Contemporary illustration of the 1868 Washita Massacre by the 7th Cavalry against Black Kettle's band of Cheyennes, during the American Indian Wars. Violence and conflict with colonists were also important causes of the decline of certain Indigenous American populations since the 16th century.
Population figures for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European colonization have been difficult to establish. By the end of the 20th century, most scholars gravitated toward an estimate of around 50 million, with some historians arguing for an estimate of 100 million or more.[1][2]
In an effort to circumvent the hold which the Ottoman Empire held on the overland trade routes to East Asia and the hold that the Aeterni regis granted to Portugal on maritime routes via the African coast and the Indian Ocean, the monarchs of the nascent Spanish Empire decided to fund Columbus' voyage in 1492, which eventually led to the establishment of colonies and the migration of millions of Europeans to the Americas. The population of African and European peoples in the Americas grew steadily, starting in 1492, and at the same time, the Indigenous population began to plummet. Eurasian diseases such as influenza, pneumonic plagues, and smallpox, in combination with conflict, forced removal, enslavement, imprisonment, and outright warfare with European newcomers reduced populations and disrupted traditional societies.[3][4] The causes of the decline and the extent of it have been characterized as a genocide by some scholars[5][6][7] while other scholars have disputed this characterization.[6][8][9]
Population overview
Natives of North America.Natives of South America.
Pre-Columbian population figures are difficult to estimate because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence. Estimates range from 8–112million.[10] Scholars have varied widely on the estimated size of the Indigenous populations prior to colonization and on the effects of European contact.[11] Estimates are made by extrapolations from small bits of data. In 1976, geographer William Denevan used the existing estimates to derive a "consensus count" of about 54million people. Nonetheless, more recent estimates still range widely.[12] In 1992, Denevan suggested that the total population was approximately 53.9million and the populations by region were, approximately, 3.8million for the United States and Canada, 17.2million for Mexico, 5.6million for Central America, 3million for the Caribbean, 15.7million for the Andes and 8.6million for lowland South America.[13] A 2020 genetic study suggests that prior estimates for the pre-Columbian Caribbean population may have been at least tenfold too large.[14] Historian David Stannard estimates that the extermination of Indigenous peoples took the lives of 100million people: "...the total extermination of many American Indian peoples and the near-extermination of others, in numbers that eventually totaled close to 100,000,000."[15] A 2019 study estimates the pre-Columbian Indigenous population contained more than 60million people, but dropped to 6million by 1600, based on a drop in atmospheric CO2 during that period.[16][17] Other studies have disputed this conclusion.[18][19]
The Indigenous population of the Americas in 1492 was not necessarily at a high point and may actually have already been in decline in some areas. Indigenous populations in most areas of the Americas reached a low point by the early 20th century.[20]
Using an estimate of approximately 37million people in Mexico, Central and South America in 1492 (including 6million in the Aztec Empire, 5–10 million in the Mayan States, 11 million in what is now Brazil, and 12 million in the Inca Empire), the lowest estimates give a death toll from all causes of 80% by the end of the 17th century (nine million people in 1650).[21] Latin America would match its 15th-century population early in the 19th century; it numbered 17million in 1800, 30million in 1850, 61million in 1900, 105million in 1930, 218million in 1960, 361million in 1980, and 563million in 2005.[21] In the last three decades of the 16th century, the population of present-day Mexico dropped to about onemillion people.[21] The Maya population is today estimated at six million, which is about the same as at the end of the 15th century, according to some estimates.[21] In what is now Brazil, the Indigenous population declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated four million to some 300,000. Over 60 million Brazilians possess at least one Native South American ancestor, according to a DNA study.[22]
While it is difficult to determine exactly how many Natives lived in North America before Columbus,[23] estimates range from 3.8 million, as mentioned above, to 7 million[24] people to a high of 18 million.[25] Scholars vary on the estimated size of the Indigenous population in what is now Canada prior to colonization and on the effects of European contact.[26] During the late 15th century is estimated to have been between 200,000[27] and two million,[28] with a figure of 500,000 currently accepted by Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Health.[29] Although not without conflict, European Canadians' early interactions with First Nations and Inuit populations were relatively peaceful.[30] However repeated outbreaks of European infectious diseases such as influenza, measles and smallpox (to which they had no natural immunity),[31] combined with other effects of European contact, resulted in a twenty-five percent to eighty percent Indigenous population decrease post-contact.[27] Roland G Robertson suggests that during the late 1630s, smallpox killed over half of the Wyandot (Huron), who controlled most of the early North American fur trade in the area of New France.[32] In 1871 there was an enumeration of the Indigenous population within the limits of Canada at the time, showing a total of only 102,358 individuals.[33] From 2006 to 2016, the Indigenous population has grown by 42.5 percent, four times the national rate.[34] According to the 2011 Canadian Census, Indigenous peoples (First Nations – 851,560, Inuit – 59,445 and Métis – 451,795) numbered at 1,400,685, or 4.3% of the country's total population.[35]
The population debate has often had ideological underpinnings.[36] Low estimates were sometimes reflective of European notions of cultural and racial superiority. Historian Francis Jennings 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."[37] In 1998, Africanist Historian David Henige said many population estimates are the result of arbitrary formulas applied from unreliable sources.[38]
Estimations
Comparative table of estimates of the pre-Columbian population (millions)
Population size for Native American tribes is difficult to state definitively, but at least one writer has made estimates, often based on an assumed proportion of the number of warriors to total population for the tribe.[50] Typical proportions were 5 people per one warrior and at least 1 up to 5 warriors (therefore at least 5-25 people) per lodge, cabin or house.
