File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 90


Date: Tue, 06 Jan 1998 09:30:18 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: How Indians became sick and died


I picked up David E. Stannard's "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the
New World" at lunch from the ever-rewarding Labyrinth Bookstore. He makes
some interesting points about the circumstances in which epidemics caused
the deaths of upwards of 90% of the Indian populations. It must be
understood that certain diseases like TB are intimately connected with the
way people are crowded together in poverty. This certainly was the case for
many of the Indians in North America who were first subjugated, then
confined in prison-like surroundings and then became ill from these living
conditions. Fatal diseases did not seek them out from long-distance like
heat-seeking missiles.

Stannard cites one example:

"Recently, an analysis has been conducted on data from more than 11,000
Chumash Indians who passed through the missions of Santa Barbara, La
Purisima, and Santa Inies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century. Perhaps the most complete data set and detailed study ever done on
a single mission Indian group's vital statistics, this analysis shows that
36 percent of those Chumash children who were not two years old when they
entered the mission died in less than twelve months. Two-thirds died before
reaching the age of five. Three of four died before attaining puberty. At
the same time, adolescent and young adult female deaths exceeded those of
males by almost two to one, while female fertility rates steadily spiraled
downward. Similar patterns--slightly better in some categories, slightly
worse in others--have been uncovered in another study of 14,000 mission
Indians in eight different Franciscan missions. [These missions functioned
more as prisons than anything else. Indians were converted at gunpoint.]

"In short, the missions were furnaces of death that sustained their Indian
population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more
natives into their confines to compensate for the huge numbers who were
being killed once they got there. This was a pattern that held throughout
California and on out across the southwest. Thus, for example, one survey
of life and death in an early Arizona mission has turned up statistics
showing that at one time an astonishing 93 percent of the children born
within its walls died before reaching the age of 10--and yet the mission's
total population did not drastically decline.

"There were various ways in which the mission Indians died. The most common
causes were the European-introduced diseases---which spread like wildfire
in such cramped quarters--and malnutrition. The  personal living for
Indians in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet per person
for unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex-segregated common
rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet. It was perhaps a bit
more space than was allowed a captive African in the hold of a slave ship
sailing the Middle Passage. Married Indians and their children, on the
other hand, were permitted to sleep together--in what Russian visitor V.M.
Golovnin described in 1818 as 'specially constructed cattle-pens.' He
explained:

<<I cannot think of a better term for these dwellings that consist of a
long row of structures not more than one *sagene* [seven feet] and 1 1/2-2
*sagenes* wide, without floor or ceiling, each divided into sections by
partititions, also no longer than two *sagenes*, with a correspondingly
small door and a tiny window in each--can one possibly call it anything but
a barnyard for domestic cattle and fowl? Each of these small sections is
occupied by an entire family; cleanliness and tidiness is out of the
question: a thrifty peasant usually has a better-kept cattle-pen.>>

"Under such conditions Spanish-introduced diseases ran wild: measles,
smallpox, typhoid, and influenza epidemics occurred and re-occurred, while
syphillis and turboculosis became, as Sherburne F. Cook once said,
'totalitarian' diseases: virtually all the Indians were afflicted by them."

Louis Proyect




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