Why didn’t Indians make social progress in America for so long?

In the "Great Navigation" era, the new southern Europeans who came to the American continent did not have the desire to "immigrate" like today. What they pursued was the possession and plunder of the existing wealth in the Americas, and their methods were also Just conquest and killing. These Europeans brought muskets and horses. The American Indians saw horses for the first time and saw the monsters riding on these gods. Not only that, the American Indians did not know how to smelt iron and had not yet entered into iron tools. In this era, their farming capabilities were extremely low. Unarmed resistance can be used to describe the imbalance of that era, and the loss of rich plains and hiding in remote mountains will undoubtedly lead to serious and large-scale famine. So, in retrospect, famine was more truly effective in causing Indian genocide than killing, although famine was also a result of the arrival of Europeans. These all happened long before the arrival of Western Europeans and Northern Europeans. Indians suffered unprecedented killings and looting. This occurred in Central and South America, where the degree of urbanization was relatively high, with kingdom rule and quasi-state social forms. . The Spaniards did not set foot in North America, and civilization in North America was basically in the form of tribes and did not yet have the high level of social civilization as in Central and South America. This can be clearly seen from the fact that there are no huge urban ruins or spectacular temple buildings in North America. Without these, it means that there is no hierarchical social system, and there is no coveted wealth concentration. When the Protestants arrived on the coast of North America, the social development there was extremely low and in the stage of tribal civilization. The tribal civilization is not a farming civilization to a certain extent. Fishing and hunting are its main economic forms. Tribes not only have no monarch, no kingdom, and no territory, but more importantly, they have no land property rights system and no sovereign power map. The story of what happened in North America is quite different from the conquests in Central and South America. It is also completely different from modern civilization with its land property rights system and national sovereignty, and the understanding based on this modern civilization. Obviously, without a land property rights system, there would be no right to own land; without a territorial map, there would be no invasion. Of course, this does not mean that tribal civilization does not have tribal ownership of land, nor does it mean that the vast mountains and rivers have value for the local indigenous people. But there is no doubt that ownership in this sense is abstract and different from, conflicts with, and contradicts ownership in the modern legal sense. The modern legal system not only fails to provide protection for original land ethics and ownership rights, but will inevitably intensify the conflict between the two civilizations. Obviously, a process of adjustment is needed between the two civilizations until a compromise is found. In this process, conflicts and confrontations are inevitable. In short, abstract rights of ownership are not recognized and protected by the modern rule of law. The conflict between two civilizations means violence and war. But because the Indian civilization in North America is tribal, this also determines that wars and violence are case-by-case, between specific tribes and specific new immigrants, unlike the unified inter-state wars in civilized societies. Nor like the wars between kingdoms and invaders in Central and South America. Tribes can migrate to avoid disasters and to escape. Therefore, the war violence that occurred between them is also different from the resistance and conquest under today's concepts of land and political power. Therefore, the wars and violence brought by new immigrants are not the first reason for the sharp decline in the Indian population. The reason for the sharp decline in the population of people, especially Indians in North America, is the infectious diseases brought by new immigrants. The Indians have been completely isolated from the outside world for tens of thousands of years, which makes their immune systems immune to new pathogens. However, even if infectious diseases such as smallpox have been raging in Asia and Europe for thousands of years, people still cannot obtain automatic immunity without vaccination. Until the discovery of cowpox immunity, humans were helpless against smallpox. This was long after the discovery of the New World, and after hundreds of years of hard work, smallpox was completely eradicated at the end of the last century. Diseases such as smallpox, diphtheria, and measles were the most fundamental causes of the sharp decline in the American Indian population. This is like Genghis Khan's westward march. Although the massacres and plunders were heavy, the plague brought more deaths and more harm than all the wars at that time, and the sharp decline in population was more severe.