american-holocaust

BEFORE COLUMBUSIndeed, Morgan later notes, "the Indians . could have done theEnglish in simply by deserting them." 99 They did not desert them, however,and in that act they sealed their fate. The same was true throughoutthe Americas: the cultural traits and the material achievements of the nativepeople were turned against them once the European invasion began.Indian openness and generosity were met with European stealth and greed.Ritualized Indian warfare, in which few people died in battle, was metwith the European belief in devastating holy war. Vast stores of grain andother food supplies that Indian peoples had lain aside became the fuel thatdrove the Europeans forward. And in that drive they traveled quickly, asthey could not otherwise have done, on native trails and roadways fromthe northeast and northwest coasts to the dizzying heights of the Andes inPeru.Some who have written on these matters-such as one historian whorecently has shown how the Spanish conquest of Mexico was literally fedby the agricultural abundance that the Aztecs had created-have commentedon the irony of native achievement being turned against itsel£. 100Perhaps the greatest and most tragic irony of all, however, was that theextraordinary good health of the native people throughout the Americasprior to the coming of the Europeans would become a key ingredient intheir disastrous undoing. For in their tens of thousands of years of isolationfrom the rest of the earth's human populations, the indigenous peoplesof the Americas were spared from contact with the cataclysms of diseasethat had wreaked such havoc on the Old World, from China to theMiddle East, from the provinces of ancient Rome to the alleyways of medievalParis.This is not to say that there were no diseases in the pre-ColumbianAmericas. There were, and people died from them. But the great plaguesthat arose in the Old World and that brought entire Asian, African, andEuropean societies to their knees-smallpox, measles, bubonic plague,diphtheria, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, and more-neveremerged on their own among the Western Hemisphere's native peoplesand did not spread to them across the oceans' barriers until 1492. Thus,when smallpox was introduced among Cree Indians in Canada as late asthe eighteenth century, one native witnessing the horrifying epidemic thatwas destroying his people exclaimed that "we had no belief that one mancould give it to another, any more than a wounded man could give hiswound to another." 101 Such devastating contagion was simply unknownin the histories of the Cree or other indigenous peoples of the Americas.Debate continues as to the existence or extent of tuberculosis and syphilisamong native peoples in the pre-Columbian era, with most recent researchsuggesting that at least some sort of "tuberculosis-like pathology"was present in some parts of the New World prior to 1492, though of a