Counting the Dead

For John, BLUF:  There has been a certain denigration of Europeans in North America, or specifically, the United States, over the intorduction of new diseases that wiped out sizeable populations.  The author uses SJW for Social Justice Warrior.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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‘Stolen Land’ and Fake Numbers:  How SJWs Invented a ‘Genocide’ Myth

Here is the sub-headline:

From The Other McCain, by Blogger Robert Stacy McCain, 5 January 2021.

Here is the lede plus one:

In 1998, University of Wisconsin historian David Henige published Numbers from Nowhere:  The American Indian Contact Population Debate, in which he examined how, during the late 20th century, academics began arguing that the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans was much larger than previously estimated.  This origins of this argument can be located rather precisely, with the 1966 publication of an article by Henry F. Dobyns in the journal Current Anthropology.  Dobyns cited evidence that the native population had been devastated by pandemic diseases — particularly smallpox but also influenza, diphtheria and other contagions — brought to the Americas by European explorers and colonists.  Dobyns then extrapolated from this an astonishing claim:

If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people.  Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. . . .

What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person.  The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated.  Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so. . . .

So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old data used by [early 20th-century ethnographer James] Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs.  From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years [i.e., from 1492 to the early 1600s] of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died — the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.

Is this true?  Were there more than 100 million people in the Western hemisphere before Columbus arrived?  Did 95% of them die of disease?

As the Blogger points out, the oldest European Colony in the US is St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565.  The first English colony was Jamestown, founded in 1607.

Woven into the blog post is the question of if the people we should be upset with for wiping out the extant 1491 population are not those who live in Mexico and South.  And perhaps the illegal immigrants in the US today.  And those of Hispanic heritage whose families have lived in the Desert Southwest for some 400 years.

There is a lot of history out there to guide us in our understanding of who we are and how we got here.  Without history we are just Post Turtles.

As we go along we might ask ourselves about the difference between a 1620 Pilgrim and today's Illegal Immigrant, wishing to establish permanent residence in these United States.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff