The Globe and Mail reported today a 45% increase in Aboriginal populations over the past decade.
Nunavut has the highest birthrate in the country, and also the highest proportion of Aboriginals at 85%.
But many claim these figures are still underrepresented,
Thousands more people weren’t specifically noted as aboriginal because they had no permanent address or were behind bars.
Others simply refused to be counted. Chief Clarence Simon of Kanesatake said,
We are not Canadian citizens, we are North American Indians. And that is something they have to understand.
They already know how many native people are registered.
Kanesatake is the Mohawk community that was involved in the 1990 Oka crisis. But 22 other reserves also refused the census.
As Aboriginal populations rise, they will slowly approach the levels they were prior to drastic reductions after the arrival of European settlers.
David Stannard said in his book, American Holocaust, that this process was the most massive genocide in the history of the world, conducted through a deliberate “string of genocide campaigns.”
He claims that over 100 million people were lost, resulting in declines of 95% of some populations.
David Cesarini, a Jewish expert on the Holocaust that has campaigned against Holocaust deniers like David Irving, has quoted Stannard,
…in terms of the sheer number of deaths and the proportion of the. population killed, the Native American genocide exceeded that of the Holocaust.(1)
Canadians still live under the shadow of Oka, especially after the findings last year that exonerated Dudley George in the Ipperwash Inquiry.
The report found that the Aboriginals were unarmed, and claims by authorities of gunshots were falsified.
We haven’t figured out how to amend for the crimes of our past, including the residential schools, and Aboriginal issues continue to challenge policy writers.
But there is some good news.
The recent cabinet appointment of Michael Bryant, former Attorney General for Ontario, to the newly created position of Minister of Aboriginal Affairs does demonstrate some willingness by the government to take these issues seriously.
(LawIsCool did an interview with Michael Bryant last year, where he gave law students some tips).
Malthusian calculations of high birth rates transforming the demographics of Canada should be quickly dismissed in this context as racist jargon. These were nations and peoples that we destroyed, almost to the point of extinction. It is our responsibility to help restore their glory.
Updates
- Stageleft has provided a list of papers covering the subject.
- See the comments for a lively discussion among some of LawIsCool blawgers.
References
(1) Gavriel D. Rosenfeld. The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1999 13(1):28-61.
Thanks to Ali Ahmed of Osgoode Hall for the heads up.
I would be very careful about using Stannard. First of all his 100 million dead number is grossly wrong (the actual number is probably in an order of magnitude less). He does not support it with data and doesn’t take into account deaths due to disease. The massive majority of native Americans that died, died due to the introduction of European disease. Now in some cases this definitely should count as deliberate murder– for example natives who died of disease becase they were enslaved in silver mines in Central America. But for the most part, deaths due to disease were accidential. Rather than European conquest helping spread disease, the spread of disease helped European conquest.
Look at the Incan Empire. The only reason Pizzaro was able to conquer it was because of epidemics that had rolled through it. If you look at the resistance later put up by Tupac [not the rapper] and the general weakness of firearms at the time (during Cortes retreat from Tenochititlan, most of his men’s guns didn’t work because of the rain) it seems likely that without the Europeans unknowingly harbouring microscopic pathogens there might have been no conquest.
Of course, I shouldn’t even be referring to “Europeans” and “native Americans”. Both continents had a myriad of different groups that interacted with each other in different ways. In some cases, like King Phillip’s war, deliberate genocide of native Americans occurred. In other cases, natives were killed outside of a deliberate plan of extermination (for example, Guatamala– where first there was a war, then brutal exploitation, then the church moved in to stop the exploitation… but started a campaign of murders to stamp out heresy). In other cases, natives were seen as trade partners or military allies. In the majority of cases, death was due to disease because people from Europe had certain microbes in their bodies that native Americans had no resistance to.
The bottom line, the massive deaths of native Americans was an appalling tragedy (though numbers like 100 million are way off). It took place over centuries with many different actors as perpetrators. When I studied this back in undergrad the main thing I took away was the necessity of looking at everything individually, rather than retroactively lumping many disparate events together.
I’ve actually come across ample material to support numbers that high, or even higher, and figures around a 95% death rate is still agreed upon. See David Henige on criticisms of all numbers though, while keeping in mind Francis Jennings:
But all that is immaterial to the point of the post.
We know from emerging historical records that plagues and disease were no accident. The incident by Sir Jeffery Amherst was not an isolated one, and was part of a systematic campaign to spread these diseases as a tool of war.
Although there were many different actors, they did have some common denominators, which included the intent of dominating the continent and eradicating the indigenous inhabitants.
We know the Vikings were here too, but did not have the same impact. There’s evidence that Ancient Egyptians, Celts, Romans, Phonecians, Berbers, Chinese, Arabs, and Malians all traveled, settled, traded with Native Americans, but had a very different type of relationship.
