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Why is the population of natives in the USA so low compared to other ethnic groups? The native population is 1.3% (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (14 children)

Started typing up an answer but don't feel like sourcing it and someone better informed is going to give a better answer eventually, but here's a start...

Whereas the Spanish significantly intermixed with the indigenous populations and created a mestizo (mixed) racial group, the US colonists maintained separation from the native population. In both cases, smallpox/disease reduced the native population by about 90% [relevance to question?]. The long running goal of the decision makers in America was to either force the natives to assimilate or be killed; the reservation was everyone's last choice.

Someone smarter, your turn

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (11 children)

In both cases, smallpox/disease reduced the native population by about 90%

It should be noted; it wasn't just disease, or rather, disease (as always throughout history and till today) only got far, far worse when natives were also subjected to constant war, violent encroachments, and man-made (American-enforced, rather) famines.

Subject any population- European populations included- to such pressures and their immune systems will be greatly compromised. It wasn't just disease- these went hand-in-hand with systemic policies, ideology, and rhetoric that encouraged disease and killed and terrorized the natives in many other ways, with the end goal of- as you said, assimilation or death (ie. genocide)- and even the question of how much "assimilation" was actually on the table is another matter- they wanted to erase their cultures, religion, livelihoods, rights, etc. yes- but even those who had adopted much of the western customs like the "5 civilized tribes" eventually were driven west in forced marches (the trail of tears- ie. another form of genocide, akin to what was inflicted on the Armenians) despite the US law itself being on their side.

Because no amount of "assimilation"- by natives, by blacks (as one can see with "black Wall Street"/Tulsa, Oklahoma), by other minorities- changed the guiding ethos of the US- if white settler society wanted what you had, or simply wanted you out of the way and saw you as an eyesore to be culled, or wanted you as a slave- one way or another it would take what it wanted through force. And white settler-colonial and imperialist society wants everything the world over and more (and even that would not quench it IMO- because it is a all-devouring, monstrous system that, without new lands to conquer or peoples to subjugate and enslave, would likely collapse in on itself as it is doing now)- still does to this day, as should be clear to anyone sensible as well.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)

The vast majority of the 90% killed by disease were killed over a hundred years before any of the tribes had ever even heard of a white person or European. Smallpox spread like wildfire since the arrival of the Spanish. The diseases just appeared seemingly out of nowhere and annihilated millions of people without them even knowing what hit them or where it came from.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago

It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the barrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans among the so-called "virgin soil" populations of the Americas caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, 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. This is a modern version of what Alexander Saxton recently has described as the "soft side of anti-Indian racism" that emerged in America in the nineteenth century and that incorporated "expressions of regret over the fate of Indians into narratives that traced the inevitability of their extinction. Ideologically," Saxton adds, "the effect was to exonerate individuals, parties, nations, of any moral blame for what history had decreed." In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere's native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable.

From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives. Although at times operating independently, for most of the long centuries of devastation that followed 1492, disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically - whipsawing their victims between plague and violence, each one feeding upon the other, and together driving countless numbers of entire ancient societies to the brink - and often over the brink - of total extermination.

Stannard, D.E. 1992. "American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World." Oxford University Press.

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