
Natives of North America.

Natives of South America.
The population figures for the
New World
prior to the 1492 voyage of
Christopher Columbus are unknown.
Estimates based on archaeological data and written records from
European settlers range from as low as 8 million to as many as 145
million indigenous "
Native American". Contact
with the New World led to the
European colonization of
the Americas, in which millions of emigrants from the "
Old World" eventually settled in the New.
The population of Old World peoples in the Americas grew steadily,
while the number of the indigenous people plummeted. Old World
diseases such as
smallpox,
influenza,
bubonic
plague and pneumonic plagues devastated the previously isolated
Native Americans. Conflict and outright warfare with European
newcomers and other American tribes reduced populations and
disrupted traditional society. The extent and causes of the decline
have long been a subject of academic debate.
Population overview
Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, even semi-accurate
pre-Columbian population figures are
impossible to obtain. 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
54 million people. Nonetheless, more recent estimates still
range widely.
Using an estimate of approximately 50 million people in 1492
(including 25 million in the
Aztec
Empire and 12 million in the
Inca
Empire), the lowest estimates give a death toll due from
disease of an astonishing 80% by the end of the 16th century
(8 million people in 1650). Latin America would only recover
its 15th century population early in the 20th century; it numbered
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
three decades of the 16th century, the population of present-day
Mexico dropped to about one million people in 1600. The
Maya population is today estimated at
6 million, which is about the same as at the end of the 15th
century, according to some estimates.
In what is now
Brazil
, the indigenous population declined from a
pre-Columbian high of an estimated 4 million to some
300,000.
Historian
David Henige has argued that
many population figures are the result of arbitrary formulas
selectively applied to numbers from unreliable historical sources.
He believes this is a weakness unrecognized by several contributors
to the field, and insists there is not sufficient evidence to
produce population numbers that have any real meaning. He
characterizes the modern trend of high estimates as "
pseudo-scientific number-crunching." Henige
does not advocate a low population estimate, but argues that the
scanty and unreliable nature of the evidence renders broad
estimates inevitably suspect, saying "high counters" (as he calls
them) have been particularly flagrant in their misuse of sources.
Many population studies acknowledge the inherent difficulties in
producing reliable statistics, given the scarcity of hard
data.
The population debate has often had
ideological underpinnings. Low estimates were
sometimes reflective of European notions of cultural and racial
superiority. Francis Jennings argues, "Scholarly wisdom long held
that Indians were so inferior in mind and works that they could not
possibly have created or sustained large populations." On the other
hand, some have argued that contemporary estimates of a high
pre-Columbian indigenous population are rooted in a bias against
Western civilization and/or
Christianity. 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, and indigenous peoples migrated long
before Europeans arrived on the scene. The indigenous population in
1492 was not necessarily at a high point and may actually have been
in decline in some areas.
Fernand
Braudel has pointed out a problem the
Amerindian faced which 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 20th century. In most cases,
populations have since begun to climb. In the United States, for
instance, the numbers may already have recovered to pre-Columbian
levels or even exceeded them.
Pre-Columbian Americas
Anthropologists and
population geneticists agree that the
bulk of indigenous American ancestry can be traced to
Ice Age migrations from
Asia via
the
Bering land bridge. The
possibility of
migration by
watercraft along coastal routes or ice sheets is viewed as a
possible viable complement to this model.
Depopulation from disease
Nearly all scholars now believe that widespread
epidemic disease, to which the natives had
no prior exposure or resistance, was the overwhelming cause of the
massive population decline of the Native Americans. 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
conquistadores, as recorded by the Spanish
themselves. The most notable account was that of the
Dominican friar
Bartolomé de las Casas,
whose writings vividly depict Spanish atrocities committed in
particular against the
Taínos. Historians
have noted there simply were not enough Spanish to have caused such
a large population decline (though this does not exonerate many
Spanish incomers from having committed grossly inhumane acts
against the native peoples). 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
Americas viewed their troubles in terms of religious or
supernatural causes within their own belief systems.
Soon after
Europeans and
Africans began to arrive in the New World,
bringing with them the infectious diseases of Europe and Africa,
observers noted immense numbers of indigenous Americans began to
die from these diseases. One reason this death toll was overlooked
(or downplayed) is that once introduced the diseases raced ahead of
European immigration in many areas. Disease killed off a sizable
portion of the populations before European observations (and thus
written records) were made. After the epidemics had already killed
massive numbers of natives, many newer European immigrants assumed
that there had always been relatively few indigenous peoples. The
scope of the epidemics over the years was tremendous, 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 of medieval Europe", which
had killed up to one-third of the people in
Europe and
Asia between 1347 and
1351. The Black Death occurred to a European population which also
had not been exposed and had little or no resistance to a new
disease.
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 (whooping cough), which were chronic in
Eurasia. The indigenous Americas also had a number of endemic
diseases, such as
tuberculosis and
perhaps including
an unusually
virulent type of
syphilis, which soon
became rampant when brought back to the Old World. (This transfer
of disease between the Old and New Worlds was part of the
phenomenon known as the "
Columbian
Exchange"). The diseases brought to the New World proved to be
exceptionally deadly to the Native Americans.