Highest available estimates: probable population peaks[50]
Genetic diversity and population structure in the American land mass using DNA micro-satellite markers (genotype) sampled from North, Central, and South America have been analyzed against similar data available from other Indigenous populations worldwide.[85][86] The Amerindian populations show a lower genetic diversity than populations from other continental regions.[86] Decreasing genetic diversity with increasing geographic distance from the Bering Strait can be seen, as well as a decreasing genetic similarity to Siberian populations from Alaska (genetic entry point).[85][86] A higher level of diversity and lower level of population structure in western South America compared to eastern South America is observed.[85][86] A relative lack of differentiation between Mesoamerican and Andean populations is a scenario that implies coastal routes were easier than inland routes for migrating peoples (Paleo-Indians) to traverse.[85] The overall pattern that is emerging suggests that the Americas were recently colonized by a small number of individuals (effective size of about 70–250), and then they grew by a factor of 10 over 800–1,000 years.[87][88] The data also show that there have been genetic exchanges between Asia, the Arctic and Greenland since the initial peopling of the Americas.[88][89] A new study in early 2018 suggests that the effective population size of the original founding population of Native Americans was about 250 people.[90][91]
One estimate of population collapse in Central Mexico brought on by successive epidemics in the early colonial period. Note: Other scholars' estimates vary widely.
Early explanations for the population decline of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas include the brutal practices of the Spanish conquistadores, as recorded by the Spaniards themselves, such as the encomienda system, which was ostensibly set up to protect people from warring tribes as well as to teach them the Spanish language and the Catholic religion, but in practice was tantamount to serfdom and slavery.[92] The most notable account was that of the DominicanfriarBartolomé de las Casas, whose writings vividly depict Spanish atrocities committed in particular against the Taínos.[93] The second European explanation was a perceived divine approval, in which God removed the natives as part of His "divine plan" to make way for a new Christian civilization. Many Native Americans viewed their troubles in a religious framework within their own belief systems.[94]
According to later academics such as Noble David Cook, a community of scholars began "quietly accumulating piece by piece data on early epidemics in the Americas and their relation to the subjugation of native peoples." Scholars like Cook believe that widespread epidemic disease, to which the natives had no prior exposure or resistance, was the primary cause of the massive population decline of the Native Americans.[95] One of the most devastating diseases was smallpox, but other deadly diseases included typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever and pertussis, which were chronic in Eurasia.[96]
However, recently scholars have studied the link between physical colonial violence such as warfare, displacement, and enslavement, and the proliferation of disease among Native populations.[4][97][98] For example, according to Coquille scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker, "In recent decades, however, researchers challenge the idea that disease is solely responsible for the rapid Indigenous population decline. The research identifies other aspects of European contact that had profoundly negative impacts on Native peoples' ability to survive foreign invasion: war, massacres, enslavement, overwork, deportation, the loss of will to live or reproduce, malnutrition and starvation from the breakdown of trade networks, and the loss of subsistence food production due to land loss."[99]
Further, Andrés Reséndez of the University of California, Davis points out that, even though the Spanish were aware of deadly diseases such as smallpox, there is no mention of them in the New World until 1519, implying that, until that date, epidemic disease played no significant part in the depopulation of the Antilles. The practices of forced labor, brutal punishment, and inadequate necessities of life, were the initial and major reasons for depopulation.[100]Jason Hickel estimates that a third of Arawak workers died every six months from forced labor in these mines.[101] In this way, "slavery has emerged as a major killer" of the indigenous populations of the Caribbean between 1492 and 1550, as it set the conditions for diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and malaria to flourish.[100] Unlike the populations of Europe who rebounded following the Black Death, no such rebound occurred for the Indigenous populations.[100]
Similarly, historian Jeffrey Ostler at the University of Oregon has argued that population collapses in North America throughout colonization were not due mainly to lack of Native immunity to European disease. Instead, he claims that "When severe epidemics did hit, it was often less because Native bodies lacked immunity than because European colonialism disrupted Native communities and damaged their resources, making them more vulnerable to pathogens." In specific regard to Spanish colonization of northern Florida and southeastern Georgia, Native peoples there "were subject to forced labor and, because of poor living conditions and malnutrition, succumbed to wave after wave of unidentifiable diseases." Further, in relation to British colonization in the Northeast, Algonquian speaking tribes in Virginia and Maryland "suffered from a variety of diseases, including malaria, typhus, and possibly smallpox." These diseases were not solely a case of Native susceptibility, however, because "as colonists took their resources, Native communities were subject to malnutrition, starvation, and social stress, all making people more vulnerable to pathogens. Repeated epidemics created additional trauma and population loss, which in turn disrupted the provision of healthcare." Such conditions would continue, alongside rampant disease in Native communities, throughout colonization, the formation of the United States, and multiple forced removals, as Ostler explains that many scholars "have yet to come to grips with how U.S. expansion created conditions that made Native communities acutely vulnerable to pathogens and how severely disease impacted them. ... Historians continue to ignore the catastrophic impact of disease and its relationship to U.S. policy and action even when it is right before their eyes."[6]
