Uncivilized Europe Apply Disease to Indigenous People N Follow Them to The West.

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… the often-deliberate destructions of flora and fauna that American Indians used for food and other purposes…the near extinction of the buffalo

We have Thornton’s carefully considered estimate of the size of the Indigenous population before the Europeans arrived. We have considerable information on the interrelated specific causes of the 12 Counting the Dead demographic collapse. We have a reliable estimate of the size of the Indigenous population at its nadir at the beginning of the twentieth century. And, along with this information, we can apply an important demographic insight articulated by Thornton as we work through these inevitably grim and saddening computations. Stannard has estimated that almost 100 million Indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere have been killed or died prematurely because of the Europeans and their descendants during the past five centuries. Stannard reached this conclusion by estimating the original Native population at approximately 100 million and by noting that this number had fallen about 95% by the beginning of the twentieth century.57 Ward Churchill has estimated the total of Indigenous deaths to be somewhat greater than 100 million.58 As staggering as these numbers are, Thornton’s research provides a compelling reason to believe that the human costs of the Indigenous Holocaust were much greater. As noted above, Thornton developed a smaller estimate of about 75 million Indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in 1492, and this population declined to less than 5 million by 1900.