If you have one chance to go back in time for a few months to live with either Native Americans or American early settlers, which group would you choose?

I would choose Native Americans, specifically Choctaw, to see how my ancestors lived. That would also be a better choice for most people because the colonists were not very familiar with the new land.

The Aboriginal natives. I have several questions, like Night At The Museum.

I would prefer to go back to a time before natives learned English, French, Spanish or Dutch.
I would know of their legends which were lost when whites decided to erase their culture.
When I returned I could write and publish them.
First, I would have to learn the language.

I would choose to live with the natives. .

I judge a race, with their ability to coexist with nature.

Therefore, I would choose the natives. I know they battled their own, but they didn’t do it with bombs, and shit. Something that I don’t agree with.

Another for the natives, Cherokee specifically. And omg, the men, hubba hubba

I have Cherokee in blood. I love it, and respect it . I would prefer to live like them. Peaceful, unless I have to .

^^Once or twice I visited the American Indian Museum in DC and a built-up teepee made great impression. There was also a well decorated and very much artistically so, quite colorful and all that, a life-size white horse, a wooden harness attached which pulls a cart of sorts laden with supplies.

What struck me most though I wouldn’t be able to describe it in detail even if I could recall it…lol….was this “pouch” on the side of the horse which if I wasn’t mistaken was meant to carry an infant. All in all, the whole set-up was very impressively aesthetic. These early Americans knew how to do it in style!

Native American. Like Shoshone, Bannock, Paiute.

It would definitely be the Natives.

The early European settlers were mainly between criminals at worst and half-educated people at best. They were accompanied by a pretty well organized army, whose leading personnel was fairly good educated, that’s at least what I think.

Taken as a whole, the Europeans were no savages, but were not much less primitive than the local population. The former were superior in technology, the latter in almost all other segments, because they had a codex of behavior, many of them farmed their land, they could produce clothes, they knew how to fish, hunt, work on their game, build houses or primitive shelters, and – what’s most important – they knew how to survive under almost unbearable conditions. The Europeans knew that as well, but those who knew it mainly remained in Europe, while most of those who emigrated to America were simple peasants, gunmen, hazarders or people with highly questionable natures. A high number of them was close to psychopaths either at their arrival, or turned so as a result of the harsh times there.

The way I am, I would be much better treated – and understood – by the Natives, than by the European settlers.

I guess I would have some troubles accepting parts of their culture – such as their rituals at healings or at praising the Spirits, but you know what, I’d have similar problems with the settlers too, because their religion was by far more hypocritical or irrational than that of the Natives, and because their way of healing ill men was either worse or maybe just a little better than that of the American Indians. Besides, in order to get a painkiller you’d have to pay to the white man, where as in an Indian village it would be free.

Besides, I have always been attracted and even amazed by the way of life of the Indigenous population in North America. As the European settlers are concerned, I only liked some aspects, such as say, a “lonely cowboy” – although that term is a contradiction in itself, because a cowboy was not supposed to be lonely, but to live on a ranch and take care of the cattle. But in lack of a better word for a lonely rider, I took the term “lonely cowboy”. And there is another thing that I liked, and that was those early “mountain men” who did the very first exploration of the Continent.

So, if I had to live with the “pale-faces”, I’d be either a mountain man or a lonely rider.

But I’d rather choose living with the American Indians, preferably with the Sioux or with those living by the Atlantic coast.