Native American Diseases

America was not a paradise and saw diseases like in any other continent, tuberculosis, and intestinal worms are just two examples, but there were a handful of other infectious diseases that had not crossed the Pacific prior to 1492. To mention some of them the following apply smallpox, measles, and cholera. The Indian’s immune system was accustomed to local diseases, but the European men brought with them diseases of the Old World, which the aboriginals were not physically prepared to handle. The American geographer Carl Sauer remarks in the following quote his understanding on the matter of depopulation: “…societal disruption with resulting social and psychological malaise.”
He claimed that Natives failed to reproduce after all these new
infectious diseases were introduced into their world, they also suffered a great death rate due to the overload of work, and with the introduction of new plants and animals like the horses; their agricultural patterns and practices were brutally interrupted causing starvation.
On the other hand, Miscegenation allowed the genes to be passed from generation to generation, therefore, the Native population grew more resistant to these infectious diseases, as the white men mated with the Indian women.
The introduction of new equipment and armaments like guns, were the main instrument for the hunting of animals, particularly deer and beaver. Animals that had lived in harmony with the Indians before the colonists were now being hunted by the Indians to the point of extinction. Before the white men arrived there existed conflicts between tribes, but as it was described by many European visitors it was more “ceremonial than lethal, more a matter of violent theater than true combat.” (The Birth of America 191) But the white men changed everything, including the scale and intensity of true combat. It was the first time since they had migrated that they could actually destroy each other. But guns were not the only reason for the collapse of Indian civilization; drunkenness was just as disastrous. Alcohol and malaria share one common denominator, the fact that Indians are physically and immunologically intolerable to both of them. Perhaps in their
attempt to escape their unfortunate reality, and the devastation of the Indian societies, Indians they took refuge in alcohol. However, it could be argued that alcohol was a fierce weapon used by the colonists to divest the Indians from their lands, as drunken Indians are more tempted to give up everything while a sober one would not do such a thing. But the white men did introduce something that would be beneficial for the Indians; horses. “Spanish explorers introduced horses to the Plains Indians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which allowed the Indians to cover ground more rapidly and made them nomadic, able to follow their main source of food, clothing, and shelter—the buffalo—along its migratory path.” (Confrontations with Native Americans) On the other hand, the Indians became too dependent on trade goods imported by the Europeans. “Fur capes were replaced by imported cloth, stone tools by steel, and clay pots by iron.” (The Birth of America 194) As these new items were introduced, the Indian society began to forget how to make with their own hands; the instruments that had served them for centuries, instruments that were part of their traditional culture. Even Skiagunsta, war chief of the Lower Cherokee claimed:
“The clothes we wear we cannot make ourselves. They are made for us. We use their ammunition with which to kill the deer. We cannot make our guns. Every necessary of life we must have from the white people.”