II.

Population: Past and Present

A.

Early Population

Scholars vary greatly in their estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived in 1492. Estimates range from 40 million to 90 million for all of the Americas, and from 2 million to 18 million for the aboriginal population north of present-day Mexico. These figures are hypothetical; exact population figures are impossible to ascertain. Furthermore, the date of Columbus’s arrival was not necessarily the peak of the Native American population. Civilizations had risen and fallen before that time—the Hopewell culture, for example, flourished from 200 bc to ad 400 in eastern North America. Some anthropologists believe the peak occurred around ad 1200.

The number of distinct Native American groups or cultures that existed at the time of European contact is more difficult to estimate. Scholars do not estimate the number of tribes that existed at the time because few Native American peoples had the level of political organization associated with true tribes. For many native peoples, especially those who lived in areas with sparse resources, the family was the largest unit, while others were organized into bands. Some tribes did exist, but it is impossible to estimate their number, for smaller groups were constantly merging into new, larger groups, or in some cases, disappearing. Europeans applied the term nation to people with a common language and customs and a name for themselves, and by 1700, they were aware of some 50 or 60 distinct Indian “nations” east of the Mississippi River. The Spaniards found some 50 Indian nations in the West, including the Pueblo, Athapaskan-speaking peoples, Comanche, and Piman- and Yuman-speaking peoples. In the Southeast and East, many Indians tried to meet the European invasion by creating confederacies or by increasing their reliance on existing confederacies of smaller groups.

B.

Decline

European settlement of the Americas drastically reduced the Native American population. The European conquest was primarily a biological one. Explorers and colonists brought a wide range of deadly communicable diseases directly from crowded European cities. These diseases spread quickly among Native Americans, who had no immunity to them. Transmitted through trade goods or a single infected person, measles, smallpox, and other diseases annihilated entire communities even before they had seen a single European. From the 16th century to the early 20th century, 93 epidemics and pandemics (very widespread epidemics) of European diseases decimated the native population. To cite only one example, in the American Southwest, the Pueblo population fell by 90 to 95 percent between 1775 and 1850. In addition to smallpox and measles, explorers and colonists brought a host of other diseases: bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, pleurisy, mumps, diphtheria, pneumonia, whooping cough, malaria, yellow fever, and various sexually transmitted infections.

Despite the undisputed devastation wreaked on Indian populations after European contact, native populations showed enormous regional variability in their response to disease exposure. Some peoples survived and, in some cases, even returned to their pre-contact population level. Others disappeared swiftly and completely. Today, as scholars explore the magnitude of the Native American population decline, they are finding that the issues are much more complex than was previously assumed. Archaeological evidence indicates that illness was increasing in the Native American population in many regions before the arrival of Columbus, probably in response to problems of population density, diet, and sanitation.

Although the introduction of new diseases was the main cause of the rapid decline of indigenous populations, other reasons were genocidal warfare, massive relocations and removals of Native Americans from their homelands, and the destruction of traditional ways of life. With white encroachment on their land, Native Americans no longer had access to their traditional hunting, gathering, and farming areas. Their subsistence patterns broke down, leading to malnutrition and greater susceptibility to disease. Relocation to new areas, often among hostile Indian tribes that were already living there, meant that people demoralized by their circumstances had to establish new subsistence patterns as well as come to terms with their forced dependency. By 1900, these factors, along with increased mortality and decreased fertility, had reduced the Native American population to its low point of only about 250,000 people in the United States and about 100,000 in Canada.

C.

Recovery

During the 20th century, Native Americans experienced a remarkable population recovery because of decreased mortality rates, including declining disease rates. Intermarriage with nonnative peoples and changing fertility patterns have kept Native American birthrates higher than birthrates for the total North American population. Another factor in the increase is that more people in the United States are identifying themselves as Native American on their census forms. By one estimate, as much as 60 percent of the population increase of American Indians from 1970 to 1980 was due to these changing identifications.

In the United States, 2.48 million people identified themselves as American Indian in the 2000 census, up from 1.8 million in 1990. More than 300 American Indian tribes are recognized by the U.S. federal government. In Canada, there are about 600 bands of Indians. At the 1996 census, about 805,000 people—including Indians, Métis, and Inuit—identified themselves as aboriginals. For more information on current population trends in the United States and Canada, see the Native Americans Today section of this article.

Trudy Griffin-Pierce contributed the Population: Past and Present section of this article.