American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  32. Paul Stuart, Nations Within a Nation: Historical Statistics of American Indians (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 15 (Table 2.1), 29 (Table 2.15).

  33. See Susanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and US. Power (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), esp. pp. 103–13, and 145–59.

  34. For overviews and analyses of some of these matters, see Peter Matthiessen, Indian Country (New York: Viking Press, 1984) and M. Annette Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1992).

  35. “Columbus’s Letter to the Sovereigns on His First Voyage, 15 February—4 March, 1493,” in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: The Heritage Press, 1963), p. 182.

  Appendix I

  1. For an early summary discussion, see S.K. Lothrop, “Early Migrations to Central and South America: An Anthropological Problem in the Light of Other Sciences,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 91 (1961), 97–123.

  2. J.L. Bada, R.A. Schroeder, and G.F. Carter, “New Evidence for the Antiquity of Man in North America Deduced from Aspartic-Acid Racemization,” Science, 184 (1974), 791–93; J.L. Bada and P.M. Masters, “Evidence for a 50,000–Year Antiquity of Man in the Americas Derived from Amino-Acid Racemization in Human Skeletons,” in Jonathan E. Ericson, R.E. Taylor, and Rainier Berger, eds., Peopling of the New World (Los Altos, Calif.: Ballena Press, 1982), pp. 171–79.

  3. Richard S. MacNeish, “Early Man in the New World,” American Scientist, 63 (1976), 316–27; for convenient summaries of much of the data on this matter as of the early 1980s, see the essays on specific locales in Jesse D. Jennings, ed., Ancient South Americans (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1983).

  4. See the overview discussion in Tom D. Dillehay, “A Late Ice-Age Settlement in Southern Chile,” Scientific American, 251 (1984), 106–19.

  5. See William N. Irving and C.R. Harrington, “Upper Pleistocene Radiocarbon-Dated Artifacts from the Northern Yukon,” Science, 179 (1973), 335–40; and two reports by James M. Adovasio: “Excavations at Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, 1973–75: A Progress Report,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist, 45 (1975), 1–30; and “Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, 1977: An Overview,” American Antiquity, 43 (1978), 632–51. For the Missouri site, see M.J. Regan, R.M. Rowlett, E.G. Garrison, W. Dort, Jr., V.M. Bryant, Jr., and C.J. Johannsen, “Flake Tools Stratified Below Paleo-Indian Artifacts,” Science, 200 (1978), 1272–75. The Warm Mineral Springs site is discussed briefly in State of Florida, Division of Archives, History, and Records Management, Archives and History News, 5 (July-August 1974), p. 1.

  6. N. Guidon and G. Delibrias, “Carbon-14 Dates Point to Man in the Americas 32,000 Years Ago,” Nature, 321 (1986), 769–71.

  7. The most detailed discussion of these earliest sites focuses on Monte Verde. See Tom D. Dillehay, Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). For a non-technical review of the ferment in archaeological circles surrounding the discoveries at Monte Verde, Pedra Furada, and other early human settlements in the Americas, see Richard Wolkomir, “New Finds Could Rewrite the Start of American History,” Smithsonian, 21 (March 1991), pp. 130–44.

  8. Morris Swadesh, “Linguistic Relations Across Bering Strait,” American Anthropologist, 64 (1962), 1262–91; Harold E. Driver, Indians of North America, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 25; L. Campbell and M. Mithun, eds., The Languages of Native America: Historical and Comparative Assessment (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).

  9. Joseph H. Greenberg’s Language in the Americas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) is the most prominent and controversial of these new studies. For an important recent discussion and critique, see James Matisoff, “On Megalo-comparison,” Language, 66 (1990), 106–20. On the evolution of indigenous language change in South America, see Mary Ritchie Key, ed., Language Change in South American Indian Languages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

  10. Richard A. Rogers, Larry D. Martin, and T. Dale Nicklas, “Ice-Age Geography and the Distribution of Native North American Languages,” journal of Biogeography, 17 (1990), 131–143.

  11. Fumiko Ikawa-Smith, “The Early Prehistory of the Americas as Seen from Northeast Asia,” in Ericson, Taylor, and Berger, eds., Peopling of the New World, p. 23. On sea level changes and their impact on—and obliteration of—archaeological sites in the Pacific, see John R.H. Gibbons and Fergus G.A.U. Clunie, “Sea Level Changes and Pacific Prehistory: New Insight into Early Human Settlement of Oceania,” Journal of Pacific History, 21 (1986), 58–82.

