Chapter 20
The Slow Dwindling of Native Americans
In This Chapter
Reviewing the five killers
Checking out the deadly contamination
Starving and attempts at extermination
Recognizing today’s challenges
In the early 1600s, Dutch explorers arrived at Delaware Bay. Lots of Europeans followed, and it is estimated that by the end of the 17th century, after the arrival of said Europeans, a staggering 90 per cent of the Native American coastal population was dead. Disease was the primary culprit, followed by violence.
Depending on the demographic model used, and depending on who you listen to, the Indigenous population in the Americans before Columbus arrived in 1492 was . . . impossible to know with certainty!
Yes, you read that right. We don’t know for sure. This is simply a reality that anthropologists, historians, and scientists have lived with for ages. (Although “argued about” might be a better way of putting it.)
This doesn’t mean, however, that the aforementioned anthropologists, historians, and scientists have not come up with numbers. That they have done. And those numbers range from 8 million to as high as 145 million. Yes, there is that big a spread in the estimates, and no one knows for certain the exact number.
The number 40 million seems to appeal to experts as possibly being as close to correct as we can get. Although depending on the estimates they support, some find it impossibly high and others, yes, impossibly low. Can’t we all just get along?
Today, there are 2.4 million full-blooded Native Americans in America. (That number approximately doubles when you count people who are part Native American.) Native American numbers are on the rise, though, and it is projected that by 2050, the Native population in American will be around 4.4 million, rising from 0.9 percent of the U.S. population, to 1.1 per cent.
Too Much to Defend Against
The drastic decline in the Native American population from the 16th century on was due to several reasons.
It’s undeniable that the combination of assaults against the Indigenous populations — the exponential increase in deaths when the attacks piled on — hastened and expanded the fatality toll.
The Native Americans had five strikes against them. The array of physical, medical, military, economic, and cultural assaults included the following:
Disease from contagions: This includes deaths from diseases carried by Europeans to which Native Americans were not immune, many of which were introduced into Indian society by the livestock and other animals brought to the New World by Europeans once the serious colonization efforts kicked in.
Disease from deliberate infections: Smallpox-infected blankets. True story.
Warfare and battle losses: Recurring violent conflict between Native Americans and Europeans caused an enormous number of deaths. Similar violent clashes between warring tribes also resulted in mass Indian deaths.
Starvation and exposure: Forced removal of Native Americans from their lands to make room for white settlers often resulted in horror shows like the 1838 Trail of Tears, during which Cherokees were marched from Georgia to Oklahoma.
(See Chapter 6 for more on the Cherokees and the Trail of Tears.) Many Natives died from starvation, illness, and exposure during the march.)
Extermination and slaughter: Deliberate annihilation of Indians began when Columbus and his men returned to Hispaniola and slaughtered thousands of Taino Natives in three years. Official policies and a cultural mindset that reduced Native Americans to less than human made it easy to consider genocidal atrocities as no big deal.
Defenseless Against Dastardly Diseases
Transmittable diseases cannot be transmitted if there is no one to transmit them to.
Today, big cities are “target-rich” playgrounds for all manner of bacteria. The nature of modern society makes it easy for nasty critters to move from host (the office doorknob), to host (the guy who delivers the mail), to host (the boss’s secretary), to host (the handle of the shopping cart), to host (you!)
This is why biological terrorism is perhaps the most frightening form of attack, because it’s essentially a silent, invisible invasion. A terrorist nonchalantly drops a test tube filled with the smallpox virus on a crowded New York city sidewalk, or in an airport terminal, or on the stadium’s cement sets at a baseball game. The vial, of course, shatters — and then the terrorist keeps on walking.
A week or so later, there’s a devastating epidemic — because no has been vaccinated against smallpox for decades. We licked it in 1979. That’s when it was considered “eradicated.” But strands of the virus still exist in U.S. and Russian laboratories and there are new fears that these samples could end up in the hands of terrorists and smallpox could be used as a biological weapon. Some believe Russia manufactured tons of it during the Cold War when they ramped up their biological weapons programs.
Dense populations, like those in cities, means that disease transmission is easy. There are a lot of people meeting up with each other and this means that it’s easy for bacteria and viruses to meet up with them as well. Because people are exposed to many different bugs, hardy populations are able to develop immune responses to the diseases. This is not to say that all diseases could be overcome. Remember that little event called the Black Plague? During the 16th and 17th centuries, European cities lived in fear of outbreaks of smallpox and of something called the sweating sickness. People typically reacted by fleeing the city or by shutting themselves away from others.
While Europeans had lived with the same set of bugs for centuries, when they brought these over to the Americas, the bacteria and viruses took advantage of the large amount of fresh vectors, so to speak.
