How many Indians died?

An interesting look at the perennial question of how many Indians died and whether Europeans were responsible for killing them.

Selected Death Tolls for Wars, Massacres and Atrocities Before the 20th Century

By Matthew WhitePopulation of the Western Hemisphere in 1492 according to various experts:(Possibly) The Twenty (or so) Worst Things People Have Done to Each Other:

1. 55 million   Second World War, 20C
2. 40 million   Mao Zedong (mostly famine), 20C
3. 40 million   Mongol Conquests, 13C
4. 36 million   An Lushan Revolt, 8C
5. 25 million   Fall of the Ming Dynasty, 17C
6. 20 million   Taiping Rebellion, 19C
7. 20 million   Annihilation of the American Indians, 15C-19CSo the Indian holocaust was the seventh worst in history if you accept the low figure of 20 million pre-Columbian inhabitants. But looking at White's chart, the average estimate appears to be 50 or 60 million. If we go by only an average estimate, the Indian holocaust was the worst in history.

Judging by how much space he gives it, here's the crux of White's essay:Traditionally we add death by disease and famine into the total cost of wars and massacres (Anne Frank, after all, died of typhus, not Zyklon-B, but she's still a victim of the Holocaust) so I don't see any problem with doing the same with the American genocides, provided that the deaths occurred after their society had already been disrupted by direct European hostility. If a tribe was enslaved or driven off its lands, the associated increase in deaths by disease would definitely count toward the atrocity (The chain of events which reduced the Indian population of California from 85,000 in 1852 to 18,000 in 1890 certainly counts regardless of the exact agent of death, because by this time, the Indians were being hunted down from one end of California to another.); however, if a tribe was merely sneezed on by the wrong person at first contact, it should not count.

Consider the Powhatans of Virginia. As I mentioned earlier, Stannard cites estimates that the population was 100,000 before contact. In the same paragraph, he states that European depredations and disease had reduced this population to a mere 14,000 by the time the English settled Jamestown in 1607. Now, come on; should we really blame the English for 86,000 deaths that occured before they even arrived? Sure, he hints at pre-Jamestown "depredations", but he doesn't actually list any. As far as I can tell, the handful of European ventures into the Chesapeake region before 1607 were too small to do much depredating, and in what conflicts there were, the Europeans often got the worst of it.

Think of it this way: if the Europeans had arrived with the most benign intentions and behaved like perfect guests, or for that matter, if Aztec sailors had been the ones to discover Europe instead of vice versa, then the Indians would still have been exposed to unfamiliar diseases and the population would still have been scythed by massive epidemics, but we'd just lump it into the same category as the Black Death, i.e. bad luck.Comment:  The obvious response is that Europeans didn't arrive with benign intentions. That changes the issue from "bad luck" to something more like manslaughter.

White wonders if we can blame the English for the deaths that occurred before they arrived. No, we can blame the Spanish for those deaths.

If an Aztec ship had sailed to Europe, only its sailors would've been exposed to disease. They would've died on the trip or developed antibodies and survived.

Final answer

I've answered White's charge several times before. You can find one such answer in Genocide by Any Other Name.... To quote myself:Europeans were guilty of directly killing or enslaving Indians...and they were guilty of, at best, depraved indifference toward the deaths they caused by infectious diseases.

Or to put it another way, how many doctors did they send or hospitals did they build when they saw the Indians dying? How many Indians did they treat medically the same as they treated their own people? If there's a tale of a Florence Nightengale type ministering to America's Natives, I'm afraid I missed it.

To extend my previous analogy, if you break into someone's house with a known killer as a partner, intending "only" to rob the house, and your partner kills 90% of the house's inhabitants while you stand by and watch, how guilty are you of those deaths?Answer:  pretty guilty.

We could keep going with these analogies. If you lock someone in the basement and he dies of an infection from a scratch, are you guilty? If you forcibly remove someone from his house and he dies of pneumonia in the cold, are you guilty? Yes. I believe the crime would be involuntary manslaughter and the punishment would be 10 or more years in jail.