  12. Jesse D. Jennings, “Origins,” in Jennings, ed., Ancient North Americans, p. 27.

  13. For a recent review of the evidence, see Sally McBrearty, “The Origin of Modern Humans,” Man, 25 (1990), 129–43. Cf., Rebecca L. Cann, “DNA and Human Origins,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 17 (1988), 127–43. As of this writing the most recently published research puts the date at somewhere between 164,000 B.C. and 247,000 B.C. See Linda Vigilant, Mark Stoneking, Henry Harpending, Kristen Hawkes, and Allan C. Wilson, “African Populations and the Evolution of Human Mitochondrial DNA,” Science, 253 (1991), 1503–1507.

  14. Knut R. Fladmark has long been a proponent of this idea. See, for example, his “Routes: Alternate Migration Corridors for Early Man in North America,” American Antiquity, 44 (1979), 55–69.

  15. See J. Peter White and J.F. O’Connell, A Prehistory of Australia, New Guinea and Sahul (Sydney: Academic Press, 1982); and J.P. White, “Melanesia,” in Jesse D. Jennings, ed., The Prehistory of Polynesia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 352–77.

  16. There also is the possibility that very early sites do exist and are accessible along the present northwest coast, but that archaeologists—presupposing that they could not exist—have simply not been digging deeply enough. That, at least, is the conclusion drawn by one archaeologist following recent work in the area. See R. Lee Lyman, Prehistory of the Oregon Coast: The Effects of Excavation Strategies and Assemblage Size on Archaeological Inquiry (New York: Academic Press, 1991), pp. 313–14.

  17. These and other early estimates are reviewed briefly in Woodrow Borah, “The Historical Demography of Aboriginal and Colonial America: An Attempt at Perspective,” in William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 14–15.

  18. Paul Rivet, G. Stresser-Pean, and C. Loukotka, “Langues américaines,” in Les Langues du Monde, Volume 16, ed. Antoine Meillet and Marcel Cohen (Paris: Société de Linguistique de Paris, 1924), pp. 597–712; Karl Sapper, “Die Zahl und die Volksdichte der indianischen Bevölkerung in Amerika vor der Conquista und in der Gegenwart,” Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Congress of Americanists, Part One (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1924), pp. 95–104; and Herbert J. Spinden, “The Population of Ancient America,” Geographical Review, 28 (1928), 641–60.

  19. Angel Rosenblat, “El desarrollo de la población indigena de América,” Tierra Firme, 1 (1935), 1:115–33; 2:117–48; 3:109–41; Alfred L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, Volume 38 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939), Section 11. Although Kroeber could not have known it at the time that he was writing, his estimate was substantially lower than the likely population of North and South America even if the entire hemisphere had been inhabited only by small tribes of hunting and gathering peoples—which, as we have seen, it decidedly was not. On population densities for hunter-gatherer societies, see Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine, 1968); for discussion on this point regarding the Americas during early millennia of human settlement, see Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 49.

  20. For a brief and instructive review of some of the d
ata and technical approaches used by these investigators in one of the settings studied, see Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, “Conquest and Population: A Demographic Approach to Mexican History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 113 (1969), 177–83.

  21. Woodrow Borah, “America as Model: The Demographic Impact of European Expansion Upon the Non-Western World,” Actas y Memorial del XXXV Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Volume III (Mexico City, 1962), 381; Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology, 7 (1966), 395–416.

  22. John D. Durand, “Historical Estimates of World Population: An Evaluation,” Population and Development Review, 3 (1977), 253–96.

  23. For helpful general discussion and an estimate in the 75,000,000 range (including between 7,000,000 and 8,000,000 for the modern-day areas of the United States and Canada), see Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), pp. 22–25. Dobyns’s conclusion that his earlier calculation for the population of the region north of Mexico was too low almost by half, and that 18,000,000 is a more probable figure, is reported in Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville:University of Tennessee Press, 1983), pp. 42, 342–43. Dobyns’s hemispheric estimate of approximately 145,000,000 was advanced in his “Reassessing New World Populations at the Time of Contact,” paper delivered at Institute for Early Contact Studies, University of Florida at Gainesville (April 1988).

  24. Terry L. Hunt and Melissa A. Kirkendall, “Social Complexity and Population Collapse in Polynesia” and “The Archaeology of Population Collapse in the Yasawa Islands, Fiji,” papers read at Seventeenth Pacific Science Congress, Honolulu, June 1991. On the potential for explosively rapid disease dispersal among isolated indigenous peoples, see also David E. Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of Hawa‘i on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu: Social Science Research Institute and University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989), esp. pp. 69–75.

