Indigenous People Left Africa Settled in Palestine Why Hominid Primate Invade us.

Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present David Michael Smith University of Houston-Downtown During the past century, researchers have learned a great deal about the nature and scope of what Russell Thornton has called the demographic collapse of the Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere after 1492.1 As David Stannard has explained, the almost inconceivable number of deaths caused by the invasion and conquest of these lands by Europeans and their descendants constitute “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed.”2 Scholars have long had reliable information on the size of the Indigenous population in this hemisphere and this country at its nadir around the turn of the twentieth century. And in recent decades, investigators have developed a range of estimates of the Native population in the Western Hemisphere before 1492.

In addition to the deadly impact of diseases, wars, and genocide, Thornton has emphasized that many Indigenous nations in what is today the United States were “removed, relocated, dispersed, concentrated, or forced to migrate at least once after contact with Europeans or Americans.”47 And he has observed that the forced removal of over 100,000 Indigenous people to areas west of the Mississippi River during the first half of the nineteenth century directly resulted in significant loss of life.48 Moreover, such removals and relocations destroyed Indigenous people’s ways of life, which resulted in substantial additional loss of life.49 Other devastating assaults on these ways of life included the Spanish missions in California, Florida, and Texas; the U.S. government’s attempts to make Plains Indians into cattle ranchers and southern Indians into American farmers…efforts by churches and governments to undermine Indian religious, governmental, and kinship systems.