Historian David Stannard says that by "focusing almost entirely on disease ... contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent—a sad, but both inevitable and "unintended consequence" of human migration and progress," and asserts that their destruction "was neither inadvertent nor inevitable," but the result of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide working in tandem.[102] He also wrote:[103]
...Despite frequent undocumented assertions that disease was responsible for the great majority of indigenous deaths in the Americas, there does not exist a single scholarly work that even pretends to demonstrate this claim on the basis of solid evidence. And that is because there is no such evidence, anywhere. The supposed truism that more native people died from disease than from direct face-to-face killing or from gross mistreatment or other concomitant derivatives of that brutality such as starvation, exposure, exhaustion, or despair is nothing more than a scholarly article of faith...
In contrast, historian Russel Thornton has pointed out that there were disastrous epidemics and population losses during the first half of the sixteenth century "resulting from incidental contact, or even without direct contact, as disease spread from one American Indian tribe to another."[104] Thornton has also challenged higher Indigenous population estimates, which are based on the Malthusian assumption that "populations tend to increase to, and beyond, the limits of the food available to them at any particular level of technology."[105]
The European colonization of the Americas resulted in the deaths of so many people it contributed to climatic change and temporary global cooling, according to scientists from University College London.[106][107] A century after the arrival of Christopher Columbus, some 90% of Indigenous Americans had perished from "wave after wave of disease", along with mass slavery and war, in what researchers have described as the "great dying".[108] According to one of the researchers, UCL Geography Professor Mark Maslin, the large death toll also boosted the economies of Europe: "the depopulation of the Americas may have inadvertently allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. It also allowed for the Industrial Revolution and for Europeans to continue that domination."[109]
Biological warfare
When Old World diseases were first carried to the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century, they spread throughout the southern and northern hemispheres, leaving the Indigenous populations in near ruins.[96][110] No evidence has been discovered that the earliest Spanish colonists and missionaries deliberately attempted to infect the American natives, and some efforts were made to limit the devastating effects of disease before it killed off what remained of their labor force (compelled to work under the encomienda system).[96][110] The cattle introduced by the Spanish contaminated various water reserves which Native Americans dug in the fields to accumulate rainwater. In response, the Franciscans and Dominicans created public fountains and aqueducts to guarantee access to drinking water.[21] But when the Franciscans lost their privileges in 1572, many of these fountains were no longer guarded and so deliberate well poisoning may have happened.[21] Although no proof of such poisoning has been found, some historians believe the decrease of the population correlates with the end of religious orders' control of the water.[21]
In the centuries that followed, accusations and discussions of biological warfare were common. Well-documented accounts of incidents involving both threats and acts of deliberate infection are very rare, but may have occurred more frequently than scholars have previously acknowledged.[111][112] Many of the instances likely went unreported, and it is possible that documents relating to such acts were deliberately destroyed,[112] or sanitized.[113][114] By the middle of the 18th century, colonists had the knowledge and technology to attempt biological warfare with the smallpox virus. They well understood the concept of quarantine, and that contact with the sick could infect the healthy with smallpox, and those who survived the illness would not be infected again. Whether the threats were carried out, or how effective individual attempts were, is uncertain.[96][112][113]
One such threat was delivered by fur trader James McDougall, who is quoted as saying to a gathering of local chiefs, "You know the smallpox. Listen: I am the smallpox chief. In this bottle I have it confined. All I have to do is to pull the cork, send it forth among you, and you are dead men. But this is for my enemies and not my friends."[115] Likewise, another fur trader threatened Pawnee Indians that if they didn't agree to certain conditions, "he would let the smallpox out of a bottle and destroy them." The Reverend Isaac McCoy was quoted in his History of Baptist Indian Missions as saying that the white men had deliberately spread smallpox among the Indians of the southwest, including the Pawnee tribe, and the havoc it made was reported to General Clark and the Secretary of War.[115][116] Artist and writer George Catlin observed that Native Americans were also suspicious of vaccination, "They see white men urging the operation so earnestly they decide that it must be some new mode or trick of the pale face by which they hope to gain some new advantage over them."[117] So great was the distrust of the settlers that the Mandan chief Four Bears denounced the white man, whom he had previously treated as brothers, for deliberately bringing the disease to his people.[118][119][120]
