All people deserve to have their agency recognized

I just posted The Persistence and propagation of academic myths discussing the absence of evidence to support the academic myth that American colonists deliberately practiced biological warfare against Native Americans long before there was any epistemic awareness of Germ Theory.

Beyond the persistence in academia of a myth known to be untrue, there is something else interesting going on.

Of course exposure to novel diseases was a devastating cause of demographic collapse among Native Americans between 1492 and 1850.  It has been estimated that 90-95% of the population collapse was due to disease rather than battles or more traditional confrontations.  Similarly, but to a far smaller degree, a number of New World diseases were also introduced into Europe.

There is a hierarchy of disease and parasitic loads.  Africa, as the origin of all people, has the deepest and most diverse range of viruses, diseases and parasitic loads.  Africa is followed by Asia, particularly the major riverine civilizations of China and India where you have the combination of human density and climate conditions favorable for diseases.  Then there is Australasia.  Finally there is the New World, only inhabited some 12,000 years ago and isolated from all the other centers of disease evolution since then.  

From 1492 onwards there was a huge disease and ecological exchange between the New World and the Old and the inhabitants of the New World were tragically vulnerable.

But the telling of this tragedy has been hijacked and made obscure by philosophies and ideologies.

In Europe, at least from the late seventeenth century, there was the literary trope of the Noble Savage.  This found ready application into the New World.  In modern times there has been an effort to strip Native Americans of any sort of agency by representing them as pure victims of rapacious Europeans, victimized by superior technology, germ warfare, superior numbers and cold, calculating racist indifference.

But that is not what happened at all.  The subsequent outcome has been made to seem inevitable and it was not.  Probable, perhaps.  But not inevitable.

The fact that it played out in the fashion it did was to a large degree due technology and population growth in Europe combined with biological isolation in the Americas.  But the Native Americans (or Aboriginal Americans to explicitly include those beyond the borders of the USA) were not noble savages in gentle harmony with the land and living in peaceful Edenic conditions.  They were as human and filled with human agency as any human population.

This is readily apparent when you look at the first five hundred years of European efforts to settle in the Americas.  The best documented early European contact we have was the attempted settlement of L'Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland occurring circa 1000 AD by Viking Greenlanders.  

There was perhaps a dozen years of efforts to settle in the Newfoundland area.  These failed and the settlers died or returned to Greenland.  However, there is evidence to support continued trading contact between the Greenlanders and the Aboriginal Americans for more than a couple of centuries.  Such trading contact may have continued until the decline of the Greenland settlements themselves owing to the little ice age circa 1300-1850.

The Greenlanders had writing, they had iron, they navigation, they had sophisticated shipwright skills, they had already adapted to a similarly hard climate (in Greenland).  Why did they not settle Newfoundland and spread from there five centuries before Columbus?

My argument is that they had many of the advantages accorded to later settlers and that those advantages were insufficient.  Iron was insufficient, knowledge was insufficient, sophisticated wood working was insufficient.

The Greenlanders were at the very tail end of an exceedingly long demographic and trade supply chain.  They could not put enough people on the ground and produce cheaply enough from extraction or trade to sustain the settlements.  In addition, the Aboriginal Americans were not passive Noble Savages.  They had agency and resisted the encroachments sufficiently effectively and with enough drawn blood that the Europeans left.

This happened again with Roanoke Colony founded in 1585.  The Europeans had the technological wherewithal to plant 120 settlers on shores 3,000 miles distant from Britain.  But they did not have the means to sustain them through the first few years of settlement, ultimately leading to the deaths or integration of all the colonists into the local tribes.

The same thing nearly happened at Jamestown in 1607.  After the starving time of 1609-10 when the population dropped from 214 to 60, the colony was in the process of being abandoned when a relief fleet crossed their path in the Chesapeake and all returned to the settlement.

In 1622, 347 settlers, nearly a quarter of the total, were killed by Native Americans in the Jamestown Massacre.  

Native American agency is far better documented in this period.  The Powhatan Confederacy was a loose alignment of tribes on the Virginia coast under a paramount leader.  For nearly fifty years (1607-1650), it was unclear which group, English settlers or Native Americans would prevail.  

Despite their clear technological superiority, the Europeans were not as adaptive in their customs and folkways to accommodate a tropical riverine environment.  Even their institutional structures (capital markets in London, powerful central government, etc.) did not provide superior advantage.

Economic adaptiveness helped save them but most likely it was the coercive nature of the Powhatan Confederacy which played the biggest role in the eventual success and durability of the Jamestown settlement.  The individual tribes and leaders within the Confederacy were constrained by the paramount chief.  This provided the means for the colonists to play Native American tribes off against one another.  Without this advantage, I suspect Jamestown would have collapsed.

The final example is that of Hernán Cortés and his conquest of Mexico in 1519-1521.  Despite technological superiority (iron, steel, guns, cannon) as well as institutional structures (a trained army of 500 with 13 horses and war dogs), he faced a sophisticated and formidably hostile Aztec Empire with tens of thousands of soldiers.

Cortes only succeeded due to the rapid spread of European diseases into the native population and the political fragility of the Aztec Empire which had been assembled through conquest.  Cortes, for many Aboriginal Americans, was a liberator.  

My point is that for the first six hundred years of contact between native North Americans and Europeans, the native North Americans came out on top because the Europeans, though technologically superior, were at the far edge of a viable supply chain and their technology advantage was insufficient to outweigh the demographic advantage of the local inhabitants.

But Aboriginal Americans were no mere noble savages or innocent victims.  They were humans at a tragic historical pivot point when changes in shipbuilding connected the whole world and all human populations for the first time since we left Africa 100,000 years ago.  They had agency and demonstrated bravery and resourcefulness in attempting to sustain their mode of life.  

But the biological vulnerability, combined with the precariousness of the empires assembled by conquest, together tipped the balance towards the intruding Europeans.  The focus of some of our historians on the pure tragedy of the intersection between the Old World and New World populations has led them to retell history as sympathetically as possible to those defeated by the collision of populations.

But it strips those people of their agency and history to make them mere victims.  It also leads to bad history writing, trying to pigeon hole some as evil conquerors and others as passive helpless victims.  That's not history.  That's ideology.