All Topics  
Population history of American indigenous peoples

 
Population History of American Indigenous Peoples

   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link






 

Population history of American indigenous peoples



 
 
It is estimated, based on archaeological data and written records from European settlers, that from 10 to 100 million indigenous people lived in the Americas when the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was a Republic of Genoa navigator, colonialist and explorer whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean?funded by Queen Isabella of Spain?led to general European awareness of the America in the Western Hemisphere....
 began a historical period of large-scale European interaction with the Americas. European
European ethnic groups

The European peoples are the various nations and ethnic groups of Europe. European ethnology is the field of anthropology focusing on Europe....
 contact with what they called the "New World
New World

The New World is one of the names used for the non-Eurasian/non-African parts of the Earth, specifically the Americas and Australasia. When the term originated in the late 15th century, the Americas were new to the Europeans, who previously thought of the world as consisting only of Europe, Asia, and Africa ....
" led to the European colonization of the Americas
European colonization of the Americas

The start of the European colonization of the Americas is typically dated to 1492, although there was at least one earlier colonization effort....
, with millions of emigrants (willing and unwilling) from the "Old World
Old World

The Old World consists of those parts of Earth known to Europeans, Asians, and Africans in the 15th century....
" eventually resettling in the Americas.

While the population of Old World peoples in the Americas steadily grew in the centuries after Columbus, the population of the American indigenous peoples plummeted mainly due to their susceptibility to old world diseases they had never before been exposed to, as well as tens of thousands of Natives who were killed through U.S.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Population history of American indigenous peoples'
Start a new discussion about 'Population history of American indigenous peoples'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


It is estimated, based on archaeological data and written records from European settlers, that from 10 to 100 million indigenous people lived in the Americas when the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was a Republic of Genoa navigator, colonialist and explorer whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean?funded by Queen Isabella of Spain?led to general European awareness of the America in the Western Hemisphere....
 began a historical period of large-scale European interaction with the Americas. European
European ethnic groups

The European peoples are the various nations and ethnic groups of Europe. European ethnology is the field of anthropology focusing on Europe....
 contact with what they called the "New World
New World

The New World is one of the names used for the non-Eurasian/non-African parts of the Earth, specifically the Americas and Australasia. When the term originated in the late 15th century, the Americas were new to the Europeans, who previously thought of the world as consisting only of Europe, Asia, and Africa ....
" led to the European colonization of the Americas
European colonization of the Americas

The start of the European colonization of the Americas is typically dated to 1492, although there was at least one earlier colonization effort....
, with millions of emigrants (willing and unwilling) from the "Old World
Old World

The Old World consists of those parts of Earth known to Europeans, Asians, and Africans in the 15th century....
" eventually resettling in the Americas.

While the population of Old World peoples in the Americas steadily grew in the centuries after Columbus, the population of the American indigenous peoples plummeted mainly due to their susceptibility to old world diseases they had never before been exposed to, as well as tens of thousands of Natives who were killed through U.S. Indian Removal
Indian Removal

Indian Removal was a nineteenth century policy of the government of the United States to Ethnic cleansing Native Americans in the United States tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the river....
 programs. The extent of this population decline have long been the subject of debate.

Population overview

Estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived have varied tremendously; 20th century estimates ranging from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons. Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, even semi-accurate pre-Columbian
Pre-Columbian

The pre-Columbian era incorporates all archaeology of the Americas in the history of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the Americas continents....
 population figures are impossible to obtain, and estimates are produced by large extrapolations from small bits of data. In 1976, geographer William Denevan used these various estimates to derive a "consensus count" of about 54 million people, recent estimates are much lower than that. On an estimate of approximately 50 million people in 1492 (including 25 million in the Aztec Empire and 12 million in the Inca Empire
Inca Empire

The Inca Empire was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in Cuzco in modern-day Peru....
), the lowest estimates give a death toll due to disease of 80% at the end of the 16th century (8 million people in 1650). Latin America would only reattain this level at the turn of the 20th century, with 17 million in 1800; 30 million in 1850; 61 million in 1900; 105 million in 1930; 218 million in 1960; 361 million in 1980, and 563 million in 2005. In the last thirty years of the 16th century (1570-1600), the Mexican population rapidly decreased to about one million people in 1600. The Maya population is today estimated at 6 million, which is the same level as at the end of the 15th century. In what is now Brazil
Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is a country in South America. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, occupying nearly half of South America, the List of countries by population country, and the fourth most populous democracy in the world....
, the indigenous population had declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated 4 million to some 300,000.

Historian David Henige
David Henige

David Patrick Henige is an American historian, bibliographer, academic librarian and Africanist scholar. The majority of Henige's academic career has been spent in affiliation with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where for over three decades he has held the position of bibliographer in African studies at UW-Madison's Memorial Library....
 has argued that many population figures are the result of arbitrary formulas selectively applied to numbers from unreliable historical sources, a deficiency he sees as being unrecognized by several contributors to the field. He believes there is not enough solid evidence to produce population numbers that have any real meaning, and characterizes the modern trend of high estimates as "pseudo-scientific
Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is any knowledge, methodology, belief, or practice that is claimed to be scientific, or that is made to appear to be scientific, but which does not adhere to the scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, or otherwise lacks scientific status....
 number-crunching." Henige does not advocate a low population estimate; rather, he argues that the scanty and unreliable nature of the evidence renders broad estimates suspect, and that "high counters" (as he calls them) have been particularly flagrant in their misuse of sources. Although Henige's criticisms are directed against specific instances, most other studies do generally acknowledge the inherent difficulties in producing reliable statistics given the almost complete lack of any hard data.

