Demographic History Of Native Americans

The demographic history of Native Americans is deeply marked by the first contacts with explorers Europeans who first, even without knowing it, have brought with them diseases from the Old World (Europe, Asia and Africa) and secondly by wars of aggression conducted against American Indians. According to some experts, the American Indians have experienced a significant population decline since the early sixteenth ^century.

Clash viral and bacterial

Without being able to specify with certainty the extent of the impact of infectious diseases among American Indians, the death rate would reach 90 percent for some people severely affected. The Indians, who were not immunized against viruses and diseases like whooping cough , the measles or smallpox which raged for millennia in the Old World, have been struck by outbreaks decades before settlers arrived in the territories apparently small population of the interior. Having no knowledge about the virus at the time, the Europeans have therefore no advantage in knowingly immune weaknesses of indigenous peoples. Subsequently, the eighteenth century in New England , General Amherst authorized the distribution of blankets infested with smallpox to Indians of the tribe of Delaware , in order that they be exterminated by the disease. This event is probably the first official biological attack perpetrated in America.

The process began in the 1500s and has killed hundreds of thousands of lives. Outbreaks of smallpox ( 1525 , 1558 , 1589 ), of typhus (1546), for influenza (1558), of diphtheria ( 1614 ) of measles ( 1618 ) have killed more than 95% of the indigenous population ^Wars

In addition, European settlement has sometimes led to wars of extermination (the Conquistadors ) and return of Indians to U.S. territories are not conducive to operating activities (agriculture and mining, forestry and mining). In South America, the Indians were most often enslaved or exterminated. In the Argentina now remains only a tiny minority in India, those who survived the brutal " Conquest of the Desert "led by Julio Argentino Roca in the late ^nineteenth century.

Today

Argentina currently has 700 indigenous communities, which represent 3% of the 36 million inhabitants (200,000 Mapuche living in Patagonia ) .

References

See also

• Indian Wars
• South American Indians

Bibliography

• Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998.
• Henig, David. Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1998.
• McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell. 1976.
• Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf. 2005.
• Bartolome de Las Casas , Very brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies , 1542.

• Portal Pre-Columbian America
• Portal History

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