Early American Indians

[Mayonaze]

I'm far from an expert in this area, but I've done some pokin' around and it appears that it aint' just the food - or the government. It's food, metabolism, life style (technology) ...

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7 ... 0.CO%3B2-K

Abstract
The aboriginal diet of the Arctic Eskimo, which consisted mainly of land and sea mammals and fish, is analyzed with respect to its capacity to provide the nutrients now regarded as essential for nutritional health. It is concluded that, despite its remarkably restricted composition, the native diet is capable of furnishing all the essential nutritional elements when prepared and consumed according to traditional customs. However, its low carbohydrate and high protein content necessitated major metabolic adaptations in energy and nitrogen metabolism. Erosion of the traditional diet culture and life style has been accompanied by a decline in nutritional status.

Information about health problems associated with changes in diet and life style among Eskimos:

http://tundramedicinedreams.blogspot.co ... esity.html

University of Michigan proposed to teach a course entitled Nutritional Anthropology
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0543-2 ... size=LARGE

[Beagle]

Thanks Mayo, those links really tell the story.

[stan]

It's not wise to generalize too much about "Indians."
It has already been pointed out that there were a lot of different
lifeways and food cultures all over the Americas, even in what is now the US.
Another thing to remember, though, is that most Native Americans do not live on reservations. As such they have access to typical American supermarkets and restaurants.
The reservations are a different story. Aside from the recent development of gambling casinos, the reservations have been on the most isolated and poorest land in the US (the lower 48 states), often far from the homelands of the tribes. (And the people have been the poorest in the US.)
Tribes from all over were settled in Oklahoma, formerly known as
"Indian Territory." The most famous example is the Cherokee, the majority of whom were forcibly moved from the eastern woodlands of the Appalachian area.
But in both groups, there is poverty. And in this country, it is the poorer people who are the most obese.

[Minimalist]

Don't forget the high rates of alcoholism and suicide.

[ravenwing5910]

“People who are culturally dispossessed are denied the right to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” (Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard, 2003).

Hasn't this been an effective method of oppression for invading armies throughout histroy, includint the invasion of the Americas?

[Minimalist]

That's a good question, R/W and I suppose the answer depends on where and when you're looking.

Certainly in the New World the conquest was helped by diseases which devastated the indigenous population but this can hardly be said to have been a tactic. The Europeans still thought disease was punishment from God at the time so they can perhaps be forgiven the assumption that they made that "God" favored their efforts by laying their enemies low....much as the bible claims happened to the Assyrians under Sennacherib.

[ravenwing5910]

Certainly in the New World the conquest was helped by diseases which devastated the indigenous population but this can hardly be said to have been a tactic..

Ok this leads me to the question of the small pox laden blankets traded to the Native Americans. (I heard recently on a documentary re:bio warfare, that this was done by the British, however at the time "we" were technically "the British"). wouldn't that have been a tactic?

[Minimalist]

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_066.html


Of course, by 1763 most of the damage had been done. And the British still did not know what caused the disease.

[ravenwing5910]

Of course, by 1763 most of the damage had been done. And the British still did not know what caused the disease.

Small pox had been around for quite sometime before 1763, The British couldn't have been that naive, could they? The link is interesting, I will look into the study that it included. Thanks.

[Digit]

That story may be apocryphal RW but it is also current in the UK. Judgement with hindsight though sometimes is unfair.
The do gooders over here are currently working themselves up into lather over the approaching bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the UK, and if they have their way we will all be covered in sack cloth and ashes.
What annoys me is that is no mention that most slaves were collected from the Gambia, where they were held by the local tribal chiefs, having either been enslaved by them or purchased by them from Arab intermediaries.
Nelson wasn't the only person blind in one eye I feel.

[ravenwing5910]

you are right Dig, holding todays generations responsible for yesterdays evil doing is counter productive. However, a knowledge of past err's may perhaps prevent future atrocities. (at least we can hope).

[Digit]

Jenner started vaccinating in the UK in 1796 RW, but the idea had been around for many years before that and was in widespread use in the Ottoman empire before Jenner got in the act. That does not alter the fact that at times in Britain as many as one third of the living population had had smallpox and survived and they knew damn well it was contagious!

[Forum Monk]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population ... us_peoples

Depopulation from disease
The earliest European immigrants offered two principal explanations for the population decline of the American natives. The first was the brutal practices of the Spanish conquistadores, as recorded by the Spanish themselves, most notably by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose writings vividly depict atrocities committed on the natives by the Spanish. The second explanation was a perceived divine approval, in that God had removed the natives as part of His divine plan in order to make way for a new Christian civilization. Many natives of the Americas also understood their troubles in terms of religious or supernatural causes. Scholars now believe that, among the various contributing factors, epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the American natives.[5]

Disease began to kill immense numbers of indigenous Americans soon after Europeans and Africans began to arrive in the New World, bringing with them the infectious diseases of the Old World. One reason this death toll was overlooked (or downplayed) is that disease, according to the widely held theory, raced ahead of European immigration in many areas, thus often killing off a sizable portion of the population before European observations (and thus written records) were made. Many European immigrants who arrived after the epidemics had already killed massive numbers of American natives assumed that the natives had always been few in number. The scope of the epidemics over the years was enormous, killing millions of people—in excess of 90% of the population in the hardest hit areas—and creating "the greatest human catastrophe in history, far exceeding even the disaster of the Black Death of medieval Europe."[6]

The most devastating disease was smallpox, but other deadly diseases included typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, mumps, yellow fever, and whooping cough. The Americas also had endemic diseases, perhaps including a type of syphilis, which soon became rampant in the Old World. (This transfer of disease between the Old and New Worlds was part of the phenomenon known as the "Columbian Exchange.") The diseases brought to the New World proved to be exceptionally deadly.

The epidemics had very different effects in different parts of the Americas. The most vulnerable groups were those with a relatively small population. Many island based groups were utterly annihilated. The Caribs and Arawaks of the Caribbean nearly ceased to exist, as did the Beothuks of Newfoundland. While disease ranged swiftly through the densely populated empires of Mesoamerica, the more scattered populations of North America saw a slower spread.

[Minimalist]

The British had nothing to do with the Spanish in S/A and, it wasn't just smallpox. Indians died in droves from measels, mumps, flu, etc because they had no immunity.

Remember, it was only in the 1790s that Jenner determined that milkmaids who got cowpox did not get smallpox. He did not know why either was caused by he made an enlightened guess that subsequent research and the development of the microscope confirmed.

[Minimalist]

You know what they say about "great minds", Monk.


Obviously works for us as well!