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Ethnic cleansing apologism on HN? Really? > By the end of the 20th century most scholars gravitated toward an estimate of around 50 million [prior to colonizat

Ethnic cleansing apologism on HN? Really? > By the end of the 20th century most scholars gravitated toward an estimate of around 50 million [prior to colonization]—with some historians arguing for an estimate of 100 million or more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indige...

kragen 5y ago
To be clear, those 50 million and 100 million numbers are for America as a whole, not North America.
- pphysch 5y ago
  Sure, peoples in South America also suffered some ethnic cleansing but not as bad as North America. At any rate it's millions of people and entire cultures exterminated. Less than 1% of US population is classified as (pure) Native American, whereas it used to be 100%. A staggering example of ethnic cleansing/replacement.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Yes, although most of South America suffered in different ways that are arguably worse. The Mohawk and the Navajo retained their language and their culture; the Caribs and the Quilmes are so thoroughly effaced that we know nothing of their religion and their folklore. Nothing as culturally catastrophic as the burning of the Maya codices befell the Haudenosaunee. Although the situation for Native Americans in the US is extremely bad and has been much worse, I think your 1%/100% contrast overstates the case a little bit. The current (not pure) Native American population in the US is 2.9%, or 9.7 million people. This may be higher than the pre-Columbian population of Native Americans, and if it's lower, it's probably not by more than a factor of three, and I really don't want to endorse ideologies proclaiming the virtues of racial purity, since I am a liberal. The great problem is, in my outsider view, not population loss, and even less is it "race mixing", but the parlous circumstances to which modern Native Americans have been reduced --- circumstances largely established by openly white supremacist government policies.

kragen 5y ago

To be clear, those 50 million and 100 million numbers are for America as a whole, not North America.

pphysch 5y ago
Sure, peoples in South America also suffered some ethnic cleansing but not as bad as North America. At any rate it's millions of people and entire cultures exterminated. Less than 1% of US population is classified as (pure) Native American, whereas it used to be 100%. A staggering example of ethnic cleansing/replacement.
- kragen 5y ago
  Yes, although most of South America suffered in different ways that are arguably worse. The Mohawk and the Navajo retained their language and their culture; the Caribs and the Quilmes are so thoroughly effaced that we know nothing of their religion and their folklore. Nothing as culturally catastrophic as the burning of the Maya codices befell the Haudenosaunee. Although the situation for Native Americans in the US is extremely bad and has been much worse, I think your 1%/100% contrast overstates the case a little bit. The current (not pure) Native American population in the US is 2.9%, or 9.7 million people. This may be higher than the pre-Columbian population of Native Americans, and if it's lower, it's probably not by more than a factor of three, and I really don't want to endorse ideologies proclaiming the virtues of racial purity, since I am a liberal. The great problem is, in my outsider view, not population loss, and even less is it "race mixing", but the parlous circumstances to which modern Native Americans have been reduced --- circumstances largely established by openly white supremacist government policies.