During the siege of British-held Fort Pitt in the Seven Years' War, Colonel Henry Bouquet ordered his men to take smallpox-infested blankets from their hospital and gave them as gifts to two neutral Lenape Indian dignitaries during a peace settlement negotiation, according to the entry in the Captain's ledger, "To convey the Smallpox to the Indians".[113][121][122] In the following weeks, Sir Jeffrey Amherst conspired with Bouquet to "Extirpate this Execreble Race" of Native Americans, writing, "Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them." His Colonel agreed to try.[112][121]
Most scholars have asserted that the 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic was "started among the tribes of the upper Missouri River by failure to quarantine steamboats on the river",[115] and Captain Pratt of the St. Peter "was guilty of contributing to the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The law calls his offense criminal negligence. Yet in light of all the deaths, the almost complete annihilation of the Mandans, and the terrible suffering the region endured, the label criminal negligence is benign, hardly befitting an action that had such horrendous consequences."[119] However, some sources attribute the 1836–40 epidemic to the deliberate communication of smallpox to Native Americans, with historian Ann F. Ramenofsky writing, "Variola Major can be transmitted through contaminated articles such as clothing or blankets. In the nineteenth century, the U. S. Army sent contaminated blankets to Native Americans, especially Plains groups, to control the Indian problem."[123] In Brazil, well into the 20th century, deliberate infection attacks continued as Brazilian settlers and miners transported infections intentionally to the native groups whose lands they coveted.[110]
Vaccination
After Edward Jenner's 1796 demonstration that the smallpox vaccination worked, the technique became better known and smallpox became less deadly in the United States and elsewhere. Many colonists and natives were vaccinated, although, in some cases, officials tried to vaccinate natives only to discover that the disease was too widespread to stop. At other times, trade demands led to broken quarantines. In other cases, natives refused vaccination because of suspicion of whites. The first international healthcare expedition in history was the Balmis expedition which had the aim of vaccinating Indigenous peoples against smallpox all along the Spanish Empire in 1803. In 1831, government officials vaccinated the Yankton Sioux at Sioux Agency . The Santee Sioux refused vaccination and many died.[36]
An 1899 chromolithograph of U.S. cavalry pursuing American Indians, artist unknown.An 1899 chromolithograph from the Werner Company of Akron, Ohio titled Custer Massacre at Big Horn, Montana – June 25, 1876.
While epidemic disease was a leading factor 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 warfare. According to demographer Russell Thornton, although many people died 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.[124]
From the U.S. Bureau of the Census in 1894, wars between the government and the Indigenous peoples ranged over 40 in number over the previous 100 years. These wars cost the lives of approximately 19,000 white people, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians, including men, women, and children. They safely estimated that the amount of Native people who were killed or wounded was actually around fifty percent more than what was recorded.[125]
There is some disagreement among scholars about how widespread warfare was in pre-Columbian America,[126] but there is general agreement that war became deadlier after the arrival of the Europeans and their firearms.[citation needed] The South or Central American infrastructure allowed for thousands of European conquistadors and tens of thousands of their Indian auxiliaries to attack the dominant Indigenous civilization. Empires such as the Incas depended on a highly centralized administration for the distribution of resources. Disruption caused by the war and the colonization hampered the traditional economy, and possibly led to shortages of food and materials.[127] Across the western hemisphere, war with various Native American civilizations constituted alliances based out of both necessity or economic prosperity and, resulted in mass-scale intertribal warfare.[128] European colonization in the North American continent also contributed to a number of wars between Native Americans, who fought over which of them should have first access to new technology and weaponry—like in the Beaver Wars.[129]
Some Spaniards objected to the encomienda system of labor, notably Bartolomé de las Casas, who insisted that the Indigenous people were humans with souls and rights. Because of many revolts and military encounters, Emperor Charles V helped relieve the strain on both the native laborers and the Spanish vanguards probing the Caribana for military and diplomatic purposes.[130] Later on New Laws were promulgated in Spain in 1542 to protect isolated natives, but the abuses in the Americas were never entirely or permanently abolished. The Spanish also employed the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita,[131] and treated their subjects as something between slaves and serfs. Serfs stayed to work the land; slaves were exported to the mines, where large numbers of them died. In other areas the Spaniards replaced the ruling Aztecs and Incas and divided the conquered lands among themselves ruling as the new feudal lords with often, but unsuccessful lobbying to the viceroys of the Spanish crown to pay Tlaxcalan war demnities. The infamous Bandeirantes from São Paulo, adventurers mostly of mixed Portuguese and native ancestry, penetrated steadily westward in their search for Indian slaves. Serfdom existed as such in parts of Latin America well into the 19th century, past independence.