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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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