Medical mayhem
Is it any wonder there was such a drastic decline in the Indian population once the Europeans set foot on the continent? The diseases the Native peoples’ immune systems suddenly had to contend with included this vile smorgasbord of illnesses (and notice how many are bacteria-borne):
Bubonic plague: An often fatal epidemic bacterial disease that affects the lymphatic system and then the entire body.
Chicken pox: A contagious viral disease.
Cholera: An often fatal intestinal disease commonly caused by drinking water contaminated with the cholera bacteria.
Diphtheria: Often deadly infectious bacterial disease that damages the heart and nervous system.
Dysentery: A lower intestinal bacterial disease that causes severe diarrhea and the passage of blood and mucus.
Influenza: A contagious viral disease that can be deadly for people with weakened immune systems or other systemic problems.
Malaria: An infectious disease caused by a parasite transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes infected with the bug.
Measles: A very contagious acute viral disease causing spots that cover the entire body, a high fever, and a sore throat.
Mumps: An acute contagious viral disease that causes fever and a swelling of the salivary glands, and can also damage the pancreas, testes, and ovaries.
Pleurisy: A serious lung inflammation that is often the result of a systemic viral or bacterial disease like tuberculosis.
Scarlet fever: A contagious bacterial disease caused by an infection and causing fever and throat problems.
Smallpox: The killer. A highly contagious viral disease causing back pain, high fever and the development of small pustules on the skin. Smallpox has a fatality rate of approximately 30 percent.
Typhoid fever: A bacterial infection of the digestive tract, sometimes fatal, that is caused by eating or drinking salmonella-contaminated food or water.
Typhus: A bacterial infection spread by ticks and fleas on rats that causes high fever and delirium and can be fatal.
Whooping cough: An infectious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and a very recognizable shrill inhalation sound.
Yellow fever: An often fatal viral infection spread by mosquitoes and causing liver damage, hemorrhaging, high fever, and vomiting of blood.
A review of these horrific ailments makes it clear that the odds were stacked against the Indigenous populations when these diseases entered their environment.
But Indians dying from European diseases did not mean they were always intentionally infected. As mentioned, a lot of the death toll was due to just plain “biological bad luck” — immune systems that had never been exposed to European diseases and, thus, were unable to fight them off.
The first epidemics
In the Autumn 1988 issue of the journal Social Science History. Dr. Francisco Guerra states that the first American epidemic to devastate an Indigenous population was the 1493 influenza epidemic, almost certainly brought from Spain to Hispaniola during Columbus’s second trip to the island.
When Columbus returned, he brought with him livestock that were the probable source of the virus.
The mainland was next.
The 93
From the 16th century (c. 1520) through the early 20th century (1918), no less than 93 confirmed epidemics and pandemics — all of which can be attributed to European contagions — decimated the American Indian population.
These 93 epidemics were a potpourri of disease, and some of them were sexually transmitted. Native American populations in the American Southwest plummeted by a staggering 90 percent or more.
The Europeans were of the belief that the deaths of the Natives was because God was on their side. The Indians, on the other hand, believed that God had abandoned them and looked to the “evidence” that their healers were helpless in the face of disease outbreaks that were catastrophic. Suicide, alcoholism, and Christianity were the solutions many Indians turned to. Unfortunately, what could have helped them — antibiotics, for one — had not yet been invented.
The Columbian Exchange
The Columbian Exchange is the term used for the rapid and widespread exchange of, well, just about everything after Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492.
There were three basic “categories” of things exchanged during the Columbia Exchange:
Animals
Plants
Diseases
This massive exchange also included human beings, both in the form of colonists and slaves, and is considered one of the most significant cultural interminglings in the history of civilization.
Smallpox during the American Revolution
The British had better immunity to smallpox than did the Continental Army, but in the end, it didn’t help them win the war.
In 1775, there was a smallpox outbreak in the North among the soldiers of the Continental Army and, thanks to George Washington’s brilliant decision to vaccinate all his soldiers, it was quelled quickly enough so as not to decimate the troops. (It did spread to the southern armies, though, where it wreaked havoc.) Washington himself was immune to smallpox: He had contracted it when he was 19 during a visit to Barbados with his ailing brother.
By the spring of 1764, smallpox was epidemic among the Indians of the area. It seems indisputable that the linens had “the desired effect.”
Wasn’t the Black Death worse?
If we compare the death toll of Native Americans killed by European diseases to Europeans killed by the Black Death from 1347 through 1350, it seems like the Indians were hurt more than the European population.
Approximately one-third to (from some estimates) one-half of Europe’s population was killed by the Black Death, which was actually bubonic plague. Yet it’s estimated that three times that percentage — 90 percent to 95 percent — of the Native American population on the North American continent was wiped out during the 400 years of the 93 epidemics.
It really boils down to a sort of “apples and oranges” comparison: The Black Death killed a smaller percentage of its victim population, but the disease did its dirty work in a very short period of only four or five years. The European diseases that killed the Indians, on the other hand, plagued the population for almost four centuries, but the death toll was a much higher percentage of the Indigenous population.
Fighting
It was almost always about land and control: keeping it, or stealing it.
Indians fought with Indians over land; Europeans fought with Indians over land; heck, even Europeans and Indian allies fought with other Indians over land. And the body count climbed each time forces came to blows.
Experts differ on the prevalance of violent battle in the pre-Columbian era, but after guns were introduced to the Indian populations, warfare became more frequent and far more deadly.
In 1675, approximately 6,000 Indians died or were enslaved in King Phillip’s War in colonial New England. The war lasted two years and it is estimated that one in ten from both sides died in the conflict. (See Chapter 11 for more details on this often-overlooked war.)
Starvation
Forcing Indians onto reservations and away from their hunting grounds and proven growing lands resulted in a great many deaths by starvation.
Also, the deliberate extermination by Europeans of the life-giving buffalo caused Indian tribes to starve and disintegrate. By 1895, the buffalo was essentially extinct. The Plains Indians suffered most from loss of the buffalo. And, again, if we follow the money, we’ll see why the animal was exploited to the point of “almost” extinction:
Their hides were worth a lot of money.
They were in the way.
How did the tribes of the Plains Indians replace the meat they got from the buffalo?
They didn’t.
Extermination
As late as the late 19th century, there was pervasive racism against Native Americans, and all too much accepted talk about eliminating them completely as a race.
University of Hawaii professor David Stannard uses the term “holocaust” to describe what the Europeans did to Native American people in the quarter of a century following Columbus’s arrival at Hispaniola in 1492.
Statistics bear him out. And those statistics are grim:
In 1492, the population of the Caribbean islands was around 8 million Natives.
By 1496, the population was down to between 4 and 5 million.
By 1508, the population was less than 100,000.
By 1518, the population was less than 20,000.
By 1535, the population was virtually extinct.
And how did all these people die?
Horrifically, is how, and the intensity of the effort to not simply eliminate the Natives, but to do it as sadistically and cruelly as possible, is an undeniable dark stain on European colonization of the New World.
Professor Stannard’s use of the term “holocaust” was deliberate, since it is now interpreted to mean a deliberate extermination, and that is precisely what the Spanish conquistadors intended: extermination of the Natives in any and all ways possible.
There is controversy over Stannard’s use of the term “holocaust” because it implies abundant intentionality. The term, right or wrong, is now associated in large part with the idea of intentional genocide. (And the term “ethnic cleansing” is often commonly used today to describe the deliberate extermination of people based solely on their race or ethnicity.) Some critics assert that genocide was not the primary purpose of western colonization, and they’ve got a point. Trade was. Follow the money, and all that, right?
Nonetheless, the disease fork of the three-pronged Columbian Exchange mentioned earlier did serve to exterminate the Native peoples quite effectively, although it’s reasonable to say that killing off Indigenous people with European diseases was not the master plan of the colonists.
What about Aztec human sacrifices?
Is it true that the pre-Columbian Aztecs in Meso- america performed ritual human sacrifices? Yes.
Did the numbers of people sacrificed affect population numbers of the Indigenous people in the post-Columbian years? Probably not, since the number of human sacrifices were small compared to the population. Some experts estimate an Aztec population of around 19 million, which dropped to 2 million or less by 1581 — but not because of the their practice of sacrificing approximately 20,000 people each year to the gods. (No group would continue a cultural tradition like sacrifice if it impaired their own ability to survive.)
The Aztec population decline is believed to have been caused by smallpox.
Today’s Challenges
The American Indian population is on the upswing.
Today, Native Americans do not have the brigade of assaults they had to contend with in the past. Yet, that said, it cannot be denied that the injuries impressed upon the Indigenous populations from the 15th century on took a toll, and their effects are lingering even today.
To put it plainly, everything in America is worse for the Indian than for other racial groups. Comedian Chris Rock, during one his comedy specials, made the point that even blacks don’t have it as bad these days are American Indians. As he said (and I’m almost certainly paraphrasing), “When was the last time you saw two Indian families eating at a Red Lobster?”
Of course, one major problem facing Native Americans is just that — the sense of being invisible. Not every Native person looks like they’re a descendant of Sitting Bull. Some look like they might be more related to Thomas Jefferson, while others could be the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Chris Rock may very well have seen two Indian families together, but not recognized them as such!
Despite the dark night of the colonization, Native people have come forward into the present day, changed in some ways, but strong in every way that matters.
In Chapter 22, we compare realities. There you’ll find statistics that do not paint a pretty picture for the American Indian.
In all categories — health, income, education, employment, and so forth — the Indian lags behind white America.