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mutherlurker t1_ixxuc32 wrote

Is it possible that without the aid of the other Native American tribes in the region, the colonists would not have been able to populate Connecticut and the northern American region due to the Pequot Nation? Doing research for my 3rd grader, and it's a simple project. I went deeper and started to understand that the Narraganset and Mohegan tribes allied up with the colonizers to rid themselves of the Pequots...resulting in the Pequot Massacre in 1637.

Simple question about this incredibly complicated historical event is this: is there evidence that if the Native American Tribes in that region had banded together that the English and Dutch colonies would not have taken hold, and the America we know today would not exist?

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MeatballDom t1_ixxylsm wrote

"Is it possible?" Sure, why not. But possible doesn't mean likely.

There's absolutely no way for a historian to answer what if questions. I've seen it best explained through an example of going to the grocery store.

Say you need groceries, you realise this at 7 o clock at night after getting home from a long day at work. You've got enough to last you til tomorrow, but not ideally. You could go to the store tonight, or you could wait until tomorrow. It's a scenario every adult has experienced.

So what happens if you go tonight, versus going tomorrow? In 99.9999% of the scenarios there's absolutely no difference maybe other than a bit of annoyance. But, for those small chances there are people that go out and get in a life changing car accident, or get food poisoning from stock that would have been replaced overnight, or run into an ex, or meet the person of their dreams in the queue, or a million different highly unlikely but entirely possible scenarios.

If you play that game for just ONE person it's highly unlikely that anything will change. But if you play that game with an entire population for hundreds of years, you're going to hit a lot of crazy odds.

So when we play the game of "what would happen if this entire group of people and this entire group of people combined with this entire group of people matched up differently..." we get into an absolutely unimaginable amount of scenarios and probabilities. Expand that over many generations and it's even more so. What if one of those people who would have been a great leader never existed because their parent died, etc. etc.

It may be fun to imagine, but there's no academic way of answering it. There is /r/HistoryWhatIf where they have a bit more fun with this, but again, take every answer with a dumptruck of salt.

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TheGreatOneSea t1_iy1dfz3 wrote

Many of the natives tried to build exactly the kind of alliance you're talking about, but practically, such a cause was always doomed: steel tools and gunpowder were simply too powerful as force multipliers to ignore, and weaker tribes saw no practical diffrence in being evicted from their land by a rival tribe instead of the Europeans.

And once a tribe takes to using gunpowder weapons and steel, it's stuck: killing all the Europeans is the same as signing one's own death warrant, because the skills needed to be independent are lost. Even if they accept that, all that changes is that the French take over instead.

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