Don't Forget Indigenous People Called Property of Whites Were Invalidly Colonized.

Thornton’s estimate that about 75 million Indigenous people lived in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 and his estimate that more than 5 million lived in what later became the continental U.S. are arguably the most methodologically circumspect and reliable current appraisals for researchers in this field. As James Wilson has suggested, Thornton’s estimate of a total of more than 7 million Indigenous people north of Mexico is probably “the nearest to a generally accepted figure,” and “a figure for the Western Hemisphere as whole of 75 to 100 million” is not unreasonable.32 Future research may disclose an even larger Indigenous population, but Thornton’s carefully considered, mid-range estimates provide a vital starting point for the development of informed and reasonable, if very rough, estimates of the total loss of life in the Indigenous Holocaust. The work of Thornton, Stannard, and other scholars has also been very important in fostering greater understanding of the various interrelated specific causes of this demographic collapse. This research provides a powerful refutation of the efforts of Gunter Lowy, Michael Medved, and other commentators to minimize the responsibility of European invaders and their descendants for the Indigenous Holocaust. Such efforts have usually involved narrowly focusing attention on the significance of diseases brought by Europeans and their African slaves in the decimation of the Indigenous people, and denying the invaders’ genocidal intentions.33 In contrast, Stannard has written, 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 microsims.