I looked up current population levels for Native Americans in the US, discovering that they are about 1.4% of the population. That's not too many. Not only that, but according to Wikipedia (I know), 8 out of 10 are of mixed ancestry.

In Shadowrun, Native Americans are running better than half the continent, with apparent populations in the millions. There are enough Native Americans to fill up cities like Vancouver, Santa Fe, Cheyenne, etc, and still populate the rest of their countries. Now, I have not yet read Shadows of North America, but I am literally about to start.

Here's the question: How many "Native Americans" in Shadowrun are actually descended from Joe Bob Smith who was (maybe) 1/16th Lakota at some point in time. How many Native Americans are blonde, black, Asian, Hispanic, etc? Is this addressed in canon? Are Native Americans more of a ruling elite within their nations, and if so, how can such a small population rule without sharing power with the non-Native majority. I am thinking along the lines of Apartheid South Africa, and if the NAN is like that, well, that sucks I guess Did VITAS and other diseases sort of skip reservations/detention centers?

If not, did the tribes just say "Hey all you honkies! Guess what? You're Native now!"

In some aspects it probably *is* more ethnicity than race, but there probably was no conversion, as you say.

I think that many people are simply too focused on living their crappy lives in 2070 to care too much about who technically runs their region.

Friend of mine is paler than I am, blond hair, blue eyes, and able to get Metis status.

My Father, OTOH, has been mistaken for pure blood First Nation on more than one occasion. And, no, no history that we know about. (Kind of hard, considering how long our family has been in Canada, however.).

EDIT: Due to Aztlan originally being with the NAN, Hispanics are considered "AmerIndian" as long as they're born in North, Central, or South America.

EDIT EDIT: Also, with Las Vegas being in NAN Territory, what do you want to bet a bunch of Chicago Goombas just found out their Great-Grandmother was Ojibwe or some such? "Yeah, here's da old birt' records dat say I'm an Injun. Watch da ink, it's still wet, knowwhatImean?"

Yes yes yes this...this has to be used in a future game. "Hi, my names is Runs-Like-The-Wind Gambino. Welcome to Vegas"

I've been suggesting that for awhile now. Finally someone runs with it, and you just nearly killed me by making me laugh, Granola!!!

Also, the Mormons supported the SAIM early because sending all Amerindians into camps caused them some theological issue. The Ute allowed the Mormons to stay in Salt Lake City as a semi-independent enclave. The Ute having the strongest bias against anglos of all the NAN, I can imagine some Mormon communities may have been allowed to stay in the other NAN. There possibly were some more who came to the NAN later, Filipino or Brazilian or gobelinized Mormons fleeing their country.

As a side note, Mormon genealogists probably played a heavy role in the "blood drop policy" to determine who would claim native ancestry or not.

The NAN have been discussed a thousend times on this forum. I think most ppl agree, that the numbers as stated in the books don't make too much sense. They either ignore the NAN entirely, or rule that SR is a paralel world where Native population numbers were higher. I prefer to rationalise as much as possible and handwave the difference.

In general 'Anglo' included all non-natives, those with european roots as well as those with asian or african. According to the books, the standards to decide what counts as native differ from nation to nation, often even from tribe to tribe. Hispanics were accepted by Aztlan and PCC, maybe Ute Nation too, but my memory is fuzzy about that. Otherwise the Ute are very anti Anglo in any case, though they got many of the Anglo Reservations in their teritory. The Sioux also got a lot of Anglo reservations, 'half-blooded' natives in the Sioux-Nation are officially accepted, but looked down on. The Salish Shidhe Council accepted a lot of pink-skin tribes (mainly metahumans, but also humans) and the novel tails you loose states, that a tiny percentage of native blood found in a genetest is sufficient to claim citizanship. I don't recall the details for the AMC, AC and Tsimshian anymore.

Don't forget that the VITAS outbreaks took roughly (( I think)) Half of the world population if you add up the percentages. So.... while population had risen, it was knocked back down a few times. So ALL the places are running on less people than we likely attribute to them.

While the Non-Hispanic First Nations were spared VITAS, due to being sequestered away in completely healthy and government approved internment camps.

the one thing I'll note is this...

Shadowrun is based on the real world. Shadowrun, however, is not the real world.

There are some very specific assumptions made at the very beginning of Shadowrun's timeline that when you track them back you start to realize that it's not a clean break at a specific date. You can't simply go "THIS is the moment it diverges!" You can go "This date is where it starts to wildly diverge and become significantly different", but for years, even decades before taht there were smaller changes that aren't directly documented.

Obviously, a much higher than normal population of Native Americans is one of them.

Tech development is another.

Corporate Policies are another.

The ripples reach back farther than 1989. They have to, or else Shadowrun's history just doesn't work.

Bull

Did Hitler get nukes, Bull?

Even the resource rush, which started it all (tribal property being seized by eminent domain) hints at some divergence prior to the main one. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there are really that many reservations that are actually sitting atop oil or coal or similar exploitable resources.

