November 23, 2004
DID THEY PICK 12 BECAUSE IT MAKES US DOUBLE NAZIS?:
Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? (Guenter Lewy, 11/23/04, History News Network)
[A]ccording to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a "vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record." [...]It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans were still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of the 19th century. Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the subject speak of an inflated "numbers game"; others charge that the size of the aboriginal population has been deliberately minimized in order to make the decline seem less severe than it was.
The disparity in estimates is enormous. In 1928, the ethnologist James Mooney proposed a total count of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribal areas north of Mexico at the time of the European arrival. By 1987, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton was giving a figure of well over 5 million, nearly five times as high as Mooney’s, while Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. That figure rested in turn on the work of the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 had estimated the aboriginal population of North America as a whole at 18 million and of the present territory of the United States at about 10 million.
From one perspective, these differences, however startling, may seem beside the point: there is ample evidence, after all, that the arrival of the white man triggered a drastic reduction in the number of native Americans. Nevertheless, even if the higher figures are credited, they alone do not prove the occurrence of genocide.
To address this issue properly we must begin with the most important reason for the Indians’ catastrophic decline—namely, the spread of highly contagious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known by scholars as a "virgin-soil epidemic"; in North America, it was the norm.
The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans.
About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby, "but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath." It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.
To some, however, this is enough in itself to warrant the term genocide. David Stannard, for instance, states that just as Jews who died of disease and starvation in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the Holocaust, Indians who died of introduced diseases "were as much the victims of the Euro-American genocidal war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs." As an example of actual genocidal conditions, Stannard points to Franciscan missions in California as "furnaces of death."
But right away we are in highly debatable territory. It is true that the cramped quarters of the missions, with their poor ventilation and bad sanitation, encouraged the spread of disease. But it is demonstrably untrue that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were unconcerned with the welfare of their native converts. No matter how difficult the conditions under which the Indians labored—obligatory work, often inadequate food and medical care, corporal punishment—their experience bore no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghettos. The missionaries had a poor understanding of the causes of the diseases that afflicted their charges, and medically there was little they could do for them. By contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghettos, and quite deliberately deprived the inmates of both food and medicine; unlike in Stannard’s "furnaces of death," the deaths that occurred there were meant to occur.
The larger picture also does not conform to Stannard’s idea of disease as an expression of "genocidal war." True, the forced relocations of Indian tribes were often accompanied by great hardship and harsh treatment; the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to territories west of the Mississippi in 1838 took the lives of thousands and has entered history as the Trail of Tears. But the largest loss of life occurred well before this time, and sometimes after only minimal contact with European traders. True, too, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among Indians, seeing it as a sign of divine providence; that, however, does not alter the basic fact that Europeans did not come to the New World in order to infect the natives with deadly diseases.
Or did they? Ward Churchill, taking the argument a step further than Stannard, asserts that there was nothing unwitting or unintentional about the way the great bulk of North America’s native population disappeared: "it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed." In brief, the Europeans were engaged in biological warfare.
Unfortunately for this thesis, we know of but a single instance of such warfare, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a particularly serious uprising threatened the British garrisons west of the Allegheny mountains. Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw as the Indians’ treacherous and savage modes of warfare, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote as follows to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt: "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate this execrable race."
Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst's suggestion, but whether he himself carried it out is uncertain. On or around June 24, two traders at Fort Pitt did give blankets and a handkerchief from the fort’s quarantined hospital to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one of the traders noted in his journal: "I hope it will have the desired effect." Smallpox was already present among the tribes of Ohio; at some point after this episode, there was another outbreak in which hundreds died.
A second, even less substantiated instance of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, the U.S. Army began to dispense "'trade blankets' to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota." He continues: Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter’s. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to scatter and seek "sanctuary" in the villages of healthy relatives.
In this way the disease was spread, the Mandans were "virtually exterminated," and other tribes suffered similarly devastating losses. Citing a figure of "100,000 or more fatalities" caused by the U.S. Army in the 1836-40 smallpox pandemic (elsewhere he speaks of a toll "several times that number"), Churchill refers the reader to Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival.
Supporting Churchill here are Stiffarm and Lane, who write that "the distribution of smallpox- infected blankets by the U.S. Army to Mandans at Fort Clark . . . was the causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40." In evidence, they cite the journal of a contemporary at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon.
But Chardon's journal manifestly does not suggest that the U.S. Army distributed infected blankets, instead blaming the epidemic on the inadvertent spread of disease by a ship's passenger. And as for the "100,000 fatalities," not only does Thornton fail to allege such obviously absurd numbers, but he too points to infected passengers on the steamboat St. Peter's as the cause. Another scholar, drawing on newly discovered source material, has also refuted the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.
Similarly at odds with any such idea is the effort of the United States government at this time to vaccinate the native population. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered in 1801 by President Jefferson; the program continued in force for three decades, though its implementation was slowed both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected a trick, and by lack of interest on the part of some officials. Still, as Thornton writes: "Vaccination of American Indians did eventually succeed in reducing mortality from smallpox."
