> the available evidence clearly indicates that the demographic collapse was not uniform in either timing or magnitude and may have been caused by factors other than epidemic disease. ... Despite the trauma of conquest, Native Americans continued to have their own histories, intertwined with but not entirely determined by Europeans and their pathogens.
Since that was written, the evidence has swung even more strongly towards the idea that disease was intimately associated with the close, persistent contacts needed for the "conquest" and missionary activities of colonial powers.
Not to mention, similar epidemics were observed among indigenous southern africans and siberians during their respective colonizations. The Americas were unique in the scale and completeness of their disruption, but not in the mechanisms.
Otherwise, it seems that any “close, persistent contacts” would inevitably happen and inevitably lead to the same results.
You're arguing from the quote that 'it's other than disease' and then two sentences later that it was, but due to 'persistent contact needed for conquest'.
None of this adds up to a coherent argument.
If Aboriginals weren't dying en mass from disease, then what from? Because we have crude records of interaction. There were very few violent fights between Aboriginals and newcomers in Canada, for example.
And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa?
I'm all for more nuanced history, we're learning stuff every day, but I think a lot of it is also speculative, and ideologically driven.
> And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa?
In Africa, Europeans died off rapidly due to local diseases. Consequently, the early slave trade was centered in the islands off of Africa itself, and mediated by a mulatto class who were less susceptible.
The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents to be taught at religious schools where they'd be beaten if they spoke their indigenous language. The goal was literal cultural genocide and to erase indigenous nations and cultures from the continent.
This was not "inevitable" but instead an active policy goal the government persued.
By the time a Canadian government even existed, most of the damage had already been done.
One might question why this policy was undertaken in Canada but not the African colonies. Perhaps because Canada’s indigenous population was already a minority. But how did that happen?
Things also would have played out differently if the Canadian government and/or colonial precursors hadn't engaged in active genocide.
Engaging in genocidal polices is of course not inevitable but an active policy choice.
It was an active policy choice, and an abominable one at that, but it was not the primary cause of the destruction of indigenous cultures. If it weren’t for the residential schools, Canada’s First Nations would still be a marginalized minority in their own homeland, displaced by English and French-speaking settlers. Without the wholesale depopulation of North America via infectious disease, English and French-speaking settlers would have never been able to come here in great numbers at the time they did in the first place.
Absolutely First Nations were to varying degrees shrunk massively from pre-contact highs, there's no debate, but the loss of cultural memory, art, music, and language really only happened very recently, in the last 100 years, and was directly related to government and religious orders imposing residential schools and literal government bans on cultural activity and organization (eg. Potlatch).
This is not ancient history. The potlatch ban only came into effect in 1885 and was only removed in 1951. Residential schools were only closed in the 1970s.
You can see evidence of this in NW Coast art, where post contact, pre 1900s, there was actually a renaissance in art production and development, as superior iron tooling made it easier than ever to make art, and creation of carvings for the tourist market opened up all sorts of new economic opportunities for First Nations people.
Then in the late 1800s the government imposes literal bans on cultural activity and brings in residential schools. Enormous loss of cultural memory occurs.
By 1969 no one on Haida Gwaii had raised a totem pole in living memory, but Robert Davidson carved one and raised it. He couldn't speak Haida. No one even knew what to do at a totem raising. Luckily there were a handful of old timers that vaguely knew enough to kick start this cultural revitalization.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/haida-totem-...
If indigenous art and culture was already dead due "inevitable" disease, then why would the government feel any need to actively try to ban it, police it and arrest indigenous people for taking part? So you can see here that no, despite population decreases, indigenous customs were quite alive and well. The destruction required a brutal government clamp down to try to snuff it out.
Potlatch ban: https://www.ictinc.ca/the-potlatch-ban-abolishment-of-first-... https://www.sfu.ca/brc/online_exhibits/masks-2-0/the-potlatc...
When you think about potlatches and totem poles, you should consider that these are the culture of a remnant of survivors of a vast cultural collapse that utterly eradicated entire civilizations across two continents. That doesn’t minimize their value; if anything, it makes them more rare and precious, and hence makes it even more fundamentally evil, if such a thing is possible, for the Canadian government to have attempted to destroy these things.
You could be right. You could be completely wrong, and neither of us have any ability to know.
What is measurable is what the Canadian government explicitly tried to eradicate in the last century.
One consequence of this is that the indigenous cultures that we’ve actually had the chance to study don’t really represent the pre-Colombian cultures that well, because by then, there was already substantial disruption from the infectious diseases and wildlife that spread throughout the continent well in advance of explorers and colonists.