This population debate has often had ideological underpinnings. Low estimates were sometimes reflective of European notions of their own cultural and racial superiority, as Francis Jennings has argued: "Scholarly wisdom long held that Indians were so inferior in mind and works that they could not possibly have created or sustained large populations." At the other end of the spectrum, some have argued that contemporary estimates of a high pre-Columbian indigenous population are rooted in a bias against some aspects of Western civilization
Western culture

File:Clash of Civilizations map.pngWestern culture are terms which are used to refer to cultures of European origin. This terminology originated as a way of describing what was different about the Graeco-Roman culture and its descendants, in contrast to the older neighboring civilizations of the Middle East, which in many ways continued...
 and/or Christianity
Christianity

Christianity is a Monotheistic religion #Christian view religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as New Testament view on Jesus' life....
. Robert Royal writes that "estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with some scholars, who are particularly critical of Europe, often favoring wildly higher figures."

Civilizations rose and fell in the Americas before Columbus arrived and the indigenous population in 1492 was not necessarily at a high point, and may have already been in decline in some areas. Fernand Braudel has pointed out a problem that the Amerindian faced that was not a factor on other continents: "The Indian population ... suffered from a demographic weakness, particularly because of the absence of any substitute animal milk. Mothers had to nurse their children until they were three or four years old. This long period of breast-feeding severely reduced female fertility and made any demographic revival precarious." Indigenous populations in most areas of the Americas reached a low point by the early twentieth century, and in most cases have started to climb again. In the United States, the numbers may have already recovered to pre-Columbian levels or more.

Pre-Columbian Americas


Anthropologists and population geneticists agree that the bulk of indigenous American ancestry can be traced to Ice Age
Ice age

The general term "ice age" or, more precisely, "glacial age" denotes a geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in an expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers....
 migrations from Asia via the Bering land bridge
Bering land bridge

The Bering land bridge was a land bridge roughly 1,000 miles north to south at its greatest extent, which joined present-day Alaska and eastern Siberia at various times during the Pleistocene ice ages....
, although the possibility of migration
Historical migration

It is theorized that pre-historical human migration began with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia about a million years ago....
 by watercraft along coastal routes or ice sheets is increasingly viewed as a possible viable complement to this model.

Depopulation from disease

Nearly all scholars now believe that wide spread epidemic disease
List of epidemics

This article is a list of major epidemics....
, which the natives had no prior exposure or resistance to, was the overwhelming cause of the massive population decline of the American natives. They reject both of the earliest European immigrants explanations for the population decline of the American natives. The first explanation was the brutal practices of the Spanish
Spain

Spain or the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in Southern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though Espa?a , Estado espa?ol and Naci?n espa?ola are used interchangeably....
 conquistador
Conquistador

Conquistador is the name given to the Spaniards soldiers, leaders, List of explorers, and adventurers involved in the conquest of the Americas following the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492....
es, as recorded by the Spanish themselves, most notably by the Dominican
Dominican Order

The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Roman Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic in the early 13th century in France....
 friar
Friar

A friar is a member of one of the mendicant orders....
 Bartolomé de las Casas
Bartolomé de Las Casas

File:Bartolomedelascasas.jpgBartolom? de las Casas, Dominican Order , was a 16th-century Spanish Empire Dominican Order priest, and the first resident Bishop of Chiapas....
, whose writings vividly depict atrocities committed on the natives (in particular the Taíno
Taíno

The Ta?nos were Indigenous peoples of the Americas of the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, and the northern Lesser Antilles. It is believed that the seafaring Ta?nos were relatives of the Arawakan people of South America....
s) by the Spanish. There just were not that many Spanish to have caused such a large population decline. The second explanation was a perceived divine approval, in that God
God

God is a deity in theism and deism religions and other belief systems, representing either the sole deity in monotheism, or a principal deity in polytheism....
 had removed the natives as part of His divine plan in order to make way for a new Christian
Christianity

Christianity is a Monotheistic religion #Christian view religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as New Testament view on Jesus' life....
 civilization. Many natives of the Americas viewed their troubles in terms of religious or supernatural causes.

It was observed that disease began to kill immense numbers of indigenous Americans soon after European
European ethnic groups

The European peoples are the various nations and ethnic groups of Europe. European ethnology is the field of anthropology focusing on Europe....
s and Africa
Africa

Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km? including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area....
ns began to arrive in the New World, bringing with them the infectious diseases of Europe and Africa. One reason this death toll was overlooked (or downplayed) is that disease, according to the widely held theory, raced ahead of European immigration in many areas, thus often killing off a sizable portion of the population before European observations (and thus written records) were made. After the epidemics had already killed massive numbers of American natives, many European immigrants who arrived assumed that the natives had always been few in number. The scope of the epidemics over the years was enormous, killing millions of people—possibly in excess of 90% of the population in the hardest hit areas—and creating one of "the greatest human catastrophe in history, far exceeding even the disaster of the Black Death
Black Death

The Black Death, was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, widely thought to have been caused by a bacterium named Yersinia pestis , but recently attributed by some factors to other diseases....
 of medieval Europe" that killed up to one-third of the people in Europe
Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
 and Asia
Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent. It covers 8.6% of the Earth's total surface area and, with over 4 billion people, it contains more than 60% of the world's current human population....
 between 1347 and 1351. The Black Death occurred to a European population that had not been exposed and had little or no resistance to a new disease.

One of the most devastating diseases was smallpox
Smallpox

Smallpox is an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning spotted, or varus, meaning "pimple"....
, but other deadly diseases included typhus
Typhus

Epidemic typhus is a form of typhus so named because the disease often causes epidemics following wars and natural disasters. The causative organism is Rickettsia prowazekii, transmitted by the human body louse ....
, measles
Measles

Measles is a infection of the respiratory system caused by a virus, specifically a paramyxovirus of the genus Morbillivirus. Morbilliviruses, like other paramyxoviruses, are enveloped, single-stranded, negative-sense RNA viruses....
, influenza
Influenza

Influenza, commonly known as the flu, is an infectious disease that affects birds and mammals caused by RNA viruses of the biological family Orthomyxoviridae ....
, bubonic plague
Bubonic plague

Plague is a deadly infectious disease caused by the Enterobacteriaceae Yersinia pestis . Plague is a zoonotic, primarily carried by rodents and spread to humans via fleas....
, cholera
Cholera