[132] Historian Andrés Reséndez argues that even though the Spanish were aware of the spread of smallpox, they made no mention of it until 1519, a quarter century after Columbus arrived in Hispaniola.[133] Instead he contends that enslavement in gold and silver mines was the primary reason why the Native American population of Hispaniola dropped so significantly.[132][133] and that even though disease was a factor, the native population would have rebounded the same way Europeans did following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to.[133] He further contends that enslavement of Native Americans was in fact the primary cause of their depopulation in Spanish territories;[133] that the majority of Indians enslaved were women and children compared to the enslavement of Africans which mostly targeted adult males and in turn they were sold at a 50% to 60% higher price,[134] and that 2,462,000 to 4,985,000 Amerindians were enslaved between Columbus's arrival and 1900.[135][134]
While some California tribes were settled on reservations, others were hunted down and massacred by 19th century American settlers. It is estimated that at least 9,400 to 16,000 California Indians were killed by non-Indians, mostly occurring in more than 370 massacres (defined as the "intentional killing of five or more disarmed combatants or largely unarmed noncombatants, including women, children, and prisoners, whether in the context of a battle or otherwise").[138][139]
Throughout history, Indigenous people have been subjected to the repeated and forced removal from their land. Beginning in the 1830s, there was the relocation of an estimated 100,000 Indigenous people in the United States called the "Trail of Tears".[140] The tribes affected by this specific removal were the Five Civilized Tribes: The Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole. The treaty of New Echota,[141] was enacted, which stated that the United States "would give Cherokee land west of the Mississippi in exchange for $5,000,000".[140] According to Jeffrey Ostler, "Of the 80,000 Native people who were forced west from 1830 into the 1850s, between 12,000 and 17,000 perished." Ostler states that "the large majority died of interrelated factors of starvation, exposure and disease".[142]
In addition to the removal of the Southern Tribes, there were multiple other removals of Northern Tribes also known as "Trails of Tears." For example, "In the free labor states of the North, federal and state officials, supported by farmers, speculators and business interests, evicted Shawnees, Delawares, Senecas, Potawatomis, Miamis, Wyandots, Ho-Chunks, Ojibwes, Sauks and Meskwakis." These Nations were moved West of the Mississippi into what is now known as Eastern Kansas, and numbered 17,000 on arrival. According to Ostler, "by 1860, their numbers had been cut in half" because of low fertility, high infant mortality, and increased disease caused by conditions such as polluted drinking water, few resources, and social stress.[142]
Ostler also writes that the areas that Northern tribes were removed to were already inhabited: "The areas west of the Mississippi River were home to other Indigenous nations— Osages, Kanzas, Omahas, Ioways, Otoes and Missourias. To make room for thousands of people from the East, the government dispossessed these nations of much their lands." Ostler writes that in 1840, when Northern Nations were moved onto their land, "The combined population of these western nations was 9,000 ... 20 years later, it had fallen to 6,000."[142]
On 8 September 2000, the head of the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) formally apologized for the agency's participation in the ethnic cleansing of Western tribes.[143][144][145] In a speech before representatives of Native American peoples in June 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom apologized for the "California Genocide." Newsom said, "That's what it was, a genocide. No other way to describe it. And that's the way it needs to be described in the history books."[146]
↑ Extrapolated from 30,000 warriors (× 5) in year 1762, according to James Gorrell. Almost a century later, in 1841, George Catlin estimated the Sioux as up to 50,000 people, and mentioned that they had just lost approx. 8,000 dead to smallpox a few years prior.
Hispaniola is an island in the Caribbean that is part of the Greater Antilles. Hispaniola is the most populous island in the West Indies, and the region's second largest in area, after the island of Cuba. The 76,192-square-kilometre (29,418 sq mi) island is divided into two separate nations: the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic to the east and the French/Haitian Creole-speaking Haiti to the west. The only other divided island in the Caribbean is Saint Martin, which is shared between France and the Netherlands.
Native Americans, sometimes called American Indians, First Americans, or Indigenous Americans, are the Indigenous peoples of the United States or portions thereof, such as American Indians from the contiguous United States and Alaska Natives. The United States Census Bureau defines Native American as "all people indigenous to the United States and its territories, including Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders, whose data are published separately from American Indians and Alaska Natives". The U.S. census tracks data from American Indians and Alaska Native separately from Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders, who include Samoan Americans and Chamorros.
During the Age of Discovery, a large scale colonization of the Americas, involving a number of European countries, took place primarily between the late 15th century and the early 19th century. The Norse had explored and colonized areas of Europe and the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. However, due to its long duration and importance, the later colonization by the European powers involving the continents of North America and South America is more well-known.