  25. The best and most thorough examinations of the hypothesis that massive disease pandemics that were brought by Europeans preceded their physical entry (at least in large numbers) into indigenous environments—in addition to Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned—are Ann F. Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Marvin T. Smith, Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast: Depopulation During the Early Historic Period (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1987); and Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991).

  26. Critics of Dobyns, who nevertheless agree that “American Indian populations typically declined by 95 percent overall”—thus supporting very large pre-1492 native population estimates—include Dean R. Snow and Kim M. Lanphear, “European Contact and Indian Depopulation in the Northeast: The Timing of the First Epidemics,” Ethnohistory, 35 (1988), 15–33; cf., Henry F. Dobyns, “More Methodological Perspectives on Historical Demography,” Ethnohistory, 36 (1989), 285–99.

  27. One of the earliest investigators to point out the demographic importance of psychological disorientation and despair among indigenous peoples, following on the devastation of epidemic disease, was J.V. Neel. See, for example, the report by Neel, W.R. Centerwall, N.A. Chagnon, and H.L. Casey, “Notes on the Effect of Measles and Measles Vaccine in a Virgin Soil Population of South American Indians,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 91 (1970), 418–29; and J.V, Neel, “Health and Disease in Unacculturated Amerindian Populations,” in Ciba Foundation Symposium Number 49, Health and Disease in Tribal Societies (Amsterdam: Elsevier/Excerpta Medica, 1977), pp. 155–68. On the enormous demographic importance of induced infertility as a consequence of imported disease and cultural dislocation among native peoples, see David E. Stannard, “Disease and Infertility: A New Look at the Demographic Collapse of Native Populations in the Wake of Western Contact,” Journal of American Studies, 24 (1990), 325–50. A recent overview, linking an array of demographic factors other than genocide in the phenomenon of indigenous population decline following Western contact, is David E. Stannard, “The Consequences of Contact: Toward an Interdisciplinary Theory of Native Responses to Biological and Cultural Invasion,” in David Hurst Thomas, ed. Columbian Consequences, Volume Three: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 519–39.

  Appendix II

  1. The quotation is from John Mason’s account of his and his followers’ crushing and burning of the Pequots in his Brief History of the Pequot War . . . in 1637 (Boston: S. Kneeland & T. Green, 1736), p. 22.

  2. For examples of exceptions to this generalization, in one way or another, see James C. Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1902), pp. 28–35; and Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York: Appleton and Company, 1918), p. viii.

  3. For the most prominent such analyses, see Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, “Origins of the Southern Labor System,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 7 (1950), 199–222; Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1957), esp. chapters 1, 2, and 4; and Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), pp. 21–23.

  4. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. vii.

  5. Winthrop D. Jordan, “Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery,” Journal of Southern History, 28 (1962), 18–30.

  6. Carl N. Degler, “Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2 (1959), 49–66; see also Degler’s Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), pp. 26–39.

  7. Jordan, “Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery”; and Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). This necessarily hasty overview precludes discussion of several other historians who made significant contributions to the debate, generally supportive of Degler. One of them actually preceded Degler, though her work was focused on other matters: Katharine George, “The Civilized West Looks at Primitive Africa, 1400–1800: A Study in Ethnocentrism,” Isis, 49 (1958), 62–72. See also, for examples of a variety of approaches, Dante Puzzo, “Racism and the Western Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 25 (1964), 579–86; Milton Cantor, “The Image of the Negro in Colonial Literature,” New England Quarterly, 36 (1963), 452–77; and Alden T. Vaughan, “Blacks in Virginia: A Note on the First Decade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 29 (1972), 469–78.

  8. Jordan, White Over Black, p. 43.

  9. Jordan, “Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery,” 30; Jordan, White Over Black, p. 98.

  10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 341–42.

  11. George M. Fredrickson, “Toward a Social Interpretation of the Development of American Racism,” in Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson, and Daniel M. Fox, eds., Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), Volume One, pp. 240–41. Reprinted in slightly revised form in George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), pp. 189–205. Emphasis added.

  12. Ibid, p. 254.

  13. See, for example, George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), esp. pp. 70–81; T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne O
wne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 64–68.

  14. One of the best studies of the emergence of racial pseudoscience in America remains William Stanton’s The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); bringing the story from the later nineteenth century up to the present is Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981).

  15. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), p. xxvii.

  16. On the scientific illegitimacy of the idea of race, see Ashley Montague, ed., The Concept of Race (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980); see also, Stephen Jay Gould, “Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View,” in Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), pp. 231–36.