[PEN-L:99] Re: Indigenous peoples and death by "accidental" infection

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

Louis,
     I noted in my original post that there certainly were 
cases of "smallpox blankets" and conscious and often 
successful efforts at extermination.  That is not the same 
thing as saying (as you appeared to do) that (nearly) all 
immigrants to the Western Hemisphere came with such 
intentions or engaged in such actions.  Some did so and 
with horrible results.
      BTW, in another recent post I noted the complete 
wiping out of some tribes.  California was indeed one of 
the places where many tribes were fully exterminated, and, 
as you have noted, by consciously brutal methods.  Reading 
the book _Ishi_ is a sad tale of the last member of one 
such tribe.  Indeed, prior to the arrival of European 
immigrants, California was the third most linguistically 
dense place in the world, after New Guinea and the Nile 
Valley in Sudan.  The majority of those languages are now 
dead as are most of the would-be descendents of those who 
spoke those languages.
Barkley Rosser
On Wed, 09 Sep 1998 17:49:10 -0400 Louis Proyect 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> >      There is no question for me that the net effect of 
> >what has happened to Indians has been genocidal.  But a 
> >significant portion of this was pretty unconscious and 
> >essentially accidental, if "convenient" for the invaders.
> >Barkley Rosser 
> 
> Ward Churchill, "A Little Matter of Genocide," pp. 151-157:
> 
> If there are any lingering doubts as to whether the invaders deliberately
> spread disease among North American Indians, it is time to lay them to rest
> once ad for all. Contrary to the orthodoxy that the Europeans who came to
> the New World were ignorant of how disease spread, it had been a practice
> at least as early as Tamerlane (Timur), circa 1385, to catapult the corpses
> of plague victims and the carcasses of diseased animals into besieged
> cities. While such early experiments in biological warfare were generally
> unsuccessful, they do demonstrate unequivocally that the Old World, or at
> least its military leadership, had learned the mechanics of rudimentary
> epidemiology well before 1492.
> 
> In North America, where wave after wave of epidemics, and several
> pandemics, wracked native populations, often with a timing uncannily
> convenient to those who had set out to conquer or eradicate them, the first
> instance in which there is clear reason to suspect these lessons were being
> applied occurred in 1636. This came with the execution of Captain John
> Oldham, an officer/diplomat for Massachusetts Colony, by the Narragansetts.
> The Indians apparently believed--rightly or wrongly--that Oldham had
> deliberately infected them with smallpox in 1633, probably by dispensing
> contaminated "gifts," unleashing an epidemic which claimed more than 700 of
> their people and numerous of their allies. He was therefore brought before
> the council of Narragansett sachems on Block Island, tried for this and
> possibly other offenses, and paid the price.
> 
> There is considerable duplicity involved in what happened next. While they
> were certainly aware of who had killed Oldham (and why), both Massachusetts
> Governor John Winthrop and William Bradford, his counterpart on the
> Plymouth Plantation, publicly blamed the Pequots for the "murder;" thus
> predicating the almost total annihilation of that people in 1637. Since it
> was actually the more powerful Narragansetts, not the Pequots, who were
> convinced the colonists might be seeking to reduce their numbers through
> intentional contamination, the idea must be considered a contributing
> factor to the outbreak of "King Philip's War" some forty years later. Such
> suspicions are known to have been harbored by several of the lesser
> nations--the Eastern Niantics, for example, and the Nipmucks--who, along
> with the larger Wampanoag confederation under Metacom ("King Philip"),
> aligned with the Narragansetts against the English in the fighting.
> 
> It is not until another ninety years had passed, however, during the last
> of the so-called "French and Indian Wars" before positive proof emerges
> that England was indeed using biological techniques, as such, to eradicate
> native populations. In 1763, having been fought to a humiliating stalemate
> in the Ohio River Valley by a French-aligned indigenous military alliance
> organized by the Ottawa leader Pontiac, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the English
> commander-in-chief, wrote a letter to a subordinate, Colonel Henry Bouquet,
> suggesting that a peace parley be convened and, as was customary at such
> events, gifts distributed.
