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.

To illustrate the implausibility:

In other words, Menzies proposes that Zheng He’s captains completed a voyage of some 17,000 miles in mainly unknown seas in seven months, including dozens of stops in the Indian Ocean, while Zheng He took the same amount of time to journey about 3,500 miles from Sumatra to Nanjing.

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

Neither Poggio nor Tafur refer to Calicut in connection with the large ships, to Chinese vessels visiting India, or to the fleet of Zheng He; neither chronicler provides a date for Conti’s stay in Calicut. Still, Menzies takes for granted that Conti was in Calicut in 1421 when the Ming armada anchored there, and since both Conti and Ma Huan describe similar scenes in Calicut, Menzies surmises that Conti must have met the Chinese chronicler in that port”
And from there it gets even more implausible. He says, again with no evidence, that Conti must have travelled on the first ever world circumnavigation – of course never writing about it.
Menzies also hillariously begs the question when talking about how Zheng He’s armada looked before it set sail. He describes it as having chicken coops. Was there a contemporary source that said that? No, he says that the Chinese must’ve carried chickens to the new world, therefore there must be chickens on the boat. The same goes for masons (how else could those pyramids been build).

One final quote:

The fundamental assumption of the book—that Zhu Di dispatched the Ming fleets because he had a “grand plan,” a vision of charting the world and creating a maritime empire spanning the oceans (pp. 19–43)—is simply asserted by Menzies without a shred of proof. It represents the author’s own grandiosity projected back onto the emperor

So basically, shredding occured.

As for Ward Churchill, this is probably a good place to start.

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.

Ward Churchill is a proven fraudster who engaged in massive acts of academic dishonesty.

Indian men balked at performing agricultural labor, which they regarded as women’s work, and colonists complained that they were “haughty” and made poor slaves.

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.

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.

This is probably the most devasting critique of the 1421 hypothesis:

The wounded leviathan of Eurocentricism no doubt deserves another harpoon, but 1421 is too leaky a vessel to deliver it. Examination of the book’s central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance: first, that the 1421–1423 voyages Menzies describes could not have taken place; second, that Conti played no role in transmitting knowledge of Chinese exploration to European cartographers; and third, that all Menzies’s evidence for the presence of the Chinese fleets abroad is baseless.

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.

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.

Amherst: Could it not be contrived to send the Smallpox among the disaffected Tribes of Indians?
Bouquet replied: I will try to inoculate the [Indians] with some blankets that may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself.
Amherst answered: You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets.

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.

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)