90% of them had died prior to the arrival of the colonists?

Man. I just vividly remembered an argument I had with one of my elementary school teachers. We had to memorize the state bird, flower, animal, etc. She told us it was illegal to pick Bluebonnets and I thought that was silly. That didn't go over well.

Estimates seem to range from 90 to 95%.

http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/va.../smallpox.html

It's sad that I didn't find out about my small amount of Native American heritage until I was a teenager. My grandmother mentioned it to me only once. When she left the room after explaining it (a lot of the "Indian Princess" stuff) my grandfather leaned over to me and mumbled, "Just another ****er."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement for multiculturalism, is it?

True. When I was in school (PNW in the 70's), we were taught that Indians were nobel savages that revered and lived as one with nature. Then the greedy evil white man came in with their guns and smallpox and wiped most of them out. Turns out that it was a lot more complex than that.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann is a good book on the subject.

LMAO

a "what"er?

That particular slur is rightfully filtered. Use your imagination. Lucky for me that my uncle happens to be an archeologist so I was able to find out more.

I think I mentioned this in a thread a while back, but the thing I don't get is why this was a one-way deal. Europeans show up and cough, and 90 million Native Americans start dying. But why didn't the Native Americans cough and kill all of the arriving Europeans?

And presumably no diseases went back to Europe with Columbus and John Smith and Verrazano and all those guys. Why not? Why didn't Europe take the same disease beatdown that the Native Americans took? Was it just sheer luck? Did the Viking expeditions somehow inoculate Europeans? And why didn't the Vikings start the North American plague? Or is it possible that something like the Black Plague was carried from America with the Vikings and nailed the white folk 200 years earlier?

The Europeans lived in cramped conditions with a long history of animal husbandry. They had already been through multiple plagues and represented, genetically, the survivors of those plagues.

Off the top of my head, the reason the NA's were so susceptible is because they were such a homogeneous group that they genetically weren't prepared to deal with the infections. Things that would just get a European under the weather could be devastating to NA's. More diverse groups like the Europeans were actually more susceptible to parasites.

Sorry for the shoddy explanation. It was in the book that I mentioned above but it's been awhile since I've read that part and I don't remember the exact reasoning.

Ah, nice answers. Thanks.

So essentially the Native Americans died because they had healthy country lifestyles in fresh air and they didn't score with Asian and African chicks.

Imagine what this country would be like had there been an unbroken line of Native American population into the modern world.

I've heard that as well.
It's the same problem that a lot of our endangered animal species face (cheetahs specifically).
New genes in the pool is never a bad thing.

I'm envisioning more of a Palestine/Israel situation.

One thing that the ancient civilizations were good at was wiping out the indigenous people when they took over a place. It made continued resistance a non-issue. It apparently happened more accidentally in the New World, but it still happened, and the Europeans ended up with an easier conquest as a result.

The Romans appear to be a big exception to that rule, though, which says that you can take over a place and not have to kill everyone who was there before. But I think the Romans brought a lot of benefits with them and gave full citizenship to the conquered people, so maybe that quelled resistance as much as killing would've.

It makes one wonder if we offered American citizenship to Iraq and let them be the 52nd state (after Puerto Rico, apparently), would that place settle down? I'm only half joking on this.