To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens was not one of them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be held responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the American-Indian population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians; neither can the large number of deaths as a result of disease be considered the result of a genocidal design.
The notion that these primitive, disease ridden, hunter-gatherers ever numbered anything like 12 million is lunacy. Meanwhile, had we wanted to genocide them we could have easily, instead of moving them around the country and setting them up in reservations. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 23, 2004 11:51 PM
"primitive, disease ridden, hunter-gatherers"
I think they prefer Native American.
Posted by: David Hill, The Bronx at November 24, 2004 12:02 AMYet there are a lot of us w/Indian blood, well, mine's really diluted by this point. I don't qualify, but my great-grandmother did.
Posted by: Sandy P at November 24, 2004 12:50 AMAn excellent article on this issue:
The guy also makes the case that the Amazon rain forest is largely a human artifact.
Posted by: PapayaSF at November 24, 2004 2:18 AMI'm retired from the practice of law, but sometimes I still think like a lawyer. One way lawyers look at things is by what was traditionally called a "demurrer to the evidence." This is essentially saying, "So what, who cares?" If there were 20 million Indians, what difference would that make? If there are a couple of cases of intentional biological warfare, beyond the personal guilt of the long-dead criminals, so what, who cares?
Volkerbewanderung ain't beanbag. Anytime you have cultures in contact, you have winners and losers. Sometimes the process is peaceful, as when the early Poles adopted Roman culture, language and religion in the Tenth Century, forgetting the very names of the Slavic gods, except for the one name, Boge, which became the word for Jehovah. Other times, the process involves hard strokes, as when Charlemagne converted the Saxons, or when Scandinavian paganism went down.
Current linguistic scholarship documents that the osmotic process of cultural domination going on in the Western Hemisphere is continuing apace. We respect and admire many things about the so-called "Native Americans"--that's why we name our sports teams after them, but the moving finger has written, and not a line is being taken back. So what, who cares?
Posted by: Lou Gots at November 24, 2004 5:26 AMWhenever you see a professor of 'ethnic studies' remember that he is someone who couldn't earn tenure even in a comic-book field like sociology or anthropology, and that he has a permanent job only because he is a raging anti-American lefty dirtbag.
I think OJ's description is about right.
Posted by: Bart at November 24, 2004 6:26 AMI want to see the Iroquois tried for genocide against the Huron. When I was little I really hated what those really bad Indians did to the really good ones.
Maybe we can take away their tax-exempt cigarette importing license as punishment.
Posted by: Randall Voth at November 24, 2004 6:51 AMPeople migrate into other people's lands, and in the process some win and some lose. Among those who migrated (or simply strayed out of) Asia we have those that became Native Americans - they lost out to those who migrated from Europe. But their "cousins" the Mongols had a "better" record against caucasians in terms of being on the "right" side of "genocide"...In summary. S#"#t Happens! Would a multi-lateral apology exchage process (which nets out apologies by/to races) be useful. Let's move on.
p.s. I assumed that oj's decription of Native Americans was as they WERE then.
Posted by: Moe from NC at November 24, 2004 8:08 AMIt's original sin. Absolutely everything about the White man arriving on these shores has been malignant. Even breathing the same air as the white devil can kill you.
Posted by: Twn at November 24, 2004 8:48 AMThere was an interesting book on BookTV.org discussing one of the smallpox plagues in colonial America: Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, by Elizabeth Fenn. She claims smallpox was significant in the outcome of the Revolutionary War, and offers anecdotal evidence of the elimination of several northwestern indian tribes.
Posted by: jd watson at November 24, 2004 10:30 AMgood book:
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/384/Pox%20American.htm
Posted by: oj at November 24, 2004 10:52 AMEven if all those numbers were true - if new the standard for "genocide" is the dying out of one population over any given number of years and the repopulation of the land with a new population - then every nation on the face of the earth is guilty of genocide.
Every single one.
Posted by: Brandon at November 24, 2004 10:55 AMWhy is 12 million lunacy?
That works to, what, one person every 30 square miles?
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at November 24, 2004 12:07 PMOrrin is right in dimissing the smallpox and other Eurasian disease epidemics as genocide. If this was genocide, who was to blame for the Black Death or the Antonine Plague? Disease is disease. Had the Chinese discovered the Americas first or had treasure fleets from Montezuma reached Europe and brought back ambassadors and animals, the results were going to be the same. American Indians simply did not have the immunity system to deal with them since they were never exposed before.
But Orrin is wrongly dismissive of American Indians as primitive, disease ridden, hunter-gatherers. It is true that they were not as technologically advanced as Europeans (since they did not have the benefit of taking their technology from China like the Europeans did), but they did have agriculture and many domesticated plants for that purpose. They were capable of very strong political institutions whether it be Aztec and Incan Empires, or the Iroquois Confederation. Several had astronomical knowledge superior to Europe, and Mathematics that was likewise equal or superior. All this knowledge was self-generated. Unlike Europe they did not have the benefit of learning from other civilizations.
