a breakdown. 

Me too.

[viper37]

Then how did they get those huge tribal confederations and empires?  Seems like you would have to subdue new subjects to me.

Pre-contact, the only tribal confederation we know of was the Iroquois, and that was after a period of war, where the chiefs united in 5 nations.  The 6th nations begged the Iroquois to be part of their league, after conflicts with the Dutch & British settlers.
Since we have no written record, we only rely on oral tradition and archeological evidence.

Indians later allied with the French came in 1701.  Prior to the destruction of the Hurons, the French had a policy of not giving firearms to non converts.  That changed afterwards.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Calling all British patriots and fellow travelers/UK residents, let's rally our forces and invade that long winded devoid of significance of a threat that is the Canadian politics one.

I know it won't be easy, some of us will succumb to the bleakness of the page long multi-quote nested posts, but we'll have the consolation in winning through, that the summer patriots who fell by the wayside in the face of yet another BB/Grallon slugfest will not see.

We should have recruited Languish's Canadians into the referendum campaign if we wanted to keep Scotland in the UK. "Project Tedium" would have assured a low turnout and NO vote 

[viper37]

Come on, it is the Scottish Independence thread, and I can summarise almost half of it as follows:

"Viper/Grallon: QUEBEC's INDEPENDENCE IS DESERVED AND NECESSARY
Others: well there are two sides to that argument
Viper/Grallon: NO
Others: yes
Viper/Grallon: NO
etc
"

Funny, I don't see things your way.  What I saw were a few Americans and a Hungarian saying the Scots were morons subject to propaganda by the YES side and unable to see for themselves what was good for them, for that, they needed American enlightment, wich holds that patriotism is totally different than nationalism, being a positive force, while nationalism is the root of all evil. According to Valmy, Nationalists are worst than nazis.

Grallon believes independance should happen right now, I think it's a lost cause for now, but will eventually resurface because of the nature of our political system wich concentrates powers in the hands of the central governement and barely leaves any room to provinces to really govern themselves the way they see fit.

I'd be more than satisfied with a renewed deal with Canada, one that allows us to sign the Constitution on terms we can agree with.  Grallon would totally reject that, though.