Cholera, sometimes known as Asiatic or epidemic cholera, is an infectious gastroenteritis caused by enterotoxin-producing strains of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae....
, malaria
Malaria

Malaria is a Vector -borne infectious disease caused by protozoan parasites. It is widespread in Tropics and subtropical regions, including parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa....
, tuberculosis
Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by mycobacterium, mainly Mycobacterium tuberculosis . Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect the central nervous system, the lymphatic system, the circulatory system, the genitourinary system, the gastrointestinal system, bones, joints, and even the...
, mumps
MUMPS

MUMPS , or alternatively M, is a programming language created in the late 1960s, originally for use in the Health care. It was designed for the production of multi-user database-driven applications....
, yellow fever
Yellow fever

Yellow fever is an acute Virus disease. It is an important cause of hemorrhage illness in many African and South American countries despite existence of an effective vaccine....
, and pertussis
Pertussis

Pertussis, also known as the whooping cough, is a highly contagious disease caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis; it derived its name from the"whooping" sound made from the exhalation of air during a cough.; a similar, milder disease is caused by Bordetella parapertussis....
 (whooping cough). The Americas also had endemic diseases, perhaps including an unusually virulent
Syphilis

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The route of transmission of syphilis is almost always through sexual contact, although there are examples of congenital syphilis via transmission from mother to child in utero....
 type of syphilis
Syphilis

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The route of transmission of syphilis is almost always through sexual contact, although there are examples of congenital syphilis via transmission from mother to child in utero....
, which soon became rampant in the Old World. (This transfer of disease between the Old and New Worlds was part of the phenomenon known as the "Columbian Exchange
Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange has been one of the most significant events in the history of world ecology, agriculture, and culture. The term is used to describe the enormous widespread exchange of plants, animals, foods, human populations , communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern Hemisphere and Western Hemisphere hemispheres that oc...
"). The diseases brought to the New World proved to be exceptionally deadly to the natives.

The epidemics had very different effects in different parts of the Americas. The most vulnerable groups were those with a relatively small population and few built up immunities. Many island based groups were utterly annihilated. The Carib
Carib

Carib, Island Carib or Kalinago people, after whom the Caribbean Sea was named, live in the Lesser Antilles islands. They are an Amerindian people whose origins lie in the southern West Indies and the northern coast of South America....
s and Arawak
Arawak

The term Arawak , was used to designate some of the peoples encountered by the Spain in the West Indies in 1492 and thereafter. These include the Ta?no, who occupied the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas and Bimini Florida, the Nepoya and Suppoyo of Trinidad and the Igneri, who were supposed to have preceded the Caribs in the Lesser Anti...
s of the Caribbean
Caribbean

The Caribbean is a region consisting of the Caribbean Sea, its islands , and the surrounding coasts. The region is located southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and Northern America, east of Central America, and to the north of South America....
 nearly ceased to exist, as did the Beothuk
Beothuk

The Beothuk were the native inhabitants of the island of Newfoundland at the time of European contact in the 15th and 16th centuries. With the death in 1829 of Shanawdithit, a woman who was the last recorded surviving member, the people became officially extinct as a separate ethnic group....
s of Newfoundland. While disease ranged swiftly through the densely populated empires of Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica or Meso-America is a region and cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua, within which a number of pre-Columbian society flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries....
, the more scattered populations of North America saw a slower spread.

Why were the diseases so deadly?

A disease (viral
Virus

A virus is a Optical microscope#Limitations of light microscopes infectious agent that is unable to grow or reproduce outside a host cell . Viruses infect all cellular life....
 or bacteria
Bacteria

The Bacteria are a large group of unicellular microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals....
l) that kills its victims before they can spread it to others tends to flare up and then die out, like a fire running out of fuel. A more resilient disease would establish an equilibrium, its victims living well beyond infection
Infection

An infection is the detrimental colonization of a host organism by a foreign species. In an infection, the infecting organism seeks to utilize the host resources to multiply ....
 to further spread the disease. This function of the evolutionary process selects against quick lethality, with the most immediately fatal diseases being the most short-lived. A similar evolutionary pressure acts upon the victim populations, as those lacking genetic resistance to common diseases die and do not leave descendants, whereas those who are resistant procreate and pass resistant genes to their offspring. For example, in the fifty years following Columbus' voyage to the Americas, an unusually strong strain of syphilis
Syphilis

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The route of transmission of syphilis is almost always through sexual contact, although there are examples of congenital syphilis via transmission from mother to child in utero....
 killed a high proportion of infected Europeans within a few months; over time however, the disease has become much less virulent.

Thus both diseases and populations tend to evolve towards an equilibrium in which the common diseases are non-symptomatic, mild, or manageable chronic. When a population that has been relatively isolated is exposed to new diseases, it has no inborn resistance to the new diseases (the population is "biologically naïve"); this body of people succumbs at a much higher rate, resulting in what is known as a "virgin soil" epidemic. Before the European arrival, the Americas had been isolated from both the Eurasia
Eurasia

Eurasia is a large landmass covering about 53,990,000 km? or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface . Often considered a single continent, Eurasia comprises the traditional continents of Europe and Asia, concepts which date back to classical antiquity and the borders for which are somewhat arbitrary....
n-Africa
Africa

Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km? including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area....
n landmass, whereas the people of the Old World had had thousands of years for their population to accommodate to their common diseases.

Contributing to this is the fact that all members of an immunologically naive population are exposed to a new disease simultaneously, while populations where the disease is endemic have generations of individuals with previously acquired immunity. In populations where a disease is endemic most adults will have already been exposed to the disease at a young age. Being therefore resistant to reinfection they are able to tend to those individuals who catch the disease for the first time such as the next generation of children. With proper care many of these "childhood diseases" are often survivable. In a naïve population all age groups are affected at once leaving few or no healthy caregivers to nurse the sick. With no resistant individuals healthy enough to tend to the ill, a disease may be more fatal than otherwise.

