Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (Amerind Studies in Archaeology) 1st Edition

Pricey but worth it. Along with Paul Kelton's 2 earlier books on the topic Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation's Fight against Smallpox, 1518-1824 (New Directions in Native American Studies series) and Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715 (Indians of the Southeast), this research overturns the "old accepted wisdom" that American Indians were overwhelmingly wiped out by disease on "virgin soil" largely before they ever met white people. While the authors in this collection document real devastating epidemics, they give balance to the story of native depopulation by recognizing the role of outright killing and mass starvation after all those cornfields were burned.
I think the Vine reviewer's slam at David Jones with the "sniffles" remark is unfair and unwarranted. Jones does not at all deny massive depopulation from disease. The topic of his introductory essay is to give the history of the discussion and point out the problems with the key arguments of those who say it was mostly/almost entirely because of disease to which the natives had no immunity. Jones is speaking to the assumptions, basis for (or not as the case may be), and rhetoric of the argumentation. Yes, he is taking a side; all ten scholars in this collection take a side and they ground it in evidence.
The one essay that Vine reviewer singles out for praise (Gutiérrez) is indeed good but is the one essay in the volume that does not address the disease issue, rather it discusses disappearance in terms of how indigenous people were redefined out of existence and the multitude of Spanish castes created by "race mixing." People interested in this topic would appreciate Jack Forbes's full-length works on the subject. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples and Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race, and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Also his book on the Apache, Navaho and Spanish speaks a lot about native slavery and war in the U.S. southwest Apache, Navaho, and Spaniard (Civilization of the American Indian Series ; V. 115)

The general narrative on the horrific decline of Native American populations after European contact has been, for a century at least, that it was almost entirely due to introduced European diseases, striking a "virgin soil" population. I have been increasingly troubled by that view for years. It doesn't fit with what I learn from early sources or eyewitness accounts, which talk a lot about actual direct violence, structural violence, and hard usage including enslavement up until slavery was abolished in the various countries and often after that. This book goes far beyond what I had been thinking. It includes fairly detailed studies by 10 authorities of the general case and of particular cases, mostly in the United States, though one of the best (by Gerardo Gutierrez) concerns Mexico. In some areas, notably the bloody southeastern United States, warfare, massacre, and outright genocide clearly caused much, likely most, of the decline. In others, community disruption, often with enslavement, caused much of it. Conversely, there is much counter-evidence against the giant epidemics that some writers have assumed to occur before outside observers came to record. Some local epidemics did run ahead of the settlers (see Hull in this volume, for example), but there is no evidence for huge, continent-sweeping ones.
There is also the point that the decline has occasionally been exaggerated. Very high figures for Native American precontact populations are questionable but are used by many popular authors. Also, several chapters herein point out that Native Americans survive in dilution, so to speak--vast numbers in the US and especially Mexico have some Native American ancestry. (For starters, all my three sons-in-law are part Indigenous, but none thinks of himself as "Native American.") Whole groups have been emerging from the shadows in recent years; tribes have been reborn, as "mixed-blood" descendants recover their heritage. Still, the decline was real and terrible; if it wasn't 95% (as Henry Dobyns and others famously argued, from full evidence for many, many groups) it was a good 90% or so.
Several authors make the point that the virgin-soil theory was often deployed in the past by racist authors who were stressing Indigenous "inferiority." True point, but rather unfair to recent users of the idea; they may be wrong but they are not in the racist tradition. Virgin soil epidemics do happen, and affect Whites too; think of bubonic plague in Europe in 1346-48. On the other hand, I am aware of quite a few more recent authors who have misused the disease argument in another pernicious way: to get the English, Spanish and Portuguese "off the hook" for the decline of Indigenous populations in their settlements. This book certainly gets them back on the hook. Massacres and local genocides were routine, and it is time we all faced it, especially since they are still going on in remote parts of Latin America.
This book is not perfect. Most authors admit that disease remains a huge part of the story, but some go overboard to minimize it. The beginning essay by David Jones is extreme; a reader might conclude from it that no Native American ever got the sniffles. This is clearly contrary to meticulous analysis, including some by authors herein, also by many others ranging from Sherburne Cook to Robert Boyd. Jones does not seem to understand virgin soil epidemics. If he believes they don't happen at all, he might examine the fate of the American chestnut, the American elm, and the western US white pines. If he thinks they never happen to humans, he might look into the documented history of Polynesia as well as the better-studied parts of North America (such as western Canada) and also the all too well known recent spreads of HIV and new flu strains. (The fact that these did not produce even more horrific mortality is due to modern medicine.) Some authors indulge in the classic technique of demanding thorough, hard evidence for disease mortality but accepting almost any account of other types (notably war deaths--often clearly overstated for effect by the victors). Some might remind themselves that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
In spite of this, the book gets 5 stars, for the better essays, for considerably deflating the "huge virgin soil epidemics" myth, and for making a very necessary case for the huge and depressing role of massacre, war, genocide, and oppression in decimating and often destroying Native American peoples.