American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492

[gottaB]

The history is bad enough. There's no need to embellish it.--Russell Thornton


The Ward Churchill brouhaha has brought to my attention the work of anthropologist Russell Thornton. Thomas Brown's Assessing Ward Churchill's Version of the 1837 Smallpox Epidemic, examines Churchill's citations of Thornton (along with other sources), and also includes several statements Thornton has made about Churchill's use of his work. The Los Angeles Times reported:

“I don’t disagree with any of the conclusions drawn by Professor Brown,” Thornton said recently. “I think people can make mistakes in quotations occasionally, but to blatantly misrepresent someone else’s work is totally inappropriate.”

Thornton, a Cherokee Indian, said there were historical cases where blankets were used to try to infect Indians, but not in this instance.

“If Churchill has sources that say otherwise, I’d like to see them. But right now I’m his source for this, and it’s wrong,” he said.

http://www.uccs.edu/~ur/media/mediawatch/view_article.php?y=mediawatch_articles&article_id=11397

Outside of academia, awareness of the controversy at present appears to be largely confined to the reactionary side of the blogosphere. This is unfortunate, as rightwing keyboard monkeys are unlikely to appreciate Thornton's work, and many will surely misrepresent it or draw inappropriate conclusions.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, Thornton is a respected authority on the historical depopulation of the Americas, and related topics in the field of American Indian studies. It would seem that anybody wishing to explore the topic of genocide in the Americas would want to consult his work, esp. his American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).

[BikeWriter]

1. Very interesting. I wonder if you've seen this document from 1542?

http://www.lasculturas.com/lib/mktxlascasasindies.php

More than thirty other islands in the vicinity of San Juan are for the most part and for the same reason depopulated, and the land laid waste. On these islands I estimate there are 2,100 leagues of land that have been ruined and depopulated, empty of people.

As for the vast mainland, which is ten times larger than all Spain, even including Aragon and Portugal, containing more land than the distance between Seville and Jerusalem, or more than two thousand leagues, we are sure that our Spaniards, with their cruel and abominable acts, have devastated the land and exterminated the rational people who fully inhabited it. We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.

The common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves Christian and who have gone there to extirpate those pitiful nations and wipe them off the earth is by unjustly waging cruel and bloody wars. Then, when they have slain all those who fought for their lives or to escape the tortures they would have to endure, that is to say, when they have slain all the native rulers and young men (since the Spaniards usually spare only the women and children, who are subjected to the hardest and bitterest servitude ever suffered by man or beast), they enslave any survivors. With these infernal methods of tyranny they debase and weaken countless numbers of those pitiful Indian nations.

[gottaB]

2. Not sure about which translation, but I studied Las Casas in school

The passage seems familiar.

[BikeWriter]

4. I thought it an excellent piece on the American holocaust.

[DELUSIONAL]

3. This is an excellent review of the European impact on

the Americas -- there's also another book which takes a closer look at the actual numbers of Indigenous peoples in the Americas pre European contact and the numbers were far higher than found in most US history books. The image presented in the history books is that the Europeans stumbled on a sparsely populated continent that was ready to be exploited by the "vastly" superior Europeans.

[Sapphire Blue]

5. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress

Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress
excerpted from a
People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn


An excerpt:



Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

Continue reading @

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/Columbus_PeoplesHx.html

[Matthias]

6. Didn't the vast majority of Native Americans who died

die from diseases brought by the Europeans? Either way, even if Europeans had come to the new continent with open arms and peaceful intentions, about as many Native Americans would have died.

[jeffrey_X]

7. bullshit

How many disease-infested blankets did we hand out?

I'm sure we didn't kill to many of them either.

:eyes:

[drdtroit]

8. ????????????????? Are you serious ?????????????????

[Igel]

9. Yes.

In fact, many of the cultures were pretty well decimated before Europeans got to them. The provable incidents of disease-ridden blankets being disseminated tend to be later.

Smallpox and other diseases don't need white skin to be passed along to populations that have never been exposed to them, whether in North American, Mesoamerica, or South America.

This doesn't excuse the massacres that took place, to say the least. But it makes probably the majority of the reduction in population an amoral occurrence.