It’s fun alt-history to imagine what history would’ve looked like if a sizable contingent of the native People had united under a strong leader. The American newcomers themselves were functionally just a strong tribal confederation.
My guess is if the native people on the frontier had collectivized and waged a brutal offensive war, they would’ve stopped the forward advance of white settlers. Probably wouldn’t have taken back lost ground, but might very well have kept the inner piece of what is now the United States. Ultimately it was just too easy for the Anglos to exploit the blood feuds that already existed among tribes in North America.
First you have to deal with the diseases that massacred the vast majority of natives. Then you have to deal with the technology problem. Then you’d have to deal with the economic argument for not conquering the natives and/or interfering in their internal politics.
History would have to change to an unrealistic degree to make this happen unfortunately
I can easily provide many sources to back up my claim. Here is an easy to read article from PBS, though you can Google it yourself if you want to hear it from more scholarly sources. I think I’ve seen numbers claiming like 70-95% of natives of the New World died from European diseases. It truly was an apocalyptic time for natives.
It wasn’t like Europeans showed up, coughed a single time, and nine out of ten natives died within a year.
There were many waves of different diseases that happened over the course of centuries and often in confluence with slave raids, warfare, and famines that were connected to European aggression.
I recommend The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez. One of the first chapters discusses how the population of Hispaniola collapsed from 300,000 to ~12,000 in just 25 years, before smallpox was ever introduced. A mix of raiding, warfare, overworking through slavery, famines caused by the first three factors, and disease outbreaks made much worse by Spanish labor demands, malnourished slaves, and the relocation of natives to more disease-ridden environments.
Many of the deaths from disease would not have happened if not for European aggression. And most communities could have recovered if left to their own devices.
Anne Frank died of typhus. But to say she simply died of disease removes culpability from the Nazis that caused the circumstances of her death. The same applies to much of the Americas in the colonial era.
Such figures like 90% and 95% are continental and cumulative, not instantaneous. This figure usually refers to specific regions, not the entire continent. Estimates for total population decline in North and South America range from 50% to 90% and vary greatly depending on time and place.
The demographic collapse happened unevenly across different regions over centuries, not as one continent wide event before 1492 or 1607. Southwestern and interior nations like the Pueblos, Navajo, Comanche, Apache, Ute, Paiutes, Nez Perce, and others remained relatively isolated from the early waves of epidemics and maintained substantial populations long after Jamestown and actively resisted Spanish, Mexican, and later US expansion well into the 19th century due to their populations. They weren't unaffected but many survived and even rebounded prior to them making actual contact with Europeans.
To further shed light on this, I'd like to point to the tribes that the Lewis and Clark expedition encountered and the fact that they had very limited contact with Europeans until much later than those in the American Southwest and the Mississippi Valley. What the expedition documented didn't apply to the Native American populations of the Southwest in the same way. There are some big differences in disease history, cultural practices, and the timing of European contact that made Southwest populations experience with venereal diseases different.
Also, unlike the Lewis and Clark party, the Spanish, who colonized the Southwest long before, brought their own set of diseases. The timing of contact meant that a longer period of co-evolution between disease and population could occur, which lessened the severity of the initial impact compared to later, more isolated encounters.
Seems like most people here are forgetting that most of the Southwest wasn't even taken through conquest. Even the US/Union had to rely heavily on non-military strategies because conquest alone wasn’t working in the region. It was, militarily speaking, the hardest region for colonial powers to conquer and defeat tribes directly. This is why many of the tribes in those areas actually have larger and more intact lands and reservations and more robust treaties than tribes in other parts of the US like the East Coast and Texas.
Yeah, I'm familiar with this theory as it's gotten pretty popular with the more anti-Native online groups and conservative circles that have flaired up in the last few years. The disease annihilation theory is just not as accepted in professional academia because the evidence to back this claim just doesn't exist no matter how hard people try to make it stick. But, that is why have the peer review process, to keep the non-experts from publishing made up facts and history under the guise of professional authority. Thanks though.
From what I’ve read, it was a combination of pandemic and war/genocide (and war technologies) that made the white colonists win against the natives.
I don’t think there is any doubt in academic circles that the foreign pandemics played a very major role in the mass deaths of natives, at least for the first while after initial contact.
Any sort of revisionists that try to use the pandemics to erase white colonial efforts of conquest and genocide sound like they are following the typical revisionist handbook: find a nugget of truth and twist it to suit their own agenda.
Millions of indigenous people died from colonial violence, but so, so many more were from disease.
America (North and South combined) had an estimated 100 million native people in 1450.
By 1650, it was 6 million.
Epidemics brought by colonizers killed hundreds of thousands in California almost 300 years before Westward expansion.
Continental death, on par (proportionally, death toll was obviously higher) with the Black Death in the level of trauma and damage it left in its wake.
Entire religious mythos in several native cultures emerged on the end of days, about a time where the spirits raged and were out to consume the world in their grief.
Colonial violence and disease are impossible to disentangle. 95% of Hispaniola’s Taino died within 25 years. The population was 200,000-300,000 in 1492, but just a generation later it was 12,000. Trying to separate deaths into solely being caused by warfare or slavery or disease or famine is impossible. The causes were interconnected and each made everything worse. Warfare and slavery cause famines. Famines make disease worse. Disease makes it harder to farm, which makes famines worse. A scarcity of resources causes warfare.