The epidemics had very different effects in different regions of
the Americas. The most vulnerable groups were those with a
relatively small population and few built-up immunities. Many
island-based groups were annihilated.
The Caribs and Arawaks of the
Caribbean
nearly ceased to exist, as did the Beothuks of Newfoundland
. While disease ranged swiftly through the
densely populated empires of
Mesoamerica, the more scattered populations of
North America saw a slower spread.
Why were the diseases so deadly?
A disease (
viral or
bacterial) 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; if its victims lived beyond
infection, the disease would spread
further. 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 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 manageably chronic. When a population that has been relatively
isolated is exposed to new diseases, it has no 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
Eurasian-
African landmass. The
peoples of the Old World had had thousands of years for their
populations to accommodate to their common diseases.
The fact that all members of an immunologically naive population
are exposed to a new disease simultaneously increases the
fatalities. Populations where the disease is endemic have
generations of individuals with acquired immunity or hardiness. In
populations where a disease is endemic, most adults are exposed to
the disease at a young age. Thus resistant to reinfection, they are
able to care for 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 have higher fatalities than
otherwise.
The natives of the Americas suffered the introduction of several
new diseases 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, for example.
Other contributing factors:
- Native American medical treatments such as sweat baths and cold water immersion (practiced
in some areas) weakened some patients and probably increased
mortality rates.
- Europeans brought many diseases with them because they (and
Asians) had many more domesticated animals than the Native
Americans. Domestication 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 Eurasian 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 the environmental determinist theory
popularized by Jared Diamond in
Guns, Germs, and
Steel, meant that it was much harder for cultivated plant
species, domesticated animals, and diseases to migrate.
- 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. The Aztecs called it cocoliztli. Acuña-Soto's conclusions are
based in part on the 50 volumes written by Francisco Hernandez,
physician to Philip II of Spain.
He interviewed survivors of the 1576 epidemic and autopsied many
victims, then recorded his findings and observations. He found that
the fever was endemic during drought years, a series of which had
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 depopulation
in the Americas concerns the degree to which Europeans deliberately
infected indigenous peoples with diseases such as smallpox. Cook
asserts that there is no evidence that the Spanish attempted to
infect the American natives. The cattle introduced by the Spanish
polluted the water reserves which Native Americans dug in the
fields to accumulate rain water. In response, the
Franciscans and
Dominicans created public fountains and
aqueducts to guarantee access to
drinking
water. But when the Franciscans lost their privileges in 1572,
many of these fountains were not guarded any more. Deliberate well
poisoning may have happened. 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. However, it is undeniable that the colonists spread
diseases carelaeesly, with little regard for human life.
1763 Smallpox outbreak at Fort Pitt
In one
disputed incident, British
soldiers in North America were said to have
discussed intentionally infecting native people as part of a war
effort. During
Pontiac's
Rebellion in 1763, a number of
Native Americans
launched a widespread war against British soldiers and settlers to
drive the British out of the
Great Lakes region.
In what is
now western Pennsylvania
, Native Americans (primarily Delawares) laid siege to
Fort
Pitt
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.
Letters exist between two other British officers,
Jeffrey Amherst and
Henry Bouquet, that explicitly advocate the
idea of using smallpox-infested blankets to kill Indians.
Historians disagree as to whether Trent acted with the intent
expressed by Bouquet and Amherst.
Whatever Trent's intent, a number of recent scholars consider
doubtful the evidence connecting his gift of blankets to the
smallpox outbreak. 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 expressed the
desire to use biological warfare, smallpox was so widespread and so
easy to catch that there were other opportunities for Native
Americans to be infected. Others attribute the smallpox outbreak to
the common Indian practice of digging up recent European graves to
retrieve the clothes of those buried, some of whom had died from
smallpox.
Vaccination
After Edward Jenner's 1796 confirmation of the efficacy of
smallpox vaccination, the inoculation
technique became more well known. Smallpox became less deadly in
the United States (and elsewhere). Many colonists and natives
became vaccinated. Although in some cases officials tried to
inoculate natives, the disease often was carried beyond containment
attempts. At other times, trade demands broke quarantines. In other
cases, some natives refused inoculation because of suspicion of
European Americans. In 1831 government officials inoculated the
Yankton Sioux at Sioux Agency. The
Santee Sioux refused inoculation and many died.
Other causes of depopulation
War and violence
While
epidemic disease 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
warfare. 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 firearms. Europeans had
gunpowder and swords, which made killing easier
and war more deadly. Europeans proved consistently successful in
achieving domination in warfare with Native Americans for a variety
of reasons. One reason was the staying power of the Europeans, who
could call on a far ranging supply network, and could sustain a
conflict over several years including the winters if necessary.
Almost no Indian tribes had the stored resources to conduct a war
for more than a few months. The massive death toll from disease
played a major role in the European conquest, but equally decisive
was the European approach to war, which was less ritualistic and
more focused on achieving decisive victory. European colonization
also contributed to a number of wars between Native Americans, who
fought over which of them should have first access to the new
weapon.
