"AMERICAN INDIAN HOLOCAUST AND SURVIVAL"

Demographics seem to be only about census head-counts, but in fact they are a mirror of how well any population is doing, which is why they are so vital to government as well as to others. The three main forces of change are birth rates, death rates, and migration. In the case of the original populations of the North American continent, these have been deeply affected by the usual forces of climate, war, and famine, but most of all -- and in recorded times -- disease coming from Eurasia and Africa. New methods of analysis have developed that tell us more about climate change over millenia, traces of prehistoric peoples, the nature of the genome of both humans and diseases, and the relationship between health and diet. The importance of demographics grows. A blizzard of sharply focused studies now exists and is available via the Internet.

Russell Thornton’s “American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492” is still a solid introduction. After a quick review of the main theories of how people got to the Americas, he faces squarely the destruction of a whole complex of people that were once a living network of villages and passageways from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Arctic Sea to the southern tip of South America.

Partly as predators and partly by accident, Europeans, and the Africans they brought along unwillingly, arrived as a mere trace along the Atlantic coast and through what can only be called “germ warfare” -- carrying deadly plagues in their bodies -- wiped out the indigenous people. The coastal population, fleeing inland to escape both smallpox and gunpowder, passed the deadly microbes on in a kind of shock-wave of contagion. Sometimes the Indians succeeded in turning to wipe out some early colonies, but it was usually hunger that killed them, in spite of help from the living indigenous people and from raiding the granaries of the dead ones. Counter-contagion seems to be mostly limited to venereal diseases.

By the time the story gets to the 19th century, population tragedies were being reported as they happened. The focus was on the prairie clearances when Civil War veterans and politics were clearly genocidal, and provoked a horrified wave of sentiment supporting the tribes. These massacres (and slavery also) forced reconsideration of what it meant to be human, to be a citizen, to have rights, and to be a Christian nation. Thornton doesn’t go into these huge philosophical concepts. still being thrashed out today, but in his careful marking of one massacre, removal, and redefinition after another, he supplies the raw material for reflection.

A Blackfeet history through this period is a free download on www.lulu.com/prairiemary (Blackfeet Paper Trails: Essays, Bibs and Time-Lines.) The Blackfeet experience is quite typical of the plunging population elsewhere, but it is one of the most recent on the continental United States. When I taught in the Sixties, there were still survivors of the 1870 Baker Massacre. After the Department of War realized Indians were too difficult and expensive to exterminate, it turned to the extermination of the buffalo. In what is called the Starvation Winter of 1884, six hundred tribal members died, reducing the tribe by half, half again being children. Slowly, slowly, matters turned around. The most poignant line in all the agent’s records is the notation that “this is the first year that births have out-numbered deaths.” The equivalent in the boarding school report is “only one child died this year.”

Birth and death as markers are far from simple facts. Even so immaterial a force as culture loss can affect both. The ceremonies, the language, the storied connections between generations are as important as food and shelter. Despondent mothers do not care for babies, desperate fathers do not want them. For indigenous people the whole level of vitality that sustains generations dropped perilously low. Waves of suicide preceded and followed the responding waves of religious synthesis and attempts to cause restoration, like the Ghost Dance movements. (Suicide remains a problem, especially among young people.)

The small percentage of survivors, maybe five or ten percent of the original population, were yet a saving remnant and have grown into a lively and vital force (therefore rather troublesome to those who are crowded and challenged by their population growth). The five hundred remnant Piegans (the American division of Blackfeet) are now more than eight thousand on the reservation and the same number enrolled but living off the reservation. (Half the identified Indians in the US live off the reservations.) Commercial development is thriving, schools are showing much more success than failure, and a steady creativity expresses itself in efforts to curb alcoholism and diabetes. Most of all, the birthrate goes up, infant survival is up, and the aged live longer. The people are changed by their sojourn through time, but they are still Blackfeet. This process continues for all of us, through America and around the world. Elimination is outwitted by transformation. So far.

Now again our attention is turned to natural resources and climate change. We find evidence of ancient severe and long-lasting drought through the SW, abruptly changing ocean shorelines that have submerged possible evidence of prehistoric villages and travel routes, negative impact of modern diet on even “modern” people (I’m thinking of diabetes and obesity in particular), the continuing worldwide plague of HIV that came from deep African jungle and has punished the Africans most of all, plus the poisoning of people and land by our careless excavations of minerals and abuse of topsoil with chemicals, the huge diasporas of people moving across the planet, the suction of the urban drawing people from the rural -- these are all issues that show up in demographics.

Thornton’s list of references is 34 pages long, a chapter in itself. Since the book was published in 1987, not much that he wrote has been discredited by later thought and research, but there has been an explosion of new insights due to new scientific methods and some legwork tracing territory.

I’ll leave you with two examples from “migration”: a few summers ago the Piegan Institute summer seminar hosted Narcisse Blood, coordinator of Kainah Studies at Red Crow Community College in Standoff, Alberta, who had been identifying the oldest tribal trails entwined with the Old North Trail down the eastside rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains. The team had vehicles and GPS monitors, but spent a lot of time walking while looking for likely historical campsites, a day’s trek apart. The GPS readings were returned to their college where huge map-making machines traced them out on paper.

About the same time, a white scholar (Ted Binnema) took Old Swan’s hand-drawn map of 1801 showing landmarks, and made it a project to identify and photograph each of the landmarks for a computer presentation. (His book is “Common & Contested Ground: a Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains.”) Even so does insight weave in and out of research. Raw numbers and percentages reveal worlds. Demography is a dramatic discipline.