200 Million American Indians killed ?

Ward Churchill, who is part-Indian, at the Universit of Colorado at Boulder has written about this and has been punished by those in power by being targetted politically by the right wing Campus Watch. Each year when he protested Columbus Day celebration (many parts of U.S. still have this holiday, it would be having Hitler day for those killed by the Nazis (all not just Jews)he has been getting the heat for it and now they tried to get him after he wrote about U.S. crimes coming home in the form of 9/11 so they managed to focus on this as they can provoke people around it and started a witch hunt around his scholarship as they could not fire him for his views. He had to leave his position as the head of the department.

The US/Canada land mass was sparsely populated when settlers arrived. Population stimates rarely go over 10 million. Just google it.

As for the number of indians killed in Latin America by the Spanish, that is probably alot higher since the tropical regions were much more densely populated. It's doubtful 200million is real since, to add perspective, the total Mexican population just reached 100 million in the last couple of decades.

The actual figure is 100 million in verified terms give or take 10 million.
That said it could have been more.

They were about 30 million people, all of them subdued by only 60 spaniards.

Every man has two nations, one of them is France. (B. Franklin)

The "200 Million Killed" statistic is just plain false. The biggest estimates for the entire population of the Americas (North and South) in 1492 are about 80-100 million. After the coming of the Europeans, that number dropped catastrophically--virtually all because of disease. In fact, those numbers are gained through estimating backwards from the probable rates of death that various waves of disease caused, and could be totally off.

American Indians come from a remarkably small gene pool (probably because they all came originally from one or two people groups in Asia) and they share a particular genetic weakness toward several European diseases, especially smallpox. So when Europeans came for the first time and unintentionally brought their diseases with them, the Indians were not only lacking in immunity for a completely new disease, they were also genetically super-susceptible to the disease, meaning they died off at insanely high rates. Smallpox (and other diseases) swept through all the Americas over the 1500s, killing off Indians at rates approaching 90%. When the Black Death pandemic crossed from China to Europe it only killed off 30-50% of the people in any given area (though it approached 90% in a few communities). The pandemic which hit the Americas over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries ought to be regarded as one of--if not the--greatest disasters in human history.

In Central Mexico, when the Spanish arrived about 1518, there were an estimated 25 million Indians living there. By 1623, after a succession of smallpox, measles, something called cocoliziti, and a group of diseases the Spanish just called "plague," there were only about 700,000 left. That's a 97% drop in a century. And that's something the Spanish shouldn't be held accountable for as genocide. True, they came in and conquered, and then put people to work as slaves, but that's been done over and over throughout history and the Mexica had done that to their neighbors a century before the Spanish came. The way the Indians died off took the Spanish completely by surprise, and was not what they wanted. They wanted slaves and an empire, not for everyone to just die. The truth is, though, they could never have conquered Central America--or the Incas, for that matter--if it hadn't been for the diseases. They were quite canny in making alliances with tribes unhappy with the status quo (they never won any battles with just 60 guys on horseback, as some people seem to think), but they still were heavily outnumbered. When they besieged Tenochtitlan, the smallpox hit the city at the same time, and they never could have taken it except for the fact that half the city was sick and/or dying.

As for North America, estimates are much less accurate. It seems obvious, however, that the population as settlers moved in had just suffered massive losses. The Pilgrims, for instance, found themselves living in and by numerous abandoned villages which lost their entire populations to disease. It is theorized that the reason bison and carrier pigeons were so incredibly numerous was because the Indian population which had kept them under control had just been decimated. So as the settlers moved West, they really did find the lands sparsely populated ready to be claimed. And the plagues kept coming back and hitting again every several years, just like the Black Death. Indians kept dying off from the disease--but unlike after the Black Death, they never got a chance to grow strong again because the Europeans kept moving in and pushing them off their land.

None of this is to whitewash the treatment of the Indians by Europeans. There were plenty of wars, atrocities, land-grabbing, promise-breaking, and official government initiatives to move them to reservations. But the accusation of a genocide of 200 million is just wrongheaded. And so is the accusation that the Europeans deliberately caused the epidemics. There is evidence of two or three times over two centuries where "smallpox blankets" or some other infected objects were given to a village to cause disease. But while this would have debilitated a single village and is no doubt a crime, it is not much different from the catapulting of rotting cows into a castle in Europe (which we never seem to judge), and would have had virtually no impact on the overall Indian population or even on a particular war.

I am not an expert on this, and all of these numbers are estimates. I've just studied the subject some in college and read a couple books on it. Sorry it's so long.

If you look under "American Genocide" in Wikipedia, you will find a well-researched discussion of various views on the fate of American Indians after colonization. Many authors are cited.

One book I read is called "American Holocaust" by David Stannard.

According to the Wikipedia entry, 200 million is a very high estimate. However, I wonder if whoever came up with this number might have been including native people who were killed/died in Central and South America. Stannard's book talks about how colonizers treated indigenous people throughout the Americas. He includes first-hand accounts by Spanish priests, who were part of Columbus' expeditions, of systematic murder and torture.

Another book which documents the ongoing campaign to exterminate native people from Central America is: (Unfinished Conquest of something like that.). It's about Guatemala. In Central and South America, governments have continued to this day to try to kill all the native peoples...I would guess that if you took these numbers into account you might well reach 200 million.

That figure is non-sense but so typical of what a Left-wing Quebecer would say while enjoying putting the blame on the Church rather than germs. Germs also killed a third of Europeans a few decades before, no one blamed the Turks (in Crimea)...



«Most scholars writing at the end of the 19th century estimated the pre-Columbian population at about 10 million; by the end of the 20th century the scholarly consensus had shifted to about 50 million, with some arguing for 100 million or more.»

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas)

So the remark is in-character from a Left-Wing Quebec professor.

Who cares? Whatever it was it was one of the major human on human exterminations in all of history. Why do you think it might matter if that number were bigger or smaller?