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‘Stolen Land’ and Fake Numbers: How SJWs Invented a ‘Genocide’ Myth

Posted on | January 5, 2021 | 2 Comments

In 1998, University of Wisconsin historian David Henige published Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate, in which he examined how, during the late 20th century, academics began arguing that the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans was much larger than previously estimated. This origins of this argument can be located rather precisely, with the 1966 publication of an article by Henry F. Dobyns in the journal Current Anthropology. Dobyns cited evidence that the native population had been devastated by pandemic diseases — particularly smallpox but also influenza, diphtheria and other contagions — brought to the Americas by European explorers and colonists. Dobyns then extrapolated from this an astonishing claim:

If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. . . .
What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so. . . .
So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old data used by [early 20th-century ethnographer James] Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs. From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years [i.e., from 1492 to the early 1600s] of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died — the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.

Is this true? Were there more than 100 million people in the Western hemisphere before Columbus arrived? Did 95% of them die of disease?

Let me offer three answers to these questions:

  1. We don’t know;
    but
  2. Probably not;
    and
  3. It doesn’t really matter.

The point made by Henige in Numbers From Nowhere is that the population estimate by Dobyns was an extrapolation lacking solid factual basis, and that this gigantic number launched a debate that quickly became political, rather than scholarly. Those whom Henige called “High Counters” (insisting on a large pre-Columbian population) were engaged in a sort of anti-American propaganda, the effect of which was to accuse European colonists of perpetrating a holocaust of such enormous proportions as to make Auschwitz seem trivial by comparison.

The reason why I say this debate doesn’t really matter is that it has almost nothing to do with the history of the United States. There is a vast difference between what Dobyns originally asserted and what is now claimed by those who denounce Americans as possessors of “stolen land.”

Whatever the entire population of the Western hemisphere may have been in 1492, the bulk of this indigenous population was in Central and South America, not in what is now the United States. However many natives died of contagious disease in the century following Columbus’s expeditions, these diseases were not spread by our British ancestors, who at that time were busy killing each other and various European enemies, including the very same Spaniards who were devastating the Americas.

The point Dobyns made about the effect of pandemic disease is important to understanding why, when the English finally began settling along the east coast of North America in the early 1600s, they encountered a relatively sparse native population that had already been shrunk by pandemics. The entirety of what is today the continental United States, with a population of more than 300 million, was perhaps home to around 1 million natives when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Very few of those natives were living in the vicinity of the first English settlements here; most were living in territory claimed by the Spanish. What is made to disappear in the whole “stolen land” rhetoric of the social-justice crowd is the fact that when the first British settlers arrived at Jamestown and Plymouth, England was engaged in a colonial rivalry against Spain (to say nothing of the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese, all of whom were pursuing their own American colonial empires).

By the time our own ancestors began to establish what became the United States, the Spaniards had been conquering and colonizing the Western hemisphere for more than a century. The oldest permanent settlement in the U.S. is not Jamestown, Virginia, or Plymouth, Massachusetts, but St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565 by the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. St. Augustine was founded by Menéndez, a commander of the Spanish treasure fleet, as an outpost against the French, who had sent an expedition to Florida led by Jean Ribault. Shortly after the founding of St. Augustine, Menéndez’s Spanish troops killed Ribault and about 350 of his men in two separate massacres.

What Menéndez did to Ribault’s Frenchmen was trivial in comparison to the unrelenting violence Spanish conquistadors inflicted on the native peoples of their American empire. Everybody knows about what Cortez did in Mexico and what Pizarro did in Peru, but have you ever studied what Hernando de Soto did in the present-day Southeast U.S.? De Soto brought along on his expedition a number of ferocious “war dogs,” giant mastiffs who were trained to disembowel their human prey. The natives along the path of De Soto’s expedition were certainly intimidated by their first encounters with men who had firearms and horses, but they were absolutely terrified by the Spanish war dogs.

Say what you will about the English settlers of the United States, they were not worse than the Spaniards who conquered Latin America.

