In General Gay Legislation Provided Penalties of Death Banishment And Confiscation of Property.

 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... The work of David A. Swanson has indicated that the Native population of Hawaii declined from about 683,000 Indigenous people after British explorer James Cook’s arrival in 1778 to about 24,000 in 1920, a loss of approximately 659,000 lives. 61 Swanson believes it is not possible to calculate the total number of lives cut short there since 1778, so the figure of 659,000 must suffice for our computations.62 Mooney’s estimate of about 72,600 Indigenous people living in Alaska in 1492 may have been very low, but his estimate of Counting the Dead 13 only about 28,300 remaining there around 1900 is arguably fairly accurate. If a multiplier of 2.5 is applied to this decline of about 44,300, the total number of Indigenous deaths in Alaska caused by colonialism since 1492 would appear to be about 110,750.63 In presentday Puerto Rico, the Taino (Arawak) population numbered at least 20,000 in 1492 but was almost eliminated within decades, so there is no need to employ a multiplier for this area. 64 In sum, it can be estimated that approximately 790,000 Indigenous deaths occurred because of colonialism in Hawaii, Alaska, in Puerto Rico. The deaths of Native people that have occurred in the U.S. since 1900 because of the legacy of colonialism and contemporary institutionalized racism must also be counted. The total number of Indigenous deaths.