But despite a divergence starting long before the "official" one, it is still hard to picture a bunch of emaciated concentration camp survivors magically turning into badass forest ninjas overnight, and then being populous enough to hold onto half of the North American continent (and parts of the South American one). I think a lot of GM hand-wavium is required, most easily done by making the blood ratio required to be a "Native American" rather miniscule, or making it fairly easy for people with marketable skills to emigrate to the NAN. Similar handwavium is needed to explain why the CAS and UCAS didn't wage a war to reclaim all of that territory once they had magical resources of their own. I typically postulate that the megacorporate puppet masters have their reasons for maintaining the status quo.

Depends. Oil or Coal? No, people knew to look for that stuff when Reservations were being handed out. Bauxite, Titanium, or Uranium? Possibly.

There's also lumber, rivers (Hydroelectric dams, fisheries), and even if the place is barren, you can always use it as a toxic/radioactive waste dump.

It's not explicitly stated, but I think it's likely that the US government was not just selling the reservations, but was basically selling any land they could get their hands on that had exploitable resources (which probably included the national parks too).

And land itself is exploitable! Especially with the new Frankenfoods they were starting to play with.

I think it was written somewhere that the ressource rush also applied to natonal parks actually - SR2 basic book, IIRC ..

I live to serve.

OK, so we have to take this to be similar to the Fallout universe: like ours, but multiple points of divergence to make it all work. Such points would include: more American Indians, a greater sense of regionalism in the US and other countries (this would account for the UCAS and CAS saying "screw it" to the new NAN states), and different standards for ethnicity than in our universe. Also, given the Shadowrun canon years 1999-2011, culture itself seems much more pro-business and fractious than in OTL. I think if the Supreme Court handed down a Seretech-type decision in OTL, there would be some pretty serious protests and probably (hopefully lol) action in Congress to do something about it. OTOH, today's government is moving to a more pro-business stance, so maybe this attitude developed sooner in SR.

Remember, "Corporations are People" and "Money is Speech".

That's true. These attitudes must have developed much earlier in the SR back-past, possibly when the idea of corporation first came into being. I bet the middle class of the SR 20th century had it way worse that we did in OTL 20th.

Man, this makes me question many of the assumptions I have had about the SR world...maybe I should take it for what it is and stop thinking about tweaks (or at least make my tweaks little and unobtrusive).

More importantly, these attitudes developed in a time before the Internet. I think that's an important key. Communication and information was (and is) much more tightly controlled in Shadowrun. The Net gave people who wouldn;t normally have one a voice, and the mass consciousness can have an effect at times. SR didn't have that early on, the Crash killed what may have been developing, and after wards, the Matrix was largely corp controlled.

Yeah, this is 100% on the mark. Its easy to forget how much the Internet has shaped our lives. I remember re-reading Neuromancer a few months back and thinking "man, some of that technology seems to kinda suck". Looking at visions of the future that were developed before the Internet (including Star Trek and Star Wars, Blade Runner, etc) is jarring in the lack of massive personal communications technology. Gotta look at Shadowrun much the same way, I suppose, or its not Shadowrun.

Everyone argues about this, so I think you're free just to take any route you choose with it. I took something along the last route you suggested, in which there was some sort of reverse cultural assimilation. I'm assuming that, by the seventies at least, in this NAN sense Nativeness is largely a race-independent cultural category much the way Hispanic is in the census in our time. But I think you could get good stories with other spins, too.

Technically the idea of Corporations is very old. The model for most of them was the Catholic Church. It led to craftsmen guilds, merchant firms and so on, all even before the Italian Renaissance. Entities like the British and Dutch East India Company actually highly resemble SR corporations in terms of sheer size, economic power and self-jurisdiction.

Also take a look at oil companies in say, Nigeria; in the time of 1st ed, they were practically ruling the country, although that's been dialed back a bit in recent years.

Also, early SR was the time of Fukuyama's "The End of History", people thought the nation-state was passe, but it's definitely been making a comeback since 9/11.

Yeah, there's also a pretty loose definition of "Native American" in use. Firstly, being Hispanic counts. Secondly, 'thin blood' still counts ... a 1/64 rate isn't out of the question.

From there, you'll likely see a population boom after a nation is being formed, with 'bloodline purity' being a Thing ... the more native blood, the higher up you get in society.

Hudson Bay Company, incorporated in 1670. Still around today, even if it is owned by bloody seps.

I just wanted to say I think Bull's post is very much what's been on our minds, collectively as a group lately-and it's very insightful.

Which one? The Alternative History one or the 'Net is Freedom and Anarchy while the Matrix is Corporate Controlled?

His first post in this thread. I haven't read the others yet. (I'm slow.)

You're not slow, your computer just has a special short bus.

*Headdesk* OK, that one hurt even me.

The church is not much of a corporation, and certainly isn't a great early one, it was an empire that devolved into a simple religion. Of course SR corporate history has more to do with Zaibatsu and 19th and early 20th century industrial/corporate culture than most western economics (can't forget east india company).