Yet somehow, inflammatory rhetoric about “genocide” against natives has become a standard part of the anti-American discourse, accusing us of occupying “stolen land,” an effort to delegitimize our national sovereignty, so that we have no right to enforce our borders. Why isn’t this argument made against the countries conquered by Spain?

The SJWs can’t answer that question, and so they seek to silence their critics with accusations of “racism,” as if the descendants of Pilgrims owe an apology to descendants of Spanish conquistadors.

Anyone who thinks the natives of North America suffered a worse fate than other conquered peoples in other places at other times is simply ignorant of history, including the history of England. The original population of the British isles was first conquered by the Belgae, then by the Romans, who made it part of their empire for about 300 years. In the twilight of Roman power, the province of Britannia was invaded by seafaring Anglo-Saxon marauders, from the vicinity of modern-day Hamburg, Germany. The Anglo-Saxon conquest marked the beginning of the Dark Ages of England, two centuries where the light of civilization in the island was practically extinguished. Scarcely had this Anglo-Saxon realm become somewhat of a Christian civilization than England began to be raided by the heathen Vikings from Scandinavia. Once the Viking era had past, and the descendants of those piratical savages incorporated into the population of Britain, England was conquered by the Normans.

By the time William of Normandy crossed the Channel in 1066, his was the fifth conquest of England in the span of about 1,000 years. Every successive wave of conquest was attended by its share of massacres, atrocities and oppression, but this history of our English ancestors is apparently unknown to young Americans, who are taught to despise themselves as perpetrators of heinous violations of “human rights.”

The SJW belief in “America the Evil” — the idea of the United States as the worst country in world history — is really just a toxic residue of Soviet-era anti-American propaganda. Anyone who wishes to push back against this leftist narrative can begin with Thomas Sowell’s 1998 book Conquests and Cultures: An International History. Let me quote the first paragraph of Sowell’s chapter on Britain:

For about one-fifth of its recorded history, Britain was a conquered country, a province of the Roman Empire — and one of the more backward provinces at that. Men from other provinces ruled over Britain, but Britons did not rule other provinces. One measure of the backwardness of pre-Roman Britain was the ease with which it was conquered by greatly outnumbered Roman soldiers and held in subjugation, despite a massive and desperate uprising in 61 A.D. The Romans were simply far better equipped and far better organized. In many other ways as well, the Romans represented a much more advanced civilization than existed in Britain at that point in history. Indeed, after the Romans withdrew from Britain four centuries later, the Britons began to retrogress, and in many respects it was centuries after that before Britain regained the economic, social, or cultural levels it had reached as a province of the Roman Empire.

How many natives of Britain died as a result of the Roman conquest? The answer: We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, because nobody is trying to make this a theme of political propaganda. The SJW myth of America as a uniquely evil nation founded on genocide and oppression requires us to ignore the history of the rest of the world, including the history of countries from which illegal aliens are now arriving here.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Category: History, Immigration, Racism

Comments

2 Responses to “‘Stolen Land’ and Fake Numbers: How SJWs Invented a ‘Genocide’ Myth”

  1. Animal’s Hump Day News | Animal Magnetism
    January 6th, 2021 @ 8:52 am

    […] Robert Stacy McCain weighs in on the “Stolen Land” argument. […]

  2. News of the Week (January 10th, 2021) | The Political Hat
    January 10th, 2021 @ 10:51 pm

    […] “Stolen Land” and Fake Numbers: How SJWs Invented a “Genocide” Myth In 1998, University of Wisconsin historian David Henige published Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate, in which he examined how, during the late 20th century, academics began arguing that the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans was much larger than previously estimated. This origins of this argument can be located rather precisely, with the 1966 publication of an article by Henry F. Dobyns in the journal Current Anthropology. Dobyns cited evidence that the native population had been devastated by pandemic diseases — particularly smallpox but also influenza, diphtheria and other contagions — brought to the Americas by European explorers and colonists. […]