Not just disease: Ideology of risk and Indigenous population decline in North America

Here we revisit the decline of Indigenous populations of North America by using the concept of perceived risk. We argue that the root cause behind Indigenous depopulation in North America was not the lack of immunological defenses against novel pathogens introduced to the New World from the Old World, a hypothesis known as “Virgin Soil.” Certainly many Indigenous people died of disease, but so did many Euro-American colonizers. The populations of colonizers rebounded, as most populations do, but Indigenous populations could not recover because of colonizer violence and the persistent marginalization perpetrated against them. We show that European settlers promoted and practiced an ideology of domination based on an exaggerated perception of risk against Indigenous communities. On the basis of colonial prejudices, they created a distorted perception of Native Americans that depicted them as dangerous savages, un