When we picture Native Americans today, especially those in the United States, we probably imagine scattered tribes, doing their best to scratch a living off of the land while harmonizing with nature. When we think of so-called great American civilizations, meaning those who threw up huge monuments and other such things that get archeologists and local tourist bureaus all hot and heavy, we mostly just think of the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca; three groups that got beat up pretty early on by the Spanish. The rest are just kind of thought of as simple farmers and stone axe wielding hunters and gatherers wandering around with feathers in their hair. However, it wasn’t always this way, and as per usual, how we are picturing history doesn’t really have much context with what really happened.
As we've gone through before, back in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and upon discovering the New World (known as the Old World if you lived there) he set out to see how big of a dick he could be. We don't need to go again into all the ways Columbus was an asshat, but to be fair to the man, the largest disaster caused by his discovery was in no way actually his fault. I'm of course talking about the spread of diseases, like small pox and measles, to the Native Americans. It cannot be overemphasized how big of a fucking deal this was from a historical perspective. Prior to Columbus' arrival, it was estimated that North and South America had a population roughly on par with Europe's, which was around 90 million people. The Americas were filled with advanced civilizations, just like every other part of the world. Groups that not only built magnificent cities and cultivated wide areas of cropland, but also engaged in the usual collection of laws, negotiations, trade, and war that has marked the entirety of human history. That all changed starting in 1492, probably because some asshat Spaniard failed to cover his mouth when he coughed. Europeans weren’t exactly the cleanest people back then. Within 150 years of first contact, it’s estimated that 90 percent of the Native American population had dropped dead, almost all due to Old World diseases.
It's hard to imagine how devastating this would have been to the civilizations that existed. Everywhere the early Europeans landed their ships became a spark, which quickly spread deep into the interior along established trade routes. To be fair to the Europeans, this was a time when their doctors believed that diseases were caused either by god being mad or because the stars were aligned in some weird way. They really didn’t have any idea how illnesses spread from one person to another, and they definitely didn’t understand things like immunity and germs. When diseases that were relatively mild for them began mowing their way through the Native Americans, they pretty much just chocked it up to god not liking the natives for some reason and left it at that. Now of course that is not to say that there weren’t some dicks who purposefully tried to get Native Americans sick, there most certainly were, but even if they hadn’t, the die was already cast.
Imagine that over a relatively short period of time, 90 percent of the population today in the United States just died off. What would that do to our economy? Our system of government? Our culture? If you’re not saying it would probably totally fuck things up, you’ve probably never seen a single movie about the apocalypse. By the time the Pilgrims arrived on the scene in 1620, the vast majority of the Native Americans were already dead. The native societies found by the Pilgrims, though still impressive given their level of culture and organization, weren’t the height of New World civilization. They were the post-apocalyptic survivors, trying desperately to rebuild all that had been lost. As the Europeans pushed further into the interior, they declared that the land they found must have been blessed by god, for there were countless clearings ready for the plow and seemingly virgin forests that had never been cut. Now imagine what your lawn would like if you didn’t mow it for a year. Now imagine what everything would look like if 90 percent of the people in the world disappeared.
The Native American groups that best survived this Armageddon were the ones that were the most scattered. The ones that lived in the most remote places. This isolation helped them survive the longest. However, unfortunately the Europeans continued to expand as time continued, moving forward into what they saw as an empty and mostly unclaimed world, spreading new rounds of pestilence and starting wars with any who dared defy them. The Native Americans they fought were the plucky survivors of the plague, but without any historical context, the Europeans saw them as nothing but savages.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conquista-de-Tenochtitlan-Mexico.jpg