The Columbian exchange, also known as the Columbian interchange, was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, precious metals, commodities, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the New World in the Western Hemisphere, and the Old World (Afro-Eurasia) in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the late 15th and following centuries. It is named after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus and is related to the European colonization and global trade following his 1492 voyage. Some of the exchanges were purposeful. Some were accidental or unintended. Communicable diseases of Old World origin resulted in an 80 to 95 percent reduction in the number of Indigenous peoples of the Americas from the 15th century onwards, most severely in the Caribbean. The cultures of both hemispheres were significantly impacted by the migration of people, both free and enslaved, from the Old World to the New. European colonists and African slaves replaced Indigenous populations across the Americas, to varying degrees. The number of Africans taken to the New World was far greater than the number of Europeans moving to the New World in the first three centuries after Columbus.
The first European contact in 1492 started an influx of communicable diseases into the Caribbean. Diseases originating in the Old World (Afro-Eurasia) came to the New World for the first time, resulting in demographic and sociopolitical changes due to the Columbian Exchange from the late 15th century onwards. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas had little immunity to the predominantly European diseases, resulting in significant loss of life and contributing to their enslavement and exploitation perpetrated by the European colonists. Waves of enslaved Africans were brought to replace the dwindling Indigenous populations, solidifying the position of disease in triangular trade.
European colonialism and colonization is the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over other societies and territories, founding a colony, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. For example, colonial policies, such as the type of rule implemented, the nature of investments, and identity of the colonizers, are cited as impacting postcolonial states. Examination of the state-building process, economic development, and cultural norms and mores shows the direct and indirect consequences of colonialism on the postcolonial states.
The first wave of European colonization began with Spanish and Portuguese conquests and explorations, and primarily involved the European colonization of the Americas, though it also included the establishment of European colonies in India and in Maritime Southeast Asia. During this period, European interests in Africa primarily focused on the establishment of trading posts there, particularly for the African slave trade. The wave ended with the British annexation of the Kingdom of Kandy in 1815 and the founding of the colony of Singapore in 1819.
The 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic spanned 1836 through 1840 but reached its height after the spring of 1837, when an American Fur Company steamboat, the SS St. Peter, carried infected people and supplies up the Missouri River in the Midwestern United States. The disease spread rapidly to indigenous populations with no natural immunity, causing widespread illness and death across the Great Plains, especially in the Upper Missouri River watershed. More than 17,000 Indigenous people died along the Missouri River alone, with some bands becoming nearly extinct.
Although a variety of infectious diseases existed in the Americas in pre-Columbian times, the limited size of the populations, smaller number of domesticated animals with zoonotic diseases, and limited interactions between those populations hampered the transmission of communicable diseases. One notable infectious disease that may be of American origin is syphilis. Aside from that, most of the major infectious diseases known today originated in the Old World. The American era of limited infectious disease ended with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and the Columbian exchange of microorganisms, including those that cause human diseases. Eurasian infections and epidemics had major effects on Native American life in the colonial period and nineteenth century, especially.
In epidemiology, a virgin soil epidemic is an epidemic in which populations that previously were in isolation from a pathogen are immunologically unprepared upon contact with the novel pathogen. Virgin soil epidemics have occurred with European colonization, particularly when European explorers and colonists brought diseases to lands they conquered in the Americas, Australia and Pacific Islands.
The genocide of Indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is the intentional elimination of Indigenous peoples as a part of the process of colonialism.
The history of Native Americans in the United States began before the founding of the country, tens of thousands of years ago with the settlement of the Americas by the Paleo-Indians. Anthropologists and archeologists have identified and studied a wide variety of cultures that existed during this era. Their subsequent contact with Europeans had a profound impact on their history afterwards.
Settler colonialism occurs when colonizers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace the existing society with the society of the colonizers.
The genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil began with the Portuguese colonization of the Americas, when Pedro Álvares Cabral made landfall in what is now the country of Brazil in 1500. This started the process that led to the depopulation of the indigenous peoples in Brazil, because of disease and violent treatment by Portuguese settlers, and their gradual replacement with colonists from Europe and enslaved peoples from Africa. This process has been described as a genocide, and continues into the modern era with the ongoing destruction of indigenous peoples of the Amazonian region.
The California genocide was a series of systematized killings of thousands of Indigenous peoples of California by United States government agents and private citizens in the 19th century. It began following the American Conquest of California from Mexico, and the influx of settlers due to the California Gold Rush, which accelerated the decline of the Indigenous population of California. Between 1846 and 1873, it is estimated that non-Natives killed between 9,492 and 16,094 California Natives. In addition, between several hundred and several thousand California Natives were starved or worked to death. Acts of enslavement, kidnapping, rape, child separation and forced displacement were widespread. These acts were encouraged, tolerated, and carried out by state authorities and militias.
The connection between colonialism and genocide has been explored in academic research. According to historian Patrick Wolfe, "[t]he question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism." Historians have commented that although colonialism does not necessarily directly involve genocide, research suggests that the two share a connection.
