A recent paper in Science addresses an intriguing question: Did North America have settled agriculture before the arrival of Europeans? Or were the people in what would come to be known as North America still in the hunter-gatherer stage—unlike Mesoamericans, who had advanced civilisations, such as the Mayans, Aztecs, and the Incas?
The answer is that indigenous populations in North America did have significant agriculture, which “disappeared” only after their encounters with the invading Europeans settling on their lands. Researchers have used Lidar tools to map areas of Michigan associated with the Menominee people, showing that settled agriculture existed not only in the lower latitudes—modern Mexico—but even in the much harsher north, near the Great Lakes bordering Canada.
Recent advances in the use of Lidar technologies—particularly drones, low-cost and lightweight Lidar sensors, and ground-penetrating radar—make it easier to survey both surface and subsurface features. Lidar surveys have led to significant advances in our understanding of the past. This article will look at how new historical knowledge about agriculture in North America informs the debate on the mass death of indigenous people in North America in the early period of European settlement. Was it genocide, or were their weak immune systems to blame? American historians today increasingly, though reluctantly, accept that disease, coupled with direct violence—mass killings and uprooting people from their ancestral lands—caused the massive population decline of the indigenous people.
A significant body of opinion—expressed particularly in popular books such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel—ascribes the killing of native peoples primarily to their lack of immunity to diseases brought to by Europeans. This view airbrushes out of history the colonists’ repeated massacres, seizure of native lands and means of sustenance, and continuous displacement of indigenous communities. It depicts the drastic fall in the latter’s population as merely an unfortunate accident of history: “The microbes did it, not us.” As we shall see, this not only contradicts what we know about history, but also about epidemics and immunity: the silent battle between germs and our immune system.
It is here that the actual history of agriculture in the North America becomes significant. The Lidar survey of Michigan brings out the extent of Menominee settlements and their agricultural practices in the Great Lakes area of Michigan. We also know that the Menominee previously occupied a much larger territory, estimated at 10 million acres. Treaties with the US government reduced their land base to only 2.5 percent of their original lands, coinciding with a sharp drop in their population.
Earlier arguments against the existence of settled agriculture on the precolonial North American plains have been the absence of the plough. We now know, as agricultural scientist Jane Mt. Pleasant has written, that the Menominee “practiced permanent, intensive cropping…. Indigenous farmers in North America also grew a highly productive cereal grain, maize, uniquely suited to no-plough conditions.” We also have a record of settled agriculture from 600 to 1600 from sites such as Cahokia and Moundville, both located in the Mississippi River Valley, and from south of the Menominee in the Great Lakes area. This means that agriculture could have been significantly more widespread than previously known. With a much larger extent of farming and higher productivity than hunting-gathering, the precolonial population of North America (modern-day United States and Canada, not counting Mexico, as it was part of Meso-America) would likely have been at least 10 million, if not higher.
What was the extent of the loss of indigenous population in the North? By all estimates, it was between 95 and 98 percent of their precontact population. A recent research paper by four geographers at University College London takes the fall in carbon emissions during the 16th and 17th centuries as a proxy for population. The drop in CO2 levels in this period is shown in ice cores from Antarctica, and therefore methodologically independent of other estimates of carbon emissions based on historical data. The data reveal that the CO2 levels fell by 7 to 10 ppm, most probably due to the forest regrowth in the Americas. “The global carbon budget of the 1500s cannot be balanced until large-scale vegetation regeneration in the Americas is included,” the authors write. “The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution.”
So how much of this loss was caused by outright violence—wars, mass killings, enslavement, and serial displacement—and how much by new diseases for which the indigenous people had no immunity? The germ theory of disease and death has an obvious attraction for those who became the owners of the land after the “removal” of the original settlers. If the indigenous people had no immunity to the European pathogens and germs, then their decimation can be blamed on nature and not the colonizers themselves. That indigenous people were violently uprooted, enslaved, and dispossessed becomes incidental to their decline.
The history of the violence inflicted by European settlers is of course well known, starting with Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish Catholic priest who chronicled Columbus’s brutality against the Arawak people in the Caribbean—in his book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies—and who became an outspoken critic of Spanish colonial violence. His and other contemporary accounts make clear that slavery, inhuman labor conditions, and mass violence led to the sharp decline of the native Arawak/Taino population in the Caribbean.
In North America, as the colonizers moved westward, they took away the lands of the indigenous peoples, whom they confined to “reservations.” Native populations were then forced to move from such reservations to other, less hospitable lands or confined to ever-decreasing areas within them. This process was always accompanied by violence and massacres, of which we have detailed evidence during the “Indian Wars” of the 19th century.
Recent scholarly works—such as David Stannard’s American Holocaust, Suzanne Austin Alchon’s A Pest in the Land, Russell Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival, and Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund’s Beyond Germs—make clear that germs in the so-called Old and New Worlds behaved in the same way as did our immune systems. New diseases emerge, causing epidemics that result in significant mortality, and populations rebound over time. When we encounter a new pathogen—or more accurately, a new variant of an existing pathogen—we become infected in large numbers, some die, and the rest develop immunity. Whether with the Black Death in medieval times or COVID-19 today, the battle between our immune system, particularly our acquired immunity (also known as adaptive immunity), behaves in very similar ways. Historical records in the Americas also bear this out, as we can see from the new accounts by Stannard, Alchon, and others. What has changed is our understanding of how infectious diseases spread— through waterborne or airborne transmission, for example—and the use of medicines and vaccines. The myth that Europeans simply had more developed immune systems has been debunked.
To sum up, I will quote the historian David S. Jones, from his 2003 essay “Virgin Soils Revisited”:
It could well be that the epidemics among American Indians, despite their unusual severity, were caused by the same forces of poverty, social stress, and environmental vulnerability that cause epidemics in all other times and places…. If they attribute depopulation to irresistible genetic and microbial forces, they risk being interpreted as supporting racial theories of historical development. Instead, they must acknowledge the ways in which multiple factors, especially social forces and human agency, shaped the epidemics of encounter and colonization.
So why does the germ theory still hold such sway in popular literature as well as in serious historical accounts? The answer is that it absolves the current beneficiaries of such past genocide, a process which was openly proclaimed from the post-1492 era to relatively recent times, but is now a matter of embarrassment. Statements such as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian“, “Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape,” and “Established in the midst of another and a superior race…they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear” are not remarks made by marginal figures. They come, respectively, from Philip Sheridan, the Commanding General of US Army and a highly decorated hero of the American Civil War, and from two US presidents: George Washington and Andrew Jackson. What was easy to say in a period when racial violence, slavery, and genocide were taken for granted by white colonizers now has to masquerade as science.