Also the natives of the Americas faced the introduction of several new diseases all at once, so that a person who successfully resisted one disease might die from another. Multiple simultaneous infections (e.g., smallpox and typhus at the same time) or in close succession (e.g., smallpox in an individual who was still weak from a recent bout of typhus) are more deadly than just the sum of the individual diseases. In this scenario, death rates can also be elevated by combinations of new and familiar diseases: smallpox in combination with American strains of syphilis or yaws
Yaws

Yaws also P?tasse tropica, thymosis, polypapilloma tropicum, pian or parangi) is a tropical infection of the skin, bones and joints caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum pertenue....
, for example.

Other contributing factors:

  • Native American medical treatments such as sweat baths
    Sweat lodge

    The sweat lodge is a Ceremony sauna and an important ritual used by some North American First Nations or Native Americans in the United States peoples....
     and cold water immersion (practiced in some areas) weakened some patients and probably increased mortality rates.


  • Europeans brought so many deadly diseases with them because they had many more domesticated animals than the Native Americans. Domestication
    Domestication

    Domestication or taming refers to the process whereby a population of living things becomes accustomed to a controlled environment by other plants or animals through a process of Selective breeding....
     usually means close and frequent contact between animals and people, which is an opportunity for diseases of domestic animals to mutate and migrate into the human population.


  • The Eurasia
    Eurasia

    Eurasia is a large landmass covering about 53,990,000 km? or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface . Often considered a single continent, Eurasia comprises the traditional continents of Europe and Asia, concepts which date back to classical antiquity and the borders for which are somewhat arbitrary....
    n landmass extends many thousands of miles along an east–west axis. Climate zones also extend for thousands of miles, which facilitated the spread of agriculture, domestication of animals, and the diseases associated with domestication. The Americas extend mainly north and south, which, according to a theory popularized by Jared Diamond
    Jared Diamond

    Jared Mason Diamond is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeography, lecturer, and nonfiction author. Diamond works as a professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles....
     in Guns, Germs, and Steel
    Guns, Germs, and Steel

    Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles....
    , meant that it was much harder for cultivated plant species, domesticated animals, and diseases to spread.


  • One contemporary National Autonomous University of Mexican epidemiologist, Rodolfo Acuña-Soto, argues that mortality due to imported diseases was compounded, or even dwarfed, by mortality due to a hemorrhagic fever native to the Americas, one which the Aztecs called cocoliztli. Acuña-Soto's research conclusions rely in part on the 50 volumes written by Francisco Hernandez
    Francisco Hernández de Toledo

    Francisco Hern?ndez de Toledo was a naturalist and court physician to the King of Spain.Hern?ndez was among the first wave of Spanish Renaissance physicians practicing according to the revived principles formulated by Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna....
    , physician to Philip II of Spain
    Philip II of Spain

    Philip II was King of Spain from 1556 until 1598, List of monarchs of Naples from 1554 until 1598, king consort of England, as husband of Mary I of England, from 1554 to 1558, lord of the Seventeen Provinces from 1556 until 1581, holding various titles for the individual territories, such as Duke or Count; and King of Portugal as Philip I...
    , who not only interviewed survivors of the 1576 epidemic but autopsied many victims and recorded his findings and observations. The fever was apparently endemic during drought years, which coincided with the early Spanish invasion of Central America. Acuña-Soto noticed that previous historians using the same reference works that he used had chosen which accounts to base their results on, so that epidemic illnesses coinciding with the Spanish invasion could, by selectively using resources, look like accounts of European-caused smallpox rather than the Aztec-recognized cocoliztli. The disease the Aztecs described, however, when read in full described a hemorrhagic fever that had nothing in common with smallpox. Such fevers are viral, spread by rodents and bodily fluid contacts between infected people. Using evidence from 24 epidemics, Acuña-Soto concluded that the Spanish did not bring the epidemic to the Aztecs, but arrived during its onset and intensification. Acuña-Soto's theory is controversial and not widely accepted .


Deliberate infection?

One of the most contentious issues relating to disease and depopulation in the Americas concerns the degree to which American indigenous peoples were intentionally infected with diseases such as smallpox. Cook asserts that there is no evidence that the Spanish ever attempted to deliberately infect the American natives. But the cattle introduced by the Spanish polluted the water reserves dug in the fields to accumulate rain water; in response to this threat, the Franciscan
Franciscan

The term Franciscan is commonly used to refer to members of Catholic religious orders that follow a body of regulations known as "The rule of St....
s and Dominican
Dominican Order

The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Roman Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic in the early 13th century in France....
s created public fountains and aqueducts to guarantee the access to drinking water
Drinking water

Drinking water is water that is of sufficiently high quality so that it can be consumed or utilized without risk of immediate or long term harm....
. But when the Franciscans lost their privileges in 1572, many of these fountains were not guarded any more, and deliberate well poisoning might have happened. Although no hard proof of such deliberate poisoning may be found, a correlation between the decrease of the population and the end of the control of the water by the religious orders may be observed. Most believers in intentional exposure to disease ignore the fact that the causes of disease (invisible germs, microbes and viruses) wasn't even worked out till well into the nineteenth century and it took a generation for doctors let alone everybody else accept it--some still don't accept it. All the so called intentional exposures occurred centuries before.

