Their treatment of protestors or anyone deemed 'dissident'

Good solar and renewable energy policies though (and fastest developing fusion reactor experiments on the planet)

Heh, I could have just said fire, but I wanted to pique the white people's curiosity and talk about how well the First Australians have mastered fire.

If you make fire in the hot and dry season, it's much more likely to transform into a raging uncontrollable wildfire. First Australians are very careful about when they use fire for terraforming. They choose a time of year and a time of day when the risk is low, and they examine the soil to check on the microbial conditions. An Elder who's experienced in traditional practices can look at a handful of dirt and tell you how hot the fire will burn.

When they light the fire under the right conditions, the temperature is very low, as fire goes. It's easy to control. It'll burn away the fallen leaves and the scrub, but it will leave the older trees untouched. Before they light the fire, they'll warn the animals and give them a chance to retreat. The insects will climb up the trees and be safe up there. See, western domestication is about controlling animals, but in Australia, the animals have evolved over tens of thousands of years to listen to the people. The insects know when to climb the trees to get away from the fire because the people tell them.

Until recently, Indigenous people near white cities were prevented from doing their traditional burning. So the scrub grew out of control, and when a fire happened by accident because of teenagers or lightning or shards of glass, the wildfires were out of control. Still are, in some places. So in recent years, white people have started listening to the First Australians about the traditional burnings. Because they don't want their houses to burn down.

But traditional burning is about much more than just stopping wildfires. It's a tool to shape the landscape. When the European invaders first arrived here, they wrote about how the land was like a garden estate. It was paradise. Grassy plains with scattered trees providing shade and fruit for humans and animals alike. That environment isn't an accident, it was engineered to be like that. Using fire. It's what an Indigenous farm looks like.

So you can imagine how angry the Indigenous people got when the whities showed up, built fences through their farms, banned traditional burning, and let their sheep and cattle poop in the water supplies.

Those are the massive dams down in Victoria that produced so many eels, the people could build permanent houses, right? Super cool, I learned about them from watching The First Inventors.

Yeah, but are the people OP is talking nowadays part of a nation currently colonizing native american peoples and do these people need a justification?

Fun fact: The ancient Egyptian pyramids were built with copper tools, not bronze. Bronze hadn't been invented yet; the Egyptians hadn't established the international trade required to get tin.

They found that copper with arsenic impurities was harder and held its shape better than pure copper, so arsenical copper was cast into basic chisel shape and the edges were cold hammered to work harden them into something that will just about cut limestone for awhile I guess. They also used tube drills and flat saws. They would scatter a slurry of quartz sand and water on the stone to be cut, and then they would work a flat plate of copper back and forth over the sand or rotate a hollow cylinder of copper in place to make a straight cut or drill a hole respectively. In that way they could cut material as hard as granite.

Now as a woodworking tool, even copper is vastly superior to stone in one key way: Ease of repair. You make the bit of an axe out of stone, it's considerably harder than copper, but it's brittle. It's easy to just break, and if you do that you'll never get it back to the same shape because to re-sharpen that bit means napping more of the edge away. A copper axe bit might dull easily, but it can be honed in a minute or so. It bends, rather than breaks.

"Stumbling upon" bronze requires access to tin and knowledge of forging and casting technology. Tin and copper are seldom found near each other, and even if you've got tin it needs to have occurred to you to try melting copper. If you only ever cold work copper, you're not going to figure out bronze.

Hernan Cortes landed on the Yucatan, riding a horse wearing an iron breastplate and carrying a steel sword, and found the Maya and Aztecs living in societies not dissimilar to the Old Kingdom Egyptians. A dude on foot wearing a jaguar skin swinging a wooden club studded with bits of sharp obsidian is scary. A dude on horseback with a matchlock musket and a steel saber is scarier. Imagine a galleon full of 16th century Spaniards dropped anchor at the mouth of the Nile in 2600 BCE and rode into Khufu's Memphis. That's pretty much exactly what went down in what is now Mexico City.

What a weird take. Yeah they had weapons made from metal, but they also had weapons made of wood, and some metal weapons in the west are also partially made of wood, therefore native americans had modern metallurgy somehow?

Whu?

"Therefore, A WIIITCH"?

We are a wood age civilisation.

TIL! Thanks!

You don't hear of American plagues decimating Europe because there basically were none. Syphilis is a new world disease, but there weren't "someone coughs, you catch the disease, it either kills you or you become immune" plagues like smallpox, measles or the bubonic plague, probably for the same reason Native Americans were pretty much neolithic while Europe was industrial: They had basically no animal husbandry.

Think of every plague you know. From the black death to Covid19. They all come from animals. To make a plague, you need to have old world style densely crowded unsanitary cities full of humans living in close proximity to animals. The animals need to have a virus, something like the cow common cold, that makes the cow mildly sick so that it sneezes on other cows to make them mildly sick, Then it needs to sneeze on a human, and the virus has to make the species switch. Patient zero of cowpox. It then spreads rapidly through the densely packed city, along the old Roman roads to other cities.

This didn't happen in the New World. They didn't have densely packed cities full of humans living alongside animals. You didn't have indians wandering through fields of sheep, goats or pigs getting covered in ungulate snot. No patient zeroes. No plagues.

Yeah, Europeans caught syphilis from indigenous Americans, and without any existing immunity to it there was a genuinely terrifying pandemic in Europe with worse symptoms than present-day forms of the disease (and no penicillin to treat it).

But indigenous Americans caught smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus from Europeans, so it really wasn't a fair exchange.

Disease requires mass concentration of people which was less common in America. They did transfer syphilis to Europe though.

Basically, and I'm generalizing but still, all those diseases that Europeans brought over to the Americas came from domesticated European animals. On the other hand there weren't really domesticated animals in the Americas (lamas but barely). So there weren't really epidemic diseases in the Americas to infect Europeans.

This one fact basically explains the entirety of the history between these two hemispheres.

Europeans had more (and more exposure to) domesticated animals. Domesticated animals are a... great way to rapidly develop and pass along new and exciting pathogens to humans.

Hunting doesn't really compare in intensity and longevity of exposure to handling (and not washing one's hands) animals for grooming and shearing, and breathing in the same stinking air as a dozen livestock through the winter, and intermittently the rest of the year.

It’s cause of how European agriculture worked and how they essentially helped create new pathogens.

European medieval peasants were just soooo filthy

Why do you suppose their metallurgy was so far behind the ‘old world’? Lack of accessible tin deposits?

So they were actually in the early bronze age then?