Was Disease the Key Factor of the Depopulation of Native Americans

Paper #1

Taking Sides: Issue 3

Was disease the key factor in the depopulation of Native Americans in the Americas?

This issue of “Taking Sides” discusses the causes of the Indian depopulation that followed the arrival of European explorers and settlers in the Americas during the fifteenth century.

It is said that the number of Native Americans “declined by as much as 95 percent in the first century following Columbus’s arrival.” (Taking Sides, 47) The shock of cultures led to violent encounters between Native Americans and Europeans but there seems to have been a much more silent force responsible for this extinction. “As historian William McNeill has suggested, the main weapon that overwhelmed indigenous peoples in the Americas was the Europeans’ breath!” (Taking Sides, 47)

In this issue, Collin G. Calloway argues the positive; he says that the European brought several diseases in the Americas and that the traditional healing practices Indian doctors possessed were insufficient to protect them from the new diseases that were brought by the settlers in the late-fifteenth century and that decimated the Native Americans.

On the other hand, David S. Jones accepts the impact of European diseases on Native Americans. To him, however, poverty, malnutrition, dislocation and environmental stress amplified the conditions in which infectious diseases could spread in such proportions.

Calloway’s first argument is that North America was not disease-free before the European invasion. However, great epidemic diseases experienced in Europe like smallpox, measles, or influenza were unknown in America. Native Americans faced other, less dangerous problems. “Bio archaeological studies reveal evidence of malnutrition and anemia resulting from dietary stress, high levels of fetal and neonatal death and infant mortality, parasitic intestinal infections, dental problems, respiratory infections, spinabifida, osteomyelitis, non-pulmonary tuberculosis, and syphilis.”...