Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present

by David Michael Smith

During the past century, researchers have learned a great deal about the nature and scope of what Russell Thornton has called the demographic collapse of the Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere after 1492. As David Stannard has explained, the almost inconceivable number of deaths caused by the invasion and conquest of these lands by Europeans and their descendants constitute “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed.” Scholars have long had reliable information on the size of the Indigenous population in this hemisphere and this country at its nadir around the turn of the twentieth century. And in recent decades, investigators have developed a range of estimates of the Native population in the Western Hemisphere before 1492. Researchers have also amassed considerable knowledge about the role of diseases, wars, genocidal violence, enslavement, forced relocations, the destruction of food sources, the devastation of ways of life, declining birth rates, and other factors in the Indigenous Holocaust. This paper draws on the work of Russell Thornton, David Stannard, and other scholars in attempting to count the dead—that is, in developing informed and reasonable, if very rough, estimates of the total loss of Indigenous lives caused by colonialism in the Western Hemisphere and in what is today the United States of America. Although this analysis is inevitably grim and saddening, there is much to be gained by understanding the most sustained loss of life in human history—both for people living today and for future generations.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the total number of Native inhabitants living in the entire Western Hemisphere had declined to 4-4.5 million. In 1800, only about 600,000 Indigenous people remained in the coterminous United States. By 1900, the Indigenous population in this country reached its lowest point of about 237,000 people. The size of the Indigenous population in the hemisphere and this country then began to grow again and has increased appreciably during the past century. Today about 70 million Indigenous people live in the Western Hemisphere. There are now approximately 7.25 million American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians in the U.S.8 In view of the historically unprecedented and unspeakably tragic depopulation that unfolded after 1492, the survival of Indigenous people is truly extraordinary. However, even today the legacy of invasion, conquest, and colonialism continues to exact a terrible human toll.

17 pages, Unknown Binding