I think it is fair to lump disparate events under the heading of “Manifest Destiny,” at least in the case of the U.S. Canada did have systematic plans for persecuting Aboriginals, or at least “assimilating” them, and it’s a legacy that we do have to pay for today. The demographic boom we currently observe is a process we should expect, and assist where we can along the way.
Omar, the link you cite gives a figure of population an order of magnitude smaller than the 100 million number (just as I cited).
First of all, there is doubt that the smallpox blanket incident actualy managed to infect anyone. But even if it did, it was a matter of a few hundred people hundreds of years after the initial contact the initial mass deaths. The plagues and diseases were not accidents in that it was not an accident that most Europeans came to America. The plagues and diseases were accidents in the sense that there was no general systemic plan to create plague and disease (though as I mentioned in many circumstances conditions that Europeans created led to disease and I’m sure there were probably some attempts at spreading disease, though probably later on).
Again, “eradicating the indigenous inhabitants” was not a constant. Some wanted to murder native Americans. Some wanted to enslave native Americans. Some wanted to convert native Americans. Some wanted to trade with native Americans. Some wanted to use them as allies.
The reason the Vikings did not have the same impact is that the native Americans in that area fought them off. The Vikings had compreble levels of military technology (though as I mentioned, firearms are overrated) and did not have African slaves (Patient Zero of the first smallpox epidemic in America was a slave – slavery was not just a catastophe for Africans, it was for native Americans as well). I am very leery of the other claims of travel to America.
Dobyns performed a valuable service by switching the paradigm of unrealistically low estimations of native populations. I don’t buy his numbers (more importantly many historians/anthropologist don’t either) mainly because I don’t agree with some of his underlying numbers. But here’s the thing– Dobyns’ argument hinges upon the fact that massive pandemics raged like a wildfire through the Americas, killing tens of millions before Europeans even saw them. That’s my thesis.
Amherst was definitely a schmuck, but it’s not clear that his plan to send in Smallpox actually worked. I’d be genuinely curious to hear about any duplications, but again – at the risk of repeating myself – it was centuries after the initial contact caused initial mass death (actually, technically I’m not repeating myself because I left out the ’caused’ one problem with fast typing). As the review you linked to notes, the mass death caused by the initial contact was seen as an act of God (this made some happy– they could settle the land. It made others unhappy – they lost a source of slaves).
The 1421 hypothesis is not widely accepted. Certainly I don’t accept Menzies at all (of course more important than what I think is what historians think – and it is certainly not accepted)
Jacob,
The first link, as stated, was presented for death rates of 95%.
Estimates of Native populations go even higher still, to 111.25 million by Henry E Dobyns. I’m personally inclined to favour higher numbers, given Jennings’ quote (and his entire book) on the subject (I think 50m is quite reasonable, and Jennings himself says that with more archaeological evidence these numbers will shift).
The Amherst incident was so successful that it was duplicated by other military campaigns. And if you doubt whether it was a military tactic, the alternative considered by Amherst was to hunt them with dogs.
Your skepticism of others is again based on a Eurocentric view of history that permeates our academia. This is slowly changing. Though people scoffed at Chinese claims, it is now increasingly accepted. Polynesians are probably right behind them.
Well, I’m not as bullish as you are on other pre-Columbian contacts. However, I think that the post-Columbian period was marked with substantially more numbers and the presence of African slaves. On the other hand you seem to be more bullish then me on how long slavery of native Americans continued in the Americas. Regardless, I’m talking about the first two centuries where Iberian desire for slaves was a huge motivator. However it was less so up north and in the later period. So while slavery was a huge motivator for the early Spanish, it was less so for, say, certain English settlers.
This is probably the most devasting critique of the 1421 hypothesis:
The Rosenfield article is interesting to read in retrospect (Ward Churchill having, since the article was published, been completely disgraced) but basically shows that much of this debate is wrapped up in contemporary middle eastern politics. As I have no desire to debate that particular topic, I’ll just say that I think the ‘destruction of the indies’ (as Las Casas put it) should be analyzed on its own terms and not distorted to wield as a weapon in the political arena.
There’s no question that there were natural factors at work. But there are three things here:
1) Other pre-Columbian contact (which you dispute) could potentially (though not likely given the longer voyage) have transmitted smallpox, yet did not, or at least not on the same scale. Jared Diamond advances this argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel. This could admittedly be due to drastically different numbers in migrations and/or the type/number of livestock transported.
2) Natural factors are largely irrelevant to the intent and desire of colonialists the exterminate indigenous populations.
3) Slavery of Natives was largely banned by 1679 in the North (though continued on a minor scale thereafter), and therefore could not be a major motive in European-Native interactions.
