Honouring our Canadian heroes - National Post

As I said that was just in the east. The Americans moved across doing that same thing to the rest of them.

 

Where did you get that figure? I'd like to see proof that in 1811 there were 30 million Native Americans in North America.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Native_California_population_graph.jpg

 

Now how about some accurate figures, with references?

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Hands-Great-Spirit-000-Year-American/dp/0684855763"]Amazon.com: In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians (9780684855769): Jake Page: Books[/ame]

That is an amazing book, and one of the finest written in the last decade.

According to sources quoted in that book, the total Indian Population in 1492 ammounts to...

18 million.

That's it. And that shrank even more during the period up until the early 18th century. Most place the total population in 1700 at around 15 million. Not because of slaughters and war, but primarily because of disease.

So put down the make-it-up figures, and actually find accurate and reliable references. You might actually learn a thing or two.

 

That also takes an unusually high mortality rate, higher then just about anywhere else in the Americas.

And do you know whay happened to the California Indians?

Primarily, it was disease.

And do you know who was in control of California during the period of the greatest deaths? I will give you a hint, it is NOT the United States.

Until 1821, it was Spain. Then until 1848 it was Mexico. By that time the region had already lost over half of their populations. And because of tribal warfare, tribes that were on the brink of extinction refused to congregate into larger groups, so entire tribes simply vanished forever. This was because disease and famine (caused by the Spanish Mission System) already pushed them to the point that their population was no longer high enough to form a viable group.

That is why you saw the final drop a decade later. During that era entire tribes simply vanished. Although it has also been sugested that many of them may have been accepted into other tribes, or migrated to other areas. They left behind no records, so it will never be known.

Those population figures are not typical of US Indian populations however. The California tribes were the most stationary and zenophobic of all Indian groups, and were hardest hit by the European diseases.

 

People also tends to forget that the native weren't exactly living in peace even before we got there. The tribes in what was known as lower Canada were already in a war of extermination between them when the first French boat arrived.

This helped the colonisation take root since we could always side with whichever gave us the most.