1763 Smallpox outbreak at Fort Pitt

There is one disputed incident in which British
Kingdom of Great Britain

The Kingdom of Great Britain, also known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain, was a country in North-West Europe, in existence from 1707 to 1801....
 soldiers in North America may have discussed intentionally infecting native people as part of a war effort. During Pontiac's Rebellion
Pontiac's Rebellion

Pontiac's Rebellion was a war launched in 1763 by North American First Nations who were dissatisfied with Kingdom of Great Britain policies in the Great Lakes region after the British victory in the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War ....
 in 1763, a number of Native Americans
Native Americans in the United States

Native Americans in the United States are the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from the regions of North America now encompassed by the continental United States United States, including parts of Alaska and the island state of Hawaii....
 launched a widespread war against British soldiers and settlers in an attempt to drive the British out of the Great Lakes region
Great Lakes region (North America)

The Great Lakes Region includes the Canada Provinces and territories of Canada of Ontario, the six United States states derived from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 , and portions of Western New York and Northwest Region....
. In what is now western Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , often colloquially referred to as PA by natives and Northeasterners, is a U.S. state located in the Northeastern United States and Mid-Atlantic States regions of the United States....
, Native Americans (primarily Delawares
Lenape

The Lenape are organized bands of Native Americans in the United States peoples with shared cultural and linguistic characteristics.These are the people who are living in what is now New Jersey and along the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, the northern shore of Delaware, and the lower Hudson Valley and New York Harbor in New York, at the t...
) laid siege
Siege

A siege is a military blockade of a city or fortress with the intent of conquering by Battle of attrition and/or assault. The term derives from sedere, Latin for "to sit." A siege occurs when an attacker encounters a city or fortress that cannot be easily taken by a coup de main and refuses to surrender ....
 to Fort Pitt
Fort Pitt (Pennsylvania)

Fort Pitt was a fort in what is now the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The fort was built in 1758 during the French and Indian War, next to the site of Fort Duquesne....
 on June 22, 1763. Surrounded and isolated, William Trent, the commander of Fort Pitt gave representatives of the besieging Delawares two blankets and a handkerchief from the Pittsburgh smallpox hospital, "out of our regard to them" when the two Delaware men came to talk to him. There are also letters between two other British officers, Jeffrey Amherst and Henry Bouquet, explicitly advocating the idea of using using smallpox-infested blankets to kill Indians. There is, however, some dispute over whether Trent was acting with the intent expressed by Bouquet and Amherst.

Whatever Trent's intent, a number of recent scholars consider the evidence connecting his gift of blankets to the eventual smallpox outbreak to be very doubtful. These scholars believe that the disease was most likely spread by native warriors returning from attacks on infected white settlements. In other words, while some officers did want to use what would now be called biological warfare, smallpox was so widespread and so easy to catch that it would be difficult to separate the results of intentional action from the natural spread of the disease. Others attribute the smallpox outbreak to the common Indian practice of digging up recent European graves to retrieve the clothes of the those buried--some of whom had died from smallpox.

Vaccination


The basic idea of vaccination
Vaccination

Vaccination is the administration of antigenic material to produce immunity to a disease. Vaccines can prevent or ameliorate the effects of infection by a pathogen....
 was known well before the American revolution but was a controversial subject with up to 3% of those vaccinated dying. After the Edward Jenner's 1796 confirmation of the efficacy of smallpox vaccination
Smallpox vaccine

The smallpox vaccine was the first successful vaccine to be developed. The process of vaccination was discovered by Edward Jenner in 1796, who acted upon his observation that milkmaids who caught the cowpox virus did not catch smallpox....
, the inoculation technique became more well known and less deadly in the United States (and elsewhere) and was used on many colonists and natives. Although situations such as the 1831 inoculation of Yankton Sioux at Sioux Agency (the Santee Sioux refused inoculation and many died) protected some during that outbreak and others, the disease often was carried beyond containment attempts or trade demands broke quarantines.

Ward Churchill's false claims about the 1837 Mandan outbreak

The Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder
University of Colorado at Boulder

The University of Colorado at Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado. Considered a Public Ivy, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado system and was founded five months before Colorado was admitted to the union in 1876....
 reviewed a claim by Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill

Ward LeRoy Churchill is an American writer and political activism. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007....
, comparing to the cited source his claim that in 1837 the United States Army
United States Army

The United States Army is the branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for Army operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S....
 deliberately infected Mandan
Mandan

The Mandan are a Native Americans in the United States tribe that historically lived along the banks of the Missouri River and two of its tributaries?the Heart River and Knife Rivers?in present-day North Dakota and South Dakota....
 Indians by distributing blankets that had been exposed to smallpox, and reported "Professor Churchill therefore misrepresents what Thornton says." Most other historians who have looked at the same event disagree with Churchill's interpretation of the historical evidence, and believe no deliberate introduction of smallpox occurred at the time and place Churchill claimed it had.

Other causes of depopulation


War and violence

While epidemic disease
List of epidemics

This article is a list of major epidemics....
 was by far the leading cause of the population decline of the American indigenous peoples after 1492, there were other contributing factors, all of them related to European contact and colonization. One of these factors was war
War

...
fare. According to demographer Russell Thornton, although many lives were lost in wars over the centuries, and war sometimes contributed to the near extinction of certain tribes, warfare and death by other violent means was a comparatively minor cause of overall native population decline.

There is some disagreement among scholars about how widespread warfare was in pre-Columbian America, but there is general agreement that war became deadlier after the arrival of the Europeans and their steel weapons and firearms. The Europeans brought with them gunpowder
Gunpowder

Gunpowder, also called black powder, is an explosive mixture of sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate, KNO3 that burns rapidly, producing volumes of hot solids and gases which can be used as a propellant in firearms and as a pyrotechnic composition in fireworks....
 and steel weapons, which made killing easier and war more deadly. Over the long run, Europeans proved to be consistently successful in achieving domination when engaged in warfare with indigenous Americans, for a variety of reasons. One of the major reasons was the staying power of the Europeans who could call on a far ranging supply network if required and could sustain a conflict over several years including the winters if necessary. Almost no Indian tribes had the stored resources to sustain a war for more than a few months. Massive death from disease certainly played a major role in the European conquest, but also decisive was the European approach to war, which was less ritualistic than in native America and more focused on achieving decisive victory. European colonization also contributed to an increased number of wars between displaced native groups as they fought over who should have first access to the new weapons and tools.

In addition, empires like the Inca
Inca

The Inca civilization began as a tribe in the Cuzco area, where the legendary first Sapa Inca, Manco Capac founded the Kingdom of Cuzco around 1200....
 depended on a highly centralized administration for the distribution of resources. The disruption caused by the war and the colonization certainly disrupted the traditional economy and possibly led to shortages of food and materials.