I was supportive of an expansive acknowledgment of Zheng Ho’s voyages well before Menzie’s work, especially when reviewing their maritime capabilities that exceeded anything Europeans would have for centuries. They imported a girraffe to the Imperial Court in China from East Africa, no small feat even today. The recent book only confirmed what many of us have been saying for a long time. Although I am aware of the critiques, I do think that in the future other historians will learn to become more open-minded and acknowledge these events.
More to the point, the Rosenfeld article provides some very interesting commentary as to why some communities debate so intensely on the subject of Native American deaths (the numbers should be largely irrelevant). He repeats some of the arguments you make, but in the analysis there are some very interesting and controversial perspectives raised.
You’re right, the pre-Columbian era was marked by African kings, not slaves. My numbers on Native slavery are pretty conservative. We know that in some parts of the south such as Carolina, it continued well into the 19th c. But Natives were not preferred for slave labour, because they were less culturally acclimitized due to their notions of gender-based work division:
An even more discouraging factor was that runaway Native slaves were just going home, and were therefore recovered far less frequently.
It is important to note that the Iberian demand for slave labour was preceded by slavery as an extension of the Requonquista; the first slave raid we have were two Moorish princes from what is now Mauritania, as the Conquestiadores attempted to circumvent the highly impenitrable Atlas Mountains after gaining a foothold in Ceuta.
The Robert Finaly review you provide of 1421 appears to be written before the book was released; I can hardly gauge its critique on that basis alone. The Conti theory alone seems flimsy’; it’s far more likely that Moorish documents were used. We have documentation of pre-Columbian expeditions from the same port Columbus set out from that apparantly crossed the ocean.
It’s the magnitude and extent of Zheng Ho’s undisputed voyages that makes the theory plausible. His trips included voyages to Africa, Arabia, and the East Indies, logging more nautical miles than Columbus or any European explorer for many years to come, and with far superior technolgical sophistication. Chinese civilization dwarfed probably anything else on the planet at that time, and it was certainly within their capabilities. The insular nature of China, both prior and following, is the reason we don’t have more about this in contemporary European accounts, which apparantly is the high standard used by modern historians.
I’m not so quick to dismiss Churchill’s arguments, simply because they have received criticique (unless you have more substantial reviews). I think we can agree on three things though:
1) Acknowledgement of the suffering of other peoples in no way detracts from one’s own narrative
2) Native Americans should be reviewed in their own context, without external political influences from contemporary politics (the converse I am willing to accept, however)
3) The different perspectives advanced in Rosenfeld’s article probably are still applicable to different individuals within the community in question. Broad generalizations of any community are usually not helpful, and fail to appreciate the divergent perspectives held within them.
The Finlay review was written in 2004, well after the release date. It completely shreads Menzies.
Ward Churchill is a proven fraudster who engaged in massive acts of academic dishonesty.
If you’re referring to the same link as above, I didn’t see any shredding.
I would like to see a source for Churchill; considering controversial premises I don’t expect he would not have encountered significant critique, but I would still like to evaluate it (when I have time).
In any case, this entire dialogue would have made an excellent podcast. Except we’re not even remotely on the subject of law any more. Some other time perhaps.
Finlay demostrates:
Menzies misuses sources, citing works to claim things they never claimed.
The so-called “missing years” Menzies sets his fantastic voyages in do not actually exist
Even taking Menzies at face value it is highly improbable the ships maintained the speeds he claims they do (52% faster than that measured in regions they knew well)
To illustrate the implausibility:
Regardless, when combined with the timetable of the sixth expedition Menzies claims are “impossible”
Menzies claims about Conti are even more off the wall. I can’t even summerize I’ll quote about
One final quote:
So basically, shredding occured.
As for Ward Churchill, this is probably a good place to start.
I concede some concerns with Churchill based on that link that warrant further investigation on my part, but it’s important to note that the allegations do not directly relate to the arguments in question, nor does Rosenfeld present alternative opinions based on Churchill alone.
The points of mutual agreement expressed above were intended to bring closure to the issue.
As for Finlay, I still do not acknowledge “shredding” simply because he takes issue with elements of his hypothesis. As you can imagine there have been responses to critiques, but it’s not worth getting into at this time. Again, we’re way off law, and even way off the topic of the post.
A more pointed and appropriate question would be, seeing how Aboriginals have the lowest SES indicators in Canada, and they are primarily a Federal responsibility, how do you propose that government deal with the demographic challenge outlined above?
Proposals based on eugenics philosophy, mandatory sterilizations, mass deportations, or just summary executions to reduce numbers will not be entertained.
How should the government deal with the demographic challenge outlined above?
I really don’t think I have anything value-added to say about this. I do something about history, so I think I can add something useful regarding the historical issues that came up regarding the numbers, Churchill, Menzies etc. Still, I’ll let those points of mutual agreement expressed above bring closure to the issue. As to your question– while I don’t know what the government should do, whatever is done will probably be done badly (given how they’re handled the issue in the past).