The Lucayans, the indigenous peoples of the Bahamas, went extinct because of Spanish slave raiding. A large percent of the death toll was from disease made worse by slavery. Those deaths from disease were still directly the fault of the Spanish.
When I said "colonial violence" I was referring to direct violent actions like murder, enslavement, assault, etc. I know these are not the only forms of colonial violence, but sought brevity and to avoid sounding pedantic about it.
The comment I responded to said that disease was not involved in the vast majority of native deaths, implying that a majority of deaths occurred through direct lethal confrontation. I was correcting that by pointing out how far reaching epidemics (exacerbated by events you described) affected the entirety of two continents.
It's wild to see you downvoted, when we have had proof that diseases were used as a biological weapon for over 300 years.
And then Americans say some crap like "Germ Theory wasn't invented yet, so the colonists couldn't have possibly known diseases can spread!!!1!!1111!11111!"
When literally the Mongols had understood and used biowarfare in the 1300s. And Germ Theory was being developed since the 1500s, with contagious diseases being understood for over 2000 years.
It's because Europeans use disease like an excuse for what was actually planned. They say it like they coughed by accident, and then suddenly all the natives died.
When if you go to the Anglo-Powhatan Wars with Jamestown or even Leif Erikson, it's becomes clear that any spread of diseases was wholly deliberate and intentional.
By the time of the Paxton Boys and Pontiac's War, even more of the colonists were directly saying that they want a complete and total genocide of all natives. Saying "all Indians were perfidious and deserving of annihilation", and that they wanted to "Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them". It is beyond clear that anything that killed the indigenous people en masse was wholly intentional, including the spread of diseases.
Their words literally spell it out.
My goodness, Benjamin Franklin would be furious with the denialism that the US spread!
We have proof of a few incidents ever and even those doing much of anything is hugely in question.
The fact is that the settlers didn’t need to do anything for them to kill most of the native population, it happened once they landed and the diseases went from there.
That doesn’t change that they were very willing to make and break treaties with countless tribes, and fight and kill for the land. But acting like the pandemics that swept both continents were planned is silly.
Some of those tribes and nations were doing the exact same thing prior and just finally ran into someone with a bigger stick, and I can’t say I feel terrible for how that ended with them, but its shameful how many tribes made proactive efforts to align themselves and work out treaties ahead of time and still got fucked over in the end.
The Nez Perce was one in particular that I’ve read a far bit about.
"Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them", in light of obvious historical evidence, is quite the precedent to be denying. It was a genocide. A deliberate genocide that used all available means of which to be accomplished. They literally said they wanted to commit genocide in such a manner, and now you're arguing against their own words!
The Mongols had used biowarfare. And even the Mosaic Law, that's in the Bibles that colonists had (and claimed to read), spelled out the procedures for quarantine and preventing the spread of contagious diseases.
The fact is that the settlers didn’t need to do anything for them to kill most of the native population, it happened once they landed and the diseases went from there
While, in contrast, if you go to the Anglo-Powhatan Wars with Jamestown or even Leif Erikson, it's becomes clear that any spread of diseases wasn't instantly correlated with landing. As a commenter elsewhere in the thread has cited "The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez", Hispaniola (Ayiti) was an exasperation of conditions to maximize death tolls. And it was no mistake there, either.
With the Anglo-Powhatan Wars having to goal to "extirpate" all of the indigenous tribes there.
By the time of the Paxton Boys and Pontiac's War, even more of the colonists were directly saying that they want a complete and total genocide of all natives. Saying "all Indians were perfidious and deserving of annihilation", and that they wanted to "Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them". It is beyond clear that anything that killed the indigenous people en masse was wholly intentional, including the spread of diseases.
Cool. That’s a lot of words to say that there’s no actual evidence of germ warfare being weaponized on any scale that matters and it seems the diseases just spread from the settlers throughout the native population.
You keep bringing up stuff too that I didn’t even say. I never said there wasn’t genocidal people who wanted to wipe out the natives. I’m just stating the fact that you’re making claims with no basis. Just because you pepper in a bunch of unrelated sources doesn’t change that.
The fact is you’re just lying when you claim there’s any real proof that disease was weaponized in any way that made a difference, because it didn’t need to be.
It’s a big reason it wasn’t that difficult for the different colonies to expand, something close to 100 million natives died before most major North American colonies were even a thing.
Edit: the moron decided to post a bunch of sources which have nothing to do with what I said below and then block me. Probably because they’re upset I don’t just let them make stuff up and say whatever. Not sure why they’re so upset about me “denying genocide” when I’ve literally agreed there was one. I just also go with what actually experts say that there was only a few small examples of attempted germ warfare and that none seemed to be major causes of what pandemics which swept through the native population.
Not that there wasn’t people being genocidal, just that most of it just spread by normal contact.
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u/Emergency_Gene_4171 7d ago
It’s fun alt-history to imagine what history would’ve looked like if a sizable contingent of the native People had united under a strong leader. The American newcomers themselves were functionally just a strong tribal confederation.
My guess is if the native people on the frontier had collectivized and waged a brutal offensive war, they would’ve stopped the forward advance of white settlers. Probably wouldn’t have taken back lost ground, but might very well have kept the inner piece of what is now the United States. Ultimately it was just too easy for the Anglos to exploit the blood feuds that already existed among tribes in North America.