And Japan's usage of Sun Tzu in the '70s and '80s (And possibly earlier) to rebuild itself economically after WWII.

Heh... Way to go CanRay...

This is explicitly mentioned several times in the NAN sourcebooks; this, coupled with much NAN territory not being as hard hit by VITAS, makes the population numbers given for various NAN holdings merely outlandish, and not utterly absurd. Early SR developers were very big on specific numbers, but not always on making sure those numbers were reasonable.

That is true, they attached a specific number to everything, from DocWagon coverage to percent of trolls in the population. I like vague-Ness, as in, there are bunches of Native Americans, and lots of orks, too.

Cascade Orks! I loves that tribe!!!

One of these days, we'll have to do something with those guys.

On NAN populations:

1. Include Hispanics, part hispanics and so forth.
2. Any blood counts-even 1/100th suiox counts for something.
3. Metas were welcomed regardless of ethnicity in many NAN states.
4. Vitas passed the Natives held in detention centers.
5. The mid west/rockies is the least populated area of the contigious 48. If you ever look at population density in the US: it is heaviest on the coasts, and heaviest east of the Missippi and in California.
6. Bull pointed out there might be a larger population of natives/part natives than RL history.
7. Indian sympathizers were also welcomed (again somewhat dependent on tribe) as were back to nature types.

And, also, Pinkskin Reserves. See how you like it, White Man!

None of which really adds up. Don't get me wrong, I want my Shadowrun world nice and crowded, and dystopic. But yeah as written the numbers don't quite Jive. This isn't to say it kills the game for me-it clearly doesn't. But when they write 5e it's my hope they'll find a different way of revising the timeline, and breaking loose from the current history. And maybe even some serious revision of how we approach the NAN and North America.

If you need to find a 'logical, sensible' reason for the state of affairs in SR, then this is actually not far from historical reality. In many North American First Nations, for centuries membership was a matter of practicality, rather than blood. Incessant warfare among groups, disease, natural attrition often led to shortages of manpower. Men and women were often captured and absorbed into the community to keep up the necessary numbers. So if a political change led to a need for adoption, even of whole groups of people, it would seem natural to do so.

Yeah, there you dip into culture vs ancestry. Is a white guy who adopts Apache ways, amrries an Apache woman, and lives with an Apache tribe that adopted him an Apache despite having blue eyes and blond hair? This was a quaestion that the US fiddled with for decades (Centuries, really). In 1924, Virginia, for instance, had two racial classifications ... white and colored. If you had a drop of non-white, you were colored, no matter what that heritage might be.

Historical racism makes for some freaky reading, let me tell you.

On the other hand, you have people like moi, pudgy white southerners who have Cherokee (or similar) heritage, since, back in the day, white guys moved into native lands, married local (native) ladies, and had kids, which eventually formed the backbone of the expanding society. These days, despite being about as ethnic as Patton Oswalt, I *could* be classed as native due to ancestry, but certainly not by culture.

As of 2003, there are, roughly, 2,786,652 native Americans in teh US. Not sure how many in Canada. There are about 35 million hispanics according to the 2000 US census (And, again, leaving Canada out for now.)

VITAS didn't muck things up too bad, and you can imagine there was a population boom for the past two generations, giving, say, 10 million for natives (Some with ludicrously thin blood) and 50 million hispanics. Break that further down into assorted nations, then throw a dart at a board because it's all wild speculation at this point.

Friend of my family has no First Nations blood in him at all, but is legally considered a full-blood... Iroquois IIRC. He was adopted.

Conversely a guy I worked with at one point was shoe string Native American-he was whatever the requirement to get casino money in these parts is; which when added with his nine kids meant most of his income was tax free!

Sounds like my relative. Just replace Apache with Chickasaw.

Ayup.

If you've never read letters from the 1700's, up in New England, you should. There're many, many incidents of locals getting tired of working themselves to death and starving while being stifled and throwing off their belongings to go run into the wilds and live with the native tribes. It was a serious, serious issue, and many treatsies were written about how alluring the native life was.

The first Pinkskins.

Exactly. And since membership in NAN would be determined by the cultural means of those who would run NAN, means used for centuries by their cultural predecessors, it wouldn't matter one whit what the anglo boys on the other side of the border thought was appropriate.

Bingo. Some nations were far more pragmatic than others ... the Ute drove about *everybody* out, for example, while the Souix allowed reservations and the PCC was fairly laid back if you had magical or techological talent. I wouldn't feel bad saying that many of the nations have a slight-to-significant whitey majority, due to the open policy and usefullness of some of the folks they didn't drive out. In time, they'll adopt into the tribes properly and be absorbed into teh culture. At this point, we're, what, forty years after the fact? That's two full generations, and a third on the way. Lots of 65-75 year old guys that remember 'The War' and worry about the kids today, but red and white are growing up, side by side, speaking the same language and learning the same things in school. The kids, they don't much *care* what color skin you have... if you're Makah, you're Makah, and that's all that matters.

Four or five generations for orks.