American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World is a multidisciplinary book about the indigenous peoples of the Americas and colonial history written by American scholar and historian David Stannard.
Indigenous response to colonialism has varied depending on the Indigenous group, historical period, territory, and colonial state(s) they have interacted with. Indigenous peoples have had agency in their response to colonialism. They have employed armed resistance, diplomacy, and legal procedures. Others have fled to inhospitable, undesirable or remote territories to avoid conflict. Nevertheless, some Indigenous peoples were forced to move to reservations or reductions, and work in mines, plantations, construction, and domestic tasks. They have detribalized and culturally assimilated into colonial societies. On occasion, Indigenous peoples have formed alliances with one or more Indigenous or non-Indigenous nations. Overall, the response of Indigenous peoples to colonialism during this period has been diverse and varied in its effectiveness. Indigenous resistance has a centuries-long history that is complex and carries on into contemporary times.
The destruction of Native American peoples, cultures, and languages has been characterized as genocide. The question of whether this event constitutes genocide is debated amongst scholars. Debates are ongoing over whether the entire process, or specific periods and local occurrences, meet the legal definition of genocide. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide", considered the displacement of Native Americans by European settlers as a historical example of genocide. However, others, like historian Gary Anderson, contend that genocide does not accurately characterize any aspect of American history, suggesting instead that ethnic cleansing is a more appropriate term.
1 2 3 Ostler, Jeffrey (2019). Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. Yale University Press. pp.11–17, 381. ISBN978-0-300-24526-4. Since 1992, the argument for a total, relentless, and pervasive genocide in the Americas has become accepted in some areas of Indigenous studies and genocide studies. For the most part, however, this argument has had little impact on mainstream scholarship in U.S. history or American Indian history. Scholars are more inclined than they once were to gesture to particular actions, events, impulses, and effects as genocidal, but genocide has not become a key concept in scholarship in these fields.
↑ Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2014). An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States. Beacon Press. ISBN978-0-8070-0041-0.
↑ Alvarez, Alex (2015). "Gary Clayton Anderson. Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America". The American Historical Review. 120 (2): 605–606. doi:10.1093/ahr/120.2.605. ISSN1937-5239.
↑ Feinstein, Stephen (2006). "God, Greed, and Genocide: The Holocaust Through the Centuries, by Arthur Grenke". Canadian Journal of History. 41 (1): 197–199. doi:10.3138/cjh.41.1.197. ISSN0008-4107. For the most part, however, the diseases that decimated the Natives were caused by natural contact. These Native peoples were greatly weakened, and as a result, they were less able to resist the Europeans. However, diseases themselves were rarely the sources of the genocides nor were they the sources of the deaths which were caused by genocidal means. The genocides were caused by the aggressive actions of one group towards another.
↑ Denevan, William M. (September 1992). "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 82 (3): 369–385. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1992.tb01965.x.
↑ Karl Sapper. Das Element der Wirklichkeit und die Welt der Erfahrung. Grundlinien einer anthropozentrischen Naturphilosophie (in German). C.H. Beck..
↑ Alfred Louis Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, University of California Press. Kroeber inclut seulement le Honduras et le Nicaragua dans l'Amérique centrale; il inclut le Guatemala et le Salvador au Mexique, et le Costa Rica et le Panama aux terres basses sudaméricaines.
↑ James H. Steward, «The Native population of South America» in Handbook of South American Indians, tome V, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, p. 655-668.
↑ Ángel Rosenblat, Población indígena y el mestizaje en América, Nova
↑ Henry F. Dobyns, «Estimating aboriginal population: an appraisal of techniques with a new hemispheric estimate», in Current Anthropology, 7, n°4, octobre 1966, p.395-449.
↑ Suzanne Austin Alchon, A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective, University of New Mexico Press, p.147-172.
↑ Thornton, Russell (2005). "Native American Demographic and Tribal Survival into the Twenty-first Century". American Studies. 46:3/4 (3/4): 23–38. JSTOR40643888.
↑ Swanton, John R. (1953). The Indian Tribes of North America. Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology. Bulletin145. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology. p.56.
1 2 3 4 Jones, Capers (2006). The History and Future of Narragansett Bay. Boca Raton, Florida: Universal Publishers.
↑ Upton, Leslie (1977). "The Extermination of the Beothucks of Newfoundland". Canadian Historical Review (58): 134.
1 2 3 4 Wang, Sijia; Lewis, Cecil M; Jakobsson, Mattias; Ramachandran, Sohini; Ray, Nicolas; Bedoya, Gabriel; Rojas, Winston; Parra, Maria V; Molina, Julio A; Gallo, Carla; Mazzotti, Guido; Poletti, Giovanni; Hill, Kim; Hurtado, Ana M; Labuda, Damian; Klitz, William; Barrantes, Ramiro; Bortolini, Maria Cátira; Salzano, Francisco M; Petzl-Erler, Maria Luiza; Tsuneto, Luiza T; Llop, Elena; Rothhammer, Francisco; Excoffier, Laurent; Feldman, Marcus W; Rosenberg, Noah A; Ruiz-Linares, Andrés (23 November 2007). "Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Native Americans". PLOS Genetics. 3 (11): e185. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030185. PMC2082466. PMID18039031.