> 
> To say that it did would be to understate the case. The disease spread like
> wildfire among the Ottawas, Mingos, Miamis, Lenni Lenapes (Delawares), and
> several other peoples. By conservative estimate, the toll was over 100,000
> dead, a matter which effectively broke the back of native resistance in
> what the United States would later call the "Northwest Territory," allowing
> its conquest less than thirty years later. Amherst's maneuver, which
> displays a considerable familiarity with the notion of disease as a weapon,
> has been erroneously described as a "milestone of sorts" in military
> history by Robert O'Connell1 in his book Of Arms and Men. Actually, since
> he specified the group targeted for "extirpation" as being not just
> opposing combatants, but an entire race, the "Ohio Valley incident" is not
> properly understood as an example of biological warfare. Rather, it
> indisputably an instance of genocide pursued through microbes.
> 
> This was by no means a singular incident, although it is the best
> documented. Only slightly more ambiguous was the U.S. Army's dispensing of
> "trade blankets" to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark, on
> the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota, beginning on June 20, 1837.
> Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military
> infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard
> the steamboat St. Peter. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the
> disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to
> scatter seek "sanctuary" in the villages of healthy relatives. By then, the
> disease was already showing up at Fort Union, adjacent to the main Mandan
> village some forty miles further upriver. The trader there, Jacob Halsey,
> who was married to an Indian woman, then attempted to administer a vaccine
> which had been stored by the army rather than used to inoculate the people
> for whom it was supposedly provided.
> 
> The perfectly predictable result of the "Fort Clark episode" was the
> igniting of a pandemic which raged for several years, decimating peoples as
> far as the Blackfeet, Bloods, and Piegans in southern Alberta and
> Saskatchewan to the west as far as the Yuroks and other northern California
> peoples, and Southward to the Kiowas and Comanches on the Staked Plains of
> Texas.
> 
> There is no conclusive figure as to how many Indians died--it depends a bit
> on how many one is willing to concede were there in the first place--but
> estimates run as high as 100,000. However many people perished, their
> "vanishing" made the subsequent U.S. conquest of the entire Plains region,
> begun seriously in the 1850s, far easier than it would otherwise have been.
> 
> By this point, California, along with its residual population of native
> people, had been acquired by the United States from Mexico. There is
> nothing confusing about the meaning of language found in an 1853 San
> Francisco newspaper, explaining how the incoming Angloamericans were
> handling their "Indian Question": "people are.. .ready to knife them, shoot
> them, or inoculate them with smallpox--all of which have been done
> (emphasis added)." Thus, by the mid-nineteenth century, it appears that the
> eradication of Indians through deliberate infection with plague diseases
> had become so commonplace that it was no longer a military specialty.
> Rather, it had been adopted as a method of "pest control" by average
> civilians. All that is missing are the details as to exactly who did it to
> which group of northern California natives, how many times and with what
> overall degree of success. Whatever it was, it fit within a conscious
> strategy of the citizenry, described in the San Francisco Bulletin on July
> 10, 1860, to effect the "ultimate extermination of the race by disease."
> 
> Given these circumstances, as well as those described in this section more
> generally, it is at best an absurdity to contend that attrition through
> disease represents anything approximating a "benign" explanation for the
> complete extinction of numerous North American native peoples--or the
> near-total disappearance of the "race" as a whole--between 1600 and 1900.
> To the contrary, based on the evidence the presumption should be--and
> should have been all along--that the waves of epidemic disease that
> afflicted indigenous populations during these centuries were deliberately
> induced, or at least facilitated, by the European invaders.
> 
> To do otherwise is tantamount to arguing, as some "scholars" do, that
> approximately 50 percent of the Jews who died as a result of "ghettoization
> and general privation" at the hands of the nazis shouldn't be tallied into
> of the Holocaust since, after all, they perished from "natural causes" like
> starvation and disease. Framed more broadly, it would be the same as that
> of the estimated fifty million fatalities usually attributed to the d World
> War, at least two-thirds should not be counted since they died of
> malnutrition, exposure, disease, and war--related traumas rather than from
> killing techniques." If such "standards" seem ridiculous when in these
> contexts--and they should--they should seem no less so when applied to the
> devastation of Native North America.
> 
> 
> Louis Proyect
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
> 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]