alt Hacker News> the intellectual aspects of native Native American cultures have really been sidelined, if not consciously suppressed by colonial powers
Or maybe intellectual refers to someone a position in a society that sufficiently is well-off to be able to support some guy not having to provide work for collective survival and who can spend time trying to formalize abstract thinking for which writing would help with (which north americans natives did not have)
It's ok, it can be an interesting culture worthy of being studied, and of course they weren't dummies, without trying to pretend that north american natives were "contemplating concepts like the law of large numbers" without writing device or support nor some kind of alphabet, come on
Yes colonization is awful and yes the natives were genocided but that doesn't mean that everyone was on its way too landing on the moon had they not been suppressed both physically and culturally. The path to civilization only gets narrower and the people who get to contribute meaningfully fewer and fewer.
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don't worry, professional researchers studying this stuff for real, a helpful hn commenter is on the way!
Writing might be helpful for intellectuals, but it's certainly not necessary. Socrates has a whole argument about written argumentation being a sign of a weak mind.
Moreover, we have records from some of these precolonial intellectual traditions in the Americas. The nahua genre of huehuetlatolli is an excellent example in many ways. The selectively preserved bits we have resemble something closer to Confucianism than mathematics, but keep in mind we have a narrow selection from a single genre in a much wider landscape.
In what's now US territory, proto-writing systems (emoji are a modern example of these) existed. There were also intellectual traditions associated with them, particularly among southwestern groups like the Puebloans. Those are relatively closed to academics for a variety of historical reasons and consequently understudied, but we know they existed.