Exploitation

Exploitation has also been cited by a few as a cause of native American depopulation. The Spanish employed the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita
Mita (Inca)

Mita was mandatory public service in the society of the Inca. It was effectively a form of tribute to the Inca government, in the form of labor, i.e....
. The Spanish conquistadors replaced the ruling Aztecs and Incas and divided the conquered lands among themselves ruling as the new feudal lords, treating their subjects as something between slaves and serfs
Serfdom

Serfdom is the socio-economic status of unfree peasants under feudalism, and specifically relates to Manorialism. It was a condition of Debt bondage or modified slavery which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe....
. Serfs stayed to work the land; slaves were exported to the mines, where large numbers of them died. Some Spaniards objected to this encomienda
Encomienda

The encomienda system is a trusteeship labor system that was employed by the Spanish crown during the Spanish colonization of the Americas. The etymology of encomienda and encomendero lies in the Spanish verb encomendar, "to entrust"......
 system, notably Bartolomé de Las Casas
Bartolomé de Las Casas

File:Bartolomedelascasas.jpgBartolom? de las Casas, Dominican Order , was a 16th-century Spanish Empire Dominican Order priest, and the first resident Bishop of Chiapas....
, who insisted that the Indians were humans with souls and rights. Largely due to his efforts, the New Laws
New Laws

The New Laws of 1542 , also known as the "New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Presevation of the Indians" were created to prevent the exploitation of the indigenous people by the Encomienda, or landowners, by strictly limiting their power, during the Spanish colonization of the Americas....
 were promulgated in Spain in 1542 to protect the natives, but the abuses in the Americas were never entirely or permanently abolished. The infamous Bandeirantes
Bandeirantes

The Bandeirantes or "followers of the banner" were members of the 16th-18th century Portuguese slave-hunting expeditions, called Bandeiras, which took place in the New World....
 from Sao Paulo
São Paulo

S?o Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, and along with Tokyo, Seoul and Mexico City is among the four largest metropolitan regions of the world....
, adventurers mostly of mixed Portuguese and native ancestry, penetrated steadily westward in their search for Indian slaves
Slavery

Slavery is a form of forced labor where a person is compelled to Labor for another . Slaves are held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase, or birth, and are deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive Remuneration in return for their labor....
. Serfdom existed as such in parts of Latin America well into the 19th century, past independence.

Massacres


Las Casas and other dissenting Spaniards from the colonial period gave vivid descriptions of the atrocities inflicted upon the natives. This has helped to create an image of the Spanish conquistadores as cruel in the extreme. However, since Las Casas's writings were polemical (argumentative) works, intended to provoke moral outrage in order to facilitate reform, most scholars speculate that his depictions were exaggerated to some degree. No mainstream scholar dismisses the idea that atrocities were widespread, but some now believe that mass killings were not a significant factor in overall native depopulation. It may be argued that the Spanish rulers in the Americas had economic reasons to be unhappy at the high mortality rate of the indigenous population, since nearly all of them wanted the natives as laborers to help support the Spanish rulers lifestyle.

However, in many areas settlers and even governments did engage in what have been called "democides," usually against nomad
Nomad

Nomadic people, , also known as nomads, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than Settler in one location....
ic Indian tribes who were seen solely as hindrances to land use by European settlers. (For further discussion of democide, see the following section.) Notable democides include:

  • The Tainos in the Antilles
    Antilles

    The Antilles Antillas in Spanish language; Antillen in Dutch language) refers to the islands forming the greater part of the Caribbean in the Caribbean Sea....
     (Some believe 80% of the population disappeared in thirty years).
  • The Pequot War
    Pequot War

    The Pequot War was an armed conflict in 1636-1637 between an alliance of Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plymouth Colony colonies, with Indigenous peoples of the Americas allies , against the Pequot tribe....
     in early New England.
  • In the mid-19th century, post-independence leader Juan Manuel de Rosas
    Juan Manuel de Rosas

    File:Juan Manuel de Rosas.jpgJuan Manuel de Rosas , was a conservative Argentina politician who ruled Argentina from 1829 to 1852. Rosas was one of the first famous caudillos in Ibero-America and through his rule united Argentina, provided an efficient government and strengthened the economy....
     engaged in what he himself presented as a war of extermination (the "Conquest of the Desert
    Conquest of the Desert

    The Conquest of the Desert was a military campaign directed mainly by General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s, which established Argentine dominance over Patagonia, which was inhabited by Indigenous peoples of the Americas#Argentina...
    ") against the natives of the Argentinian interior, leaving over 1,300 indigenous dead.
  • While some California
    California

    California is a U.S. state on the West Coast of the United States of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. It is bordered by Oregon to the north, Nevada to the east, Arizona to the southeast, and to the south the Mexico state of Baja California....
     tribes were settled on reservations, others were hunted down and massacred by 19th century American settlers. It is estimated that some 4,500 Native Californians suffered violent deaths between 1849 and 1870.


Determining how many people died in these massacres overall is difficult. In the book The Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee, amateur historian William M. Osborn sought to tally every recorded atrocity in the area that would eventually become the continental United States
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
, from early contact (1511) to the closing of the frontier (1890), and determined that 9,156 people died from atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans, and 7,193 people died from atrocities perpetrated by Europeans. Osborn defines an atrocity as the murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners. Both numbers are far too low to account for the presumed large population loss.

The most reliable figures are derived from collated records of strictly military engagements such as by Gregory Michno which reveal 21,586 dead, wounded, and captured civilians and soldiers for the period of 1850–90 alone. Other figures are derived from extrapolations of rather cursory and unrelated government accounts such as that by Russell Thornton who calculated that some 45,000 Indians and 19,000 whites were killed. This later rough estimate includes women and children on both sides, since noncombatants were often killed in frontier massacres
List of massacres

This is a list of events named "massacre". The term suggests mass murder and its usage may be controversial. There are numerous events which are called "massacre" by one party to the debate while the other denies that they were such; in many other cases an event is acknowleged to be a massacre but there is a considerable debate on the nu...
.