I know OJ does not like the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, but his objections seem entirely based on politics rather than facts. But this is a man who hates science too.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at November 24, 2004 12:09 PMThey had a life expectancy of 30, never figured out the wheel, never domesticated animals, and so on and so forth.
Posted by: oj at November 24, 2004 12:16 PMJeff:
They're called tribes for a reason--they didn't have 30 acre farms.
Posted by: oj at November 24, 2004 12:17 PM12-15 million sounds about right, if one totals all of North and South America and the Caribbean.
Chris,
He was talking about North American Indians, who were primitive hunter-gatherers, period end of story. The notion that an illiterate people like the Iroquois could have strong political institutions is laughable. The Aztecs and Incas did, but they were slave societies far more brutal than even the worst of Europe, hence the ease with which a relative handful of Spanish freebooters could topple them. Montezuma made Pol Pot look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
They didn't have algebra or geometry, so they were well behind us mathematically even in the mid-Renaissance. By the time the Americans met the Plains Indians, calculus had already been developed by Newton and Leibniz and logarithms had been invented by Napier.
Posted by: Bart at November 24, 2004 1:43 PMIf there were millions of Native Americans, they must have had a much greater impact on the ecology than the PC crowd would admit. They definitely exterminated a large number of animal species when they entered North America. I'm rather glad they did. It meant we don't have to deal with saber-toothed tigers.
Posted by: Joseph Hertzlinger at November 24, 2004 2:03 PMA few comments:
12 million is hardly lunacy, although 12 million after 1800 is a bit harder to swallow. Prior to the founding, however, there is plenty of evidence both for large numbers and for something other than "primitive, disease-ridden hunter-gatherers," such as the mound culture of the midwest.
The official definition of genocide - as drawn up by the man who invented the term - includes resettlement and dispossession, as well as outright extermination. By that criterion, the American expansion easily qualifies. The indiscriminate slaughter of women and children, which pops up rather frequently in the history of U.S./Native American interactions, would also seem a dead giveaway.
Is "primitive, disease-ridden hunter-gatherers" just another way of denying Native American humanity? Shrug over the consequences as much as you want, but along with slavery, the treatment of Native Americans comprises the original American sin. This is the greatest nation ever stolen.
Posted by: M. Bulger at November 24, 2004 3:39 PMJoseph:
There was an interesting NOVA on PBS concerning the Clovis culture which is associated with the mega-fauna kills in North America. The speculation was that the Clovis point stone technology was most similar to a technology from central Europe (the Asian cultures used a micro-blade technology) and that one of the genetical markers found in Native American tribes (hitherto unaccounted for) matches one found in central Europe but none in Asia.
It was the Europeans who eradicated the most formidable modern predator, the grizzly bear, the wolf, and the bison -- perhaps it was Europeans who were responsible for all the exterminations in North America, saving the Indians from any ecological incorrectness.
Posted by: jd watson at November 24, 2004 3:46 PMM: Slavery is our original sin. Killing all the Indians, and their culture, wasn't a sin and wasn't particularly ours.
Posted by: David Cohen at November 24, 2004 4:01 PMNobody knows, or is ever likely to know, precisely what the maximum population of pre-Columbian America was.
The natives, however, were probably less disease-ridden than Europeans, as unlike Europeans they did not enjoy the(largely) African diseases that Europe did.
Several of the comments reveal a ridiculously erroneous view of who the Indians were.
They domesticated animals and not all in N. America were hunter-gatherers. The Southeastern Indians were sophisticated farmers.
The dieoff from introduced diseases, expansion of better-equipped farmers etc., as Lou says, was an inevitable result of the collision of widely different societies.
But there were local, deliberate genocides that had little or nothing to do with introduced diseases or economic competition.
The Spaniards wiped out many Indian populations in the Caribbean and made a strong attempt to do so in Yucatan.
There were others instances as well.
Genocide, it seems to me, is defined not by outcomes so much as by intent.
By that standard, many European groups were genocidal.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at November 25, 2004 1:02 AMNot until European (strictly African) diseases got to them. Bone analysis and early encounter reports show that their lifespan was longer than that of Europeans in the 16th century.
Your crack about not domesticating animals was one of your less apposite citations. How many animals did Europeans domesticate?
One. One and a half, if you count Lapps as Europeans and reindeer as domesticated.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at November 25, 2004 10:25 PMHorses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens,....
Posted by: oj at November 25, 2004 10:27 PMNot one of those was domesticated by Europeans, Orrin.
Europeans did domesticate one animal, though I bet you cannot name it.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at November 27, 2004 2:44 PMSwine ?
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at November 29, 2004 4:17 AM