The Invasion And Conquest of These lands by Europeans And Their Descendants. Dis

Example, the Puritan massacres of the Pequot Indian tribe on May 26, 1637, and again on July 14, 1637, were deemed by the Puritans to be directed by God 

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