american indian holocaust and survival russell thornton pdf

2 By the same token, most scholars consider Dobyns’s estimates to be excessive.

TABLE 5–1 Twentieth Century Estimates of the Aboriginal Population of North America Most scholars now agree that Mooney’s population estimate significantly underestimated aboriginal population size for the area north of the Rio Grande and, thus, the baseline from which the area’s aboriginal popu. In 1983, Dobyns used depopulation ratios from epidemics along with possible carrying capacities to assert some 18 million native Americans for North America-i.e., northern Mexico as well as the present-day United States, Canada, and Greenland (Dobyns, 1983). In 1966, however, Henry Dobyns used depopulation ratios to assert an aboriginal population size, for this area, of between 9 and 12 million people (Dobyns, 1966). Subsequent scholars generally accepted Mooney’s estimate, although one-Alfred L.Kroeber-suggested the number was excessive and lowered it. Early in the twentieth century, for the region north of the Rio Grande, James Mooney estimated individual indigenous tribal population sizes at first European contact, summed them by regions, then totaled them, arriving at an estimate of 1,152,950 aboriginal people in that region of what would become North America (Mooney, 1910, 1928). Scholars debate the size of the aboriginal population north of present-day Mexico, and the magnitude of population decline beginning sometime after A.D.

In this book Thornton discusses in detail how many Indians there were, where they had come from, and how modern scholarship in many disciplines may enable us to make more accurate estimates of aboriginal populations.Trends Among American Indians in the United States 1 Until recently most scholars seemed reluctant to speculate about North American Indian populations in 1492. Russell Thornton describes how the holocaust had as its causes disease, warfare and genocide, removal and relocation, and destruction of aboriginal ways of life. The fires of the holocaust that consumed American Indians blazed in the fevers of newly encountered diseases, the flash of settlers’ and soldiers’ guns, the ravages of 'firewater,' and the scorched-earth policies of the white invaders. They wish to forget that, as Euro-Americans invaded North America and prospered in the 'New World,' the numbers of native peoples declined sharply entire tribes, often in the space of a few years, were 'wiped from the face of the earth.' This demographic overview of North American Indian history describes in detail the holocaust that, even today, white Americans tend to dismiss as an unfortunate concomitant of Manifest Destiny.

American indian holocaust and survival russell thornton pdf