Empires such as the
Inca's 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.
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. 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. Serfs stayed to
work the land; slaves were exported to the mines, where large
numbers of them died. Some Spaniards objected to this
encomienda system, notably
Bartolomé de Las Casas, who
insisted that the Indians were humans with souls and rights.
Largely due to his efforts, the
New Laws
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 from Sao 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.
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 . 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 economy.
However, in many areas settlers and even governments did engage in
what have been called "democides," usually against
nomadic 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 (Some believe 80% of the population
disappeared in thirty years).
- The Pequot War in early New
England.
- In the mid-19th century, post-independence leader Juan Manuel de Rosas engaged in what he
himself presented as a war of extermination (the "Conquest of the Desert") against the
natives of the Argentinian interior, leaving over 1,300 indigenous
dead.
- While
some California
tribes were settled on reservations, others were
hunted down and massacred by 19th century American settlers.
Dr. David Stannard estimated that
some 50,000 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
, 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 or their
descendants. 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 the research by Gregory
Michno which reveals 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 white Americans were
killed. This later rough estimate includes women and children on
both sides, since
noncombatants were
often killed by both sides in frontier
massacres.
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 and the
reservation
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.
After the
Nazi-perpetrated
Holocaust during
World War
II, 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 is of the opinion that
the indigenous peoples of America (including Hawaii
) 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,
Ben Kiernan,
Lenore A. Stiffarm, and
Phil Lane, Jr., among others; the perspective
has been further refined by
Ward
Churchill, who has said "it was precisely malice, not nature,
that did the deed."
Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been challenged because
he does not cite any demographic evidence 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
, 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-type
explanations for depopulation.
In response to Stannard's figure,
political scientist R. J. Rummel 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. "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."
Some historians argue that genocide, a crime of intent, was not the
intent of European colonization while in America. Historian
Stafford Poole 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 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, to mention but two of the major
victims of this century."
However, a number of historians, though not viewing the history of
European colonization as one continuous 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 (1637) and campaigns waged
against tribes in California
starting in the 1850s.
See also
Notes
- 20th century estimates in Thornton, p. 22; Denevan's consensus count; recent lower estimates.
- "La catastrophe démographique" (The Demographical
Catastrophe"), L'Histoire n°322, July-August 2007,
p. 17.
- Henige, p. 182.
- Jennings, p. 83; Royal's quote.
- Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The
Limits of the Possible, New York: Harper & Row, 1981; 36.
See also: Jared Diamond, Germs, Guns, and Steel.
- Thornton, pp. xvii, 36.
- Shoemaker, pp. 3–4.
- Cook, Noble David. Born To Die, pp. 1-11.
- Cook, Noble David. Born To Die, p. 13.
- Cook, p. 208; Thornton, p. 47.
- Cook, p. 214.
- Anderson, pp. 541–2; McConnell, p. 195; Dowd, War Under
Heaven, p. 190.
- War not a major cause: Thornton, pp. 47–49.
- Increased deadliness of warfare, see for example Hanson,
ch. 6. See also flower war.
- Bolivia - Ethnic Groups.
- Cook, p. 212.
- Carlos A. Floria and César A. García Belsunce, 1971.
Historia de los Argentinos I and II; ISBN
84-599-5081-6.
- Stannard, David. American Holocaust. Oxford University Press,
1993
- Michno, "Encyclopedia of Indian Wars" Index.
- Thornton, American Indian Holocaust, pp. 48–49.
- Indian Mixed-Blood.
- INTERVIEW: David Stannard.
- Were
American Indians the Victims of Genocide?
- Stannard, p. x (quotation), p. 151 (death toll
estimate).
- Cook on Stannard, p. 12; Rummel's quote and estimate from
his website, about midway down the page, after
footnote 82. Rummel's estimate is presumably not a single
democide, but is a total of multiple democides, since there were
many different governments involved.
- Stafford Poole, quoted in Royal, p. 63.
- For example, The Oxford Companion to American Military
History (Oxford University Press, 1999) states that "if
Euro-Americans committed genocide anywhere on the [American]
continent against native Americans, it was in California."
References
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 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, 1998.
ISBN 0-521-62208-5, ISBN 0-521-62730-3.
- Hanson, Victor Davis.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western
Power. New York: Doubleday, 2001. ISBN 0-385-50052-1.
- Henige, David. Numbers from
Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate.
Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8061-3044-X.
- Mann, Charles C. 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. American
Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford 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,
1987. ISBN 0-8061-2074-6.
Online sources
- Lewy, Guenter. "Were American Indians the Victims of
Genocide?", History News Network, originally published in
Commentary.
- Lord, Lewis. How many people were here before Columbus?
(mirror of original at archive.org), August 10, 1997.
- Rummel, R.J. Death by Government, Chapter 3: Pre-Twentieth
Century Democide
- Stutz, Bruce. Megadeath in Mexico Discover, February 21,
2006.
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.
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