Displacement and disruption

Even more consequential than warfare or mistreatment on indigenous populations was the geographic displacement of native Indian tribes. The increased European population due to immigration and high birth rates of Native European settlers put pressure on native tribes to relocate and alter their traditional ways of life. The introduction of new forms of intensive agriculture by Europeans let them grow enough food in a given area to support many more people than the native hunting and gathering societies could. Displacement of native peoples living their traditional lifestyles often resulted in decreased birth rates and often higher death rates which steadily lowered their populations for some time. In the United States, for example, the relocations of Native Americans resulting from the policies of Indian removal
Indian Removal

Indian Removal was a nineteenth century policy of the government of the United States to Ethnic cleansing Native Americans in the United States tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the river....
 and the reservation
Indian reservation

An Indian reservation is an area of land managed by a Native Americans of the United States tribe under the United States Department of the Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs....
 system created a disruption which resulted in fewer births and a short term population decline.

The populations of many Native American peoples were reduced by the common practice of intermarrying with Europeans. Although many Indian cultures that once thrived are extinct today, their descendants exist today in some of the bloodlines of the current inhabitants of the Americas.

Genocide debate

A controversial question relating to the population history of American indigenous peoples is whether or not the natives of the Americas were the victims of genocide
Genocide

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.While precise genocide definitions, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ....
. After the Nazi
Nazism

Nazism, officially National Socialism , refers to the ideology and practices of the National Socialist German Workers? Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945....
-perpetrated Holocaust during World War II
World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
, genocide was defined (in part) as a crime "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such."

Historian David Stannard
David Stannard

David Edward Stannard was born to Florence E. Harwood Stannard and David L. Stannard, a businessman. He served in the armed forces and worked in the publishing industry between 1959 and 1968....
 is of the opinion that the indigenous peoples of America (including Hawaii
Hawaii

File:Pahoehoe and Aa flows at Hawaii.jpgThe State of Hawaii is a U.S. state in the United States, located on an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of Australia....
) were the victims of a "Euro-American genocidal war." While conceding that the majority of the indigenous peoples fell victim to the ravages of European disease, he estimates that almost 100 million died in what he calls the American Holocaust. Stannard's perspective has been joined by Kirkpatrick Sale
Kirkpatrick Sale

Kirkpatrick Sale is an independent scholar and author who has written prolifically about environmentalism, luddism, technology and political decentralism....
, Ben Kiernan
Ben Kiernan

Benedict F. Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University....
, Lenore A. Stiffarm, and Phil Lane, Jr., among others; the perspective has been further refined by Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill

Ward LeRoy Churchill is an American writer and political activism. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007....
, who has said that "it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed."

Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been disputed because he does not cite any demographic data to support this number, and because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease. Noble David Cook, Latin Americanist and history professor at Florida International University
Florida International University

Florida International University, commonly referred to as FIU or Florida International, is a public university research university located in Miami, Florida, Florida, in the United States, with its main campus at University Park, Florida....
, considers books such as Stannard's a number of which were released around the year 1992 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the Columbus voyage to America to be an unproductive return to Black Legend
Black Legend

The Black Legend is a term coined by Juli?n Juder?as in his 1914 book La leyenda negra y la verdad hist?rica , to describe the depiction of Spain and Spaniards as "cruel", "intolerant" and "fanatical" in anti-Spanish literature, starting in the sixteenth century....
-type explanations for depopulation
Depopulation

Depopulation is a term used to describe any great reduction in a human population. It can be used to refer to longterm demographic trends, as in urban decay or rural depopulation, but it is also commonly employed to describe large reductions in population due to violence, disease, or other catastrophes....
. In response to Stannard's figure, political scientist
Political science

Political science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior....
 R. J. Rummel
R. J. Rummel

Rudolph Joseph Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination....
 has instead estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million American indigenous people were the victims of what he calls democide
Democide

Democide is a term coined by political scientist R. J. Rummel for "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the legal definition of genocide, and it has found currency among...
.
"Even if these figures are remotely true," writes Rummel, "then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history."

While no mainstream historian denies that death and suffering were unjustly inflicted by a number of Europeans upon a great many American natives, most historians argue that genocide, which is a crime of intent, was not the intent of European colonization while in America. Historian Stafford Poole
Stafford Poole

The Reverend Stafford Poole, Lazarists, is a priest, full-time research historian, formerly a history professor and president of St. John's Seminary College in Camarillo, California....
 wrote: "There are other terms to describe what happened in the Western Hemisphere, but genocide is not one of them. It is a good propaganda
Propaganda

Propaganda is the dissemination of information aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviors of large numbers of people. As opposed to Objectivity providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience....
 term in an age where slogans and shouting have replaced reflection and learning, but to use it in this context is to cheapen both the word itself and the appalling experiences of the Jews and Armenians
Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide , also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, the Great Calamity —refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian people population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I....
, to mention but two of the major victims of this century."

Therefore, nearly all mainstream scholars tend not to use the term "genocide" to describe the overall depopulation of American natives. However, a number of historians, rather than seeing the whole history of European colonization as one long act of genocide, do cite specific wars and campaigns which were arguably genocidal in intent and effect. Usually included among these are the Pequot War
Pequot War

The Pequot War was an armed conflict in 1636-1637 between an alliance of Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plymouth Colony colonies, with Indigenous peoples of the Americas allies , against the Pequot tribe....
 (1637) and campaigns waged against tribes in California
California

California is a U.S. state on the West Coast of the United States of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. It is bordered by Oregon to the north, Nevada to the east, Arizona to the southeast, and to the south the Mexico state of Baja California....
 starting in the 1850s.

