Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (Amerind Studies in Archaeology)From University of Arizona Press
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Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (Amerind Studies in Archaeology)From University of Arizona Press
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There is no question that European colonization introduced smallpox, measles, and other infectious diseases to the Americas, causing considerable harm and death to indigenous peoples. But though these diseases were devastating, their impact has been widely exaggerated. Warfare, enslavement, land expropriation, removals, erasure of identity, and other factors undermined Native populations. These factors worked in a deadly cabal with germs to cause epidemics, exacerbate mortality, and curtail population recovery.Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America challenges the “virgin soil” hypothesis that was used for decades to explain the decimation of the indigenous people of North America. This hypothesis argues that the massive depopulation of the New World was caused primarily by diseases brought by European colonists that infected Native populations lacking immunity to foreign pathogens. In Beyond Germs, contributors expertly argue that blaming germs lets Europeans off the hook for the enormous number of Native American deaths that occurred after 1492. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians come together in this cutting-edge volume to report a wide variety of other factors in the decline in the indigenous population, including genocide, forced labor, and population dislocation. These factors led to what the editors describe in their introduction as “systemic structural violence” on the Native populations of North America. While we may never know the full extent of Native depopulation during the colonial period because the evidence available for indigenous communities is notoriously slim and problematic, what is certain is that a generation of scholars has significantly overemphasized disease as the cause of depopulation and has downplayed the active role of Europeans in inciting wars, destroying livelihoods, and erasing identities.
Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (Amerind Studies in Archaeology)From University of Arizona Press - Amazon Sales Rank: #580971 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.00" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (Amerind Studies in Archaeology)From University of Arizona Press Review “An essential volume, not only for American archaeologists and historians, but for all scholars interested in the complex interplay of disease and colonialism in global history. Highlighting human agency, Beyond Germs offers compelling new analysis and haunting conclusions.”—Christina Snyder, author of Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America“This edited volume represents a long overdue reevaluation of a central issue in American archaeology, history, and anthropology—the evidence and implications of catastrophic population declines among indigenous peoples in the New World.”—Michael Wilcox, author of The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact“An excellent addition to a growing literature that challenges the 'virgin soil' hypothesis and shows its wide exaggeration.”—Choice
About the Author Catherine M. Cameron is a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. An archaeologist, she studies captives in prehistory and works in the American Southwest. She edited the book Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences. Paul Kelton is a professor of history and a member of the executive board of the Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715 and Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824. Alan C. Swedlund is a professor emeritus and former chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840–1916.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. though one of the best (by Gerardo Gutierrez) concerns Mexico By E. N. Anderson The general narrative on the horrific decline of Native American populations after European contact has been, for a century at least, that it was almost entirely due to introduced European diseases, striking a "virgin soil" population. I have been increasingly troubled by that view for years. It doesn't fit with what I learn from early sources or eyewitness accounts, which talk a lot about actual direct violence, structural violence, and hard usage including enslavement up until slavery was abolished in the various countries and often after that. This book goes far beyond what I had been thinking. It includes fairly detailed studies by 10 authorities of the general case and of particular cases, mostly in the United States, though one of the best (by Gerardo Gutierrez) concerns Mexico. In some areas, notably the bloody southeastern United States, warfare, massacre, and outright genocide clearly caused much, likely most, of the decline. In others, community disruption, often with enslavement, caused much of it. Conversely, there is much counter-evidence against the giant epidemics that some writers have assumed to occur before outside observers came to record. Some local epidemics did run ahead of the settlers (see Hull in this volume, for example), but there is no evidence for huge, continent-sweeping ones.There is also the point that the decline has occasionally been exaggerated. Very high figures for Native American precontact populations are questionable but are used by many popular authors. Also, several chapters herein point out that Native Americans survive in dilution, so to speak--vast numbers in the US and especially Mexico have some Native American ancestry. (For starters, all my three sons-in-law are part Indigenous, but none thinks of himself as "Native American.") Whole groups have been emerging from the shadows in recent years; tribes have been reborn, as "mixed-blood" descendants recover their heritage. Still, the decline was real and terrible; if it wasn't 95% (as Henry Dobyns and others famously argued, from full evidence for many, many groups) it was a good 90% or so.Several authors make the point that the virgin-soil theory was often deployed in the past by racist authors who were stressing Indigenous "inferiority." True point, but rather unfair to recent users of the idea; they may be wrong but they are not in the racist tradition. Virgin soil epidemics do happen, and affect Whites too; think of bubonic plague in Europe in 1346-48. On the other hand, I am aware of quite a few more recent authors who have misused the disease argument in another pernicious way: to get the English, Spanish and Portuguese "off the hook" for the decline of Indigenous populations in their settlements. This book certainly gets them back on the hook. Massacres and local genocides were routine, and it is time we all faced it, especially since they are still going on in remote parts of Latin America.This book is not perfect. Most authors admit that disease remains a huge part of the story, but some go overboard to minimize it. The beginning essay by David Jones is extreme; a reader might conclude from it that no Native American ever got the sniffles. This is clearly contrary to meticulous analysis, including some by authors herein, also by many others ranging from Sherburne Cook to Robert Boyd. Jones does not seem to understand virgin soil epidemics. If he believes they don't happen at all, he might examine the fate of the American chestnut, the American elm, and the western US white pines. If he thinks they never happen to humans, he might look into the documented history of Polynesia as well as the better-studied parts of North America (such as western Canada) and also the all too well known recent spreads of HIV and new flu strains. (The fact that these did not produce even more horrific mortality is due to modern medicine.) Some authors indulge in the classic technique of demanding thorough, hard evidence for disease mortality but accepting almost any account of other types (notably war deaths--often clearly overstated for effect by the victors). Some might remind themselves that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."In spite of this, the book gets 5 stars, for the better essays, for considerably deflating the "huge virgin soil epidemics" myth, and for making a very necessary case for the huge and depressing role of massacre, war, genocide, and oppression in decimating and often destroying Native American peoples.
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