1 2 3 4 Walsh, Bruce; Redd, Alan J.; Hammer, Michael F. (January 2008). "Joint match probabilities for Y chromosomal and autosomal markers". Forensic Science International. 174 (2–3): 234–238. doi:10.1016/j.forsciint.2007.03.014. PMID17449208.
↑ Curthoys, Ann; Docker, John (2001). "Introduction: Genocide: definitions, questions, settler-colonies". Aboriginal History. 25: 1–15. ISSN0314-8769. JSTOR45135468. Some of the worst examples of escalating death by sickness and disease occurred on the Spanish Christian missions in Florida, Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico in the period 1690-1845. After the military delivered captive Indians to the missions, they were expected to perform arduous agricultural labour while being provided with no more than 1400 calories per day in low-nutrient foods, with some missions supplying as little as 715 calories per day.
↑ Gilio-Whitaker, Dina (2019). As long as grass grows: the indigenous fight for environmental justice, from colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press. p.40. ISBN978-0-8070-7378-0. OCLC1044542033.
↑ Russel, Thornton (1994). "Book reviews - American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard". The Journal of American History. 80 (4): 1428. doi:10.2307/2080617. JSTOR2080617.
1 2 3 The Tainted Gift; Barbara Alice Mann; ABC-CLIO; 2009; pp. 1–18
↑ Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation's Fight Against Smallpox, 1518–1824; Paul Kelton; University of Oklahoma Press; 2015; pp. 102–05
1 2 3 The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian; Esther Wagner Stearn, Allen Edwin Stearn; University of Minnesota; 1945; pp. 13–20, 73–94, 97
↑ Chardon's Journal at Fort Clark, 1834–1839; Annie Heloise Abel; Books for Libraries Press; 1932; pp. 319, 394
↑ Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History; Donald R. Hopkins; University of Chicago Press; 1983; pp. 270–71
↑ Robert Blaisdell ed., Great Speeches by Native Americans, p. 116.
1 2 Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian; R. G. Robertson; Caxton Press; 2001 pp. 80–83; 298–312
↑ Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present; George C. Kohn; pp. 252–53
1 2 Pontiac and the Indian Uprising; Peckham, Howard H.; University of Chicago Press; 1947; pp. 170, 226–27
↑ Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766; Anderson, Fred; New York: Knopf; 2000; pp. 541–42, 809 n11; ISBN0-375-40642-5
↑ Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact; University of New Mexico Press; 1987; pp.147–48
↑ Cartwright, Mark (October 2015). "Inca Government". World History Encyclopedia. Knights of Vatican. Retrieved 19 July 2017. Eventually 40,000 Incas would govern some 10 million subjects speaking over 30 different languages. Consequently, the centralised Inca government, employing a vast network of administrators, governed over a patchwork empire which, in practice, touched local populations to varying degrees.
↑ W. D. Rubinstein (2012). Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica. University of Oklahoma Press; Reprint edition. p.1. ISBN978-0-8061-4325-5.
↑ Increased deadliness of warfare, see for example Hanson, ch.6. See also flower war.
↑ Reséndez estimates between 2.462 and 4.985 million Indigenous people were enslaved.Reséndez, Andrés (2017). The other slavery: The uncovered story of Indian enslavement in America. p.324. ISBN978-0-544-94710-8.
↑ Carlos A. Floria and César A. García Belsunce, 1971. Historia de los Argentinos I and II; ISBN84-599-5081-6.
↑ Madley, Benjamin, An American Genocide, The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846–1873, Yale University Press, 2016, 692 pages, ISBN978-0-300-18136-4, pp. 11, 351
↑ For example, The Oxford Companion to American Military History (Oxford University Press, 1999) states that "if Euro-Americans committed genocide anywhere on the continent against Native Americans, it was in California."
↑ Buck, Christopher (2006). "'Never Again': Kevin Gover's Apology for the Bureau of Indian Affairs". Wíčazo Ša Review. 21 (1): 97–126. doi:10.1353/wic.2006.0002. S2CID159489841.
Henige, David P. (1998). Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN978-0-8061-3044-6.
Ramenofsky, Ann (1988). Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN978-0-8263-0997-6.
Alchon, Suzanne Austin (2003). A Pest in the Land. University of New Mexico Press.[ISBNmissing]
Cameron, Catherine M., Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund (eds.) (2015). Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. [ISBNmissing]
Sletcher, Michael 'North American Indians', in Will Kaufman and Heidi Macpherson, eds., Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, (2 vols., Oxford, 2005). [ISBNmissing]
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