See also

  • European colonization of the Americas
    European colonization of the Americas

    The start of the European colonization of the Americas is typically dated to 1492, although there was at least one earlier colonization effort....
  • Columbus Day
    Columbus Day

    Many countries in the New World and elsewhere celebrate the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas, which occurred on October 12, 1492 in the Julian calendar and October 21, 1492 in the modern Gregorian calendar, as an official holiday....
  • Indian Wars
    Indian Wars

    Indian Wars is the name generally used in the United States to describe a series of conflicts between the colonial or federal government and the indigenous peoples of North America....
     (in the United States)
  • Bandeirantes
    Bandeirantes

    The Bandeirantes or "followers of the banner" were members of the 16th-18th century Portuguese slave-hunting expeditions, called Bandeiras, which took place in the New World....
  • Trail of Tears
    Trail of Tears

    The Trail of Tears was the relocation and movement of Native Americans in the United States in the United States from their homelands to Indian Territory in the Western United States....
  • Indigenous peoples of the Americas
    Indigenous peoples of the Americas

    The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples....
  • Amazonas before the Inca Empire
    Amazonas before the Inca Empire

    The Amazonas Region has a millennial history. There is some evidence exhibited on rocky walls dated from the most remote times, including the Cave painting of Chi?u?a-Yam?n and Limones-Calp?n in the Utcubamba Province....
  • Native American massacres (mass killings in the United States)
  • Smallpox Epidemics in the New World
    Smallpox

    Smallpox is an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning spotted, or varus, meaning "pimple"....
  • Tribal warfare
    Endemic warfare

    Endemic warfare is the state of continual, low-threshold warfare in a tribe warrior society. Endemic warfare is often highly ritualized and plays an important function in assisting the formation of a social structure among the tribes' men by proving themselves in battle....
  • Uncontacted peoples
    Uncontacted peoples

    Uncontacted peoples are peoples who, either by choice or chance, live, or have lived, without significant contact with the 'modern' civilizations of the world....
  • Pandemic
    Pandemic

    A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that spreads through populations across a large region; for instance a continent, or even worldwide....
  • List of epidemics
    List of epidemics

    This article is a list of major epidemics....
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel
    Guns, Germs, and Steel

    Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles....
  • 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
    1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

    1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas....


Books

  • Cappel, Constance, The Smallpox Genocide of the Odawa Tribe at L'Arbre Croche, 1763: The History of a Native American People, Edwin Mellen Press, 2007, ISBN -10: 0-7734-5220-6, ISBN 13: 978-0-7734-5220-6.
  • Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
    Cambridge University Press

    Cambridge University Press is a printer and publisher granted a Royal Letters Patent by Henry VIII of England in 1534. It is the world's oldest continually operating book publisher....
    , 1998. ISBN 0-521-62208-5, ISBN 0-521-62730-3.
  • Hanson, Victor Davis
    Victor Davis Hanson

    Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian, columnist, political essayist and former classics professor, notable as a scholar of ancient warfare....
    . Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. New York: Doubleday, 2001. ISBN 0-385-50052-1.
  • Henige, David
    David Henige

    David Patrick Henige is an American historian, bibliographer, academic librarian and Africanist scholar. The majority of Henige's academic career has been spent in affiliation with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where for over three decades he has held the position of bibliographer in African studies at UW-Madison's Memorial Library....
    . Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press
    University of Oklahoma Press

    The University of Oklahoma Press is the publishing arm of the University of Oklahoma. It has been in operation for over seventy-five years, and was the first university press established in the American Southwest....
    , 1998. ISBN 0-8061-3044-X.


  • Mann, Charles C.
    Charles C. Mann

    Charles C. Mann is an American journalist and author, specializing in scientific topics.He has been coauthor of four books, and in 2005 he wrote 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus....
     1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus New York: Knopf, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-4006-X


  • Royal, Robert. 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992.
  • Shoemaker, Nancy. American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century. University of New Mexico Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8263-1919-X.
  • Stannard, David E
    David Stannard

    David Edward Stannard was born to Florence E. Harwood Stannard and David L. Stannard, a businessman. He served in the armed forces and worked in the publishing industry between 1959 and 1968....
    . American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press
    Oxford University Press

    Oxford University Press is a publisher and a department of the University of Oxford in England. It is the largest university press in the world, being larger than all the American university presses combined with Cambridge University Press....
    , 1993. ISBN 0-19-508557-4
  • Stearn, E. Wagner and Allen E. Stearn. The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian. Boston: Humphries, 1945.
  • Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. University of Oklahoma Press
    University of Oklahoma Press

    The University of Oklahoma Press is the publishing arm of the University of Oklahoma. It has been in operation for over seventy-five years, and was the first university press established in the American Southwest....
    , 1987. ISBN 0-8061-2074-6.


Online sources

  • Lewy, Guenter. , History News Network, originally published in Commentary.
  • Lord, Lewis. U.S. News and World Report, August 18, 1997.
  • Rummel, R.J.
  • Stutz, Bruce. Discover, February 21, 2006.
  • White, Matthew. . Amateur website, but reports data from scholarly sources.
  • "Lord Jeffrey Amherst's letters discussing germ warfare against American Indians" Retrieved February, 2007


Further reading

  • Fagan, Brian. Ancient North America. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005, ISBN 0-500-28532-2.
  • Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Knopf Publishing Group, August 2005, ISBN 1-4000-4006-X.
  • McNeill, William H.
    William McNeill

    William McNeill may refer to:* William Hardy McNeill, Canadian historian* William Simpson McNeill, former politician in Prince Edward Island, Canada...
     Plagues and Peoples. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, NY, 1976, ISBN 0-385-12122-9.
  • Michael Sletcher, ‘North American Indians’, in Will Kaufman and Heidi Macpherson, eds., Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, (2 vols., Oxford, 2005).
  • Cappel, Constance, The Smallpox Genocide of the Odawa Tribe at L'Arbre Croche. 1763: The History of a Native American People, Edwin Mellen Press, October, 2007, ISBN 10: 0-7734-5220-6 and ISBN 13: 978-0-7734-5220-6.


External links