something else about nukes, you dont nuke your own nation!

Wes have you ever spent any real ammount of time on a Reservation? I have and although I suppose it could be different elsewhere in the country here in the Wyoming/Montana area it is not a pretty picture and after putting them through Death Camps there is no fragging way the members of the local tribes are going to be able to wage war against a modern military Magic or no Magic.

Also something to consider, if the Great Ghost Dance was this magical "I Win" button for the Indians, why didn't they push the Anglos back into the sea? After all, it's clear that nothing sort of Magic and stand up against Magic.

I've seen Cherokee just south of the National Park. It's pathetic. Billboards everywhere practically saying "Please don't beat your wife and kids." "Please don't drink." and none of them listen. SAIM could get a better fighting force from the meth-makers in the local hills than the sad-asses I saw in Cherokee. Pathetic.

Sounds like some groups are doing better. Also it isn't neccesarily just the reservation set that would pitch in. There are a lot of mixed bloods out there integrated with our society. Also it sounds like the southern NAN nations just brought in the hispanic population to the cause.

At any rate the Ghost dance couldn't push the anglos to the sea because then they might actually start responding with nukes and in far greater numbers.

As is most of what the NAN got were low population states and areas. Spots that might have been in some turmoil anyway after VITAS, Goblinization and all that.

I always thought about the NAN that in fact, they took a lot of non-anglos whiteys or other more... tolerable groups. And assimilated-incultured them, perhaps even a willing two ways. Like implied and said outright in the californian fluff about the 'new' Ananzi nation/tribes.

I think that maybe, there was a few.. sympathisers to their cause, peoples who flocked to help the natives...

I means, latinos as quoted, and perhaps also afro-americans and cie; black seminoles, anyone?

So... A 'dirty' secret, never spoken aloud...

Not according to Third Edition's fluff they didn't, I remember it being quoted that non-Indians were all considered Anglos...

Also something to consider is that the "low population" states that the NAN took over just so happens to have other attributes that make them really fragging important to the nation as a whole.

Actually. And maybe I'm thinking SR2 fluff. But I thought they also wound up sheltering a lot of metas regardless of what their previous ethnicity was.

This wound up biting them in the rear a little as Ork and Elven groups managed to carve out some of their own territory.

At any rate if you look at the NAN popuation figures from the various fluff books that list it some groups seriously weren't being picky with who they accepted.

Either that or the SR writers thought there were a whole lot of native Americans around.

This is the part of the fluff where you head explodes if you try to make it make sense. There are today, at most, 10,000 Utes total including both Colorado and Utah (There are several seperate groups that don't seem to like each other much.) How many did SoNA say there were in 2065?

Where did the hundreds of thousands of Navajo go?

Assimiled?

Now, for all I said, it may have been un-willingly...

The Najavo know.

Those metahuman numbers won't mean jack crap since there were few if any metahuman during the time of the succession. It would only be later that this really crops up, but by then it's not the natives vs. USA anymore.

The GGD did not bring down the US or change lines on the map. What it did do is force the US government to the negotiating table because they couldn't counter it. In essence, it is irrelevant whether it is more powerful than nukes or not (even though on a sheer force scale it was more powerful than any individual nuke) because it functioned as a morale breaking weapon. That is how wars are won and lost generally - in breaking the will of the opponent to fight.

Once both sides were at the negotiating table, the US basically said "what will it take to get you guys to stop this weird shit". The NANs didn't push the anglos back into the sea for the simple reason that they couldn't - they didn't have the numbers or military power to face a nation faced with complete extinction, so they were smart and didn't force the issue that far.

Seems pretty true to life in my book.

hmm, given that aztelan was invited to join the treaty of denver, i wonder if not they could have aided the war somehow...

still, the wiki timeline is anything but detailed...

in the end i suspect that we just have to live with the first couple of editions written more in the "sounds cool!" style, then some kind of "could happen" speculative history piece...

Plot device. I try not to think too much about it when it comes up in my game - and I bend and replace canon a lot already.

just like real life, where current generations have to live with the results of what actions older generations ended up taking...

If you look past the GGD there are other factors that make the NAN treaty more acceptable.
1. 15-20% of the US leadership was dead from Vitas so they were not in peak form.
2. The military had suffered their worst single-day losses in both lives & materials since Vietnam just from the aircraft destroyed by storms.
3. A militarized Mexico (Aztlan) was also involved.
4. Immortal Elves had Tir Taringire in mind. Under cover of Vitas they could have killed anyone with magic that would have threatened their scheme (making #1 worse.)

5. The territories the NAN weren't worth that much.

5 requires some thought. The NAN states produce ~$3 trillion of the US' current $13 trillion GDP. 25% seems like a lot. But ~$2T was California, the place that was hit by The Big One. Between Vitas and the Quake (even ignoring the Japanese) its more loss than profit.

Colorado's ~$230B GDP is significant but a sizeable portion is Federal (USGS, NOAA, the Mint)or military bases (2 USAF bases, UsaF academy & NORAD). Most of which was retained per the Treaty IIRC.

"Minerals, oil and tourism!" you cry. "Decades of Resource Rush, volcanoes and a plague," I respond. Excluding oil shale, most coal and oil fields in the western states will be played out in the 2030s at 2000-ish production levels. And travel all but stops during a plague.

Vegas is a huge chunk of Nevada GDP (see tourism & plagues) and minerals (resource rush).

Arizona and New Mexico are the real losses, being big economies not hit hard by the GGD. They were the worst pill to swallow.

The other ~5 states are population & budget tiny, having GDPs of ~$30B and ~1 million people per state. Kentucky (not a major powerhouse of a state) has roughly the same GDP and population of those states combined.

So in hindsight was it a great idea? Nope. Would it have worked against an intact US government? Probably not. Could SAIM have held out for much longer? Doubtful, even with the help of the Immortal Elves angling for Tir Taringire. Plausible? Yeah, just.

California remained part of the USA anyway, it seeceeded later.

According to the Neo-Anarchist's guide to North America, the U.S.A of Shadowrun also demilitarized massively, didn't they? They abandoned their bases in Europe and Asia (which the new Japanese Imperial Army took over), went for some kind of corporate-america, where the goal was to have everyone deal in stocks.

The Shadowrun-U.S.A is completely different from the real-world U.S.A.

Or has this book and all the history to the north american nations been retconned out of existence?

No, it hasn't been. All of the older Shadowrun canon material still applies.

There is a much more powerful group who got its own little non-tribalturf in the NAN, a lot more powerful than some millenias old immortal spellslingers from the previous ages of magic.

The Mormons

so basically they went for blackwater to the Nth degree?

explains lone star and seretech...

From first edition, 2 NaN books and the Tir book I always got the impression the IE's had been plotting in background for a long time to destabilize the good ole US of A as a needed preparation for the creation of there sovereign state. With hundreds of years to plot and plant seeds and a scapegoat like the NAN's the confusion of Vitas and the awakening were just the over the top icing on the cake.

I think it's worth mentioning a tidbit eluded to above. The SR world isn't ours it's a fictional world, a parallel even who's history diverged from our own in the late 90's.

Actually, it diverged much earlier than that (what with the Spike Babies, "secret histories", boats on Mars and whatnot) but that's an excellent point.

Not just the Immortal Elves either. Thais tried to teach the Great Ghost Dance about a hundred years prior to the Awakening, but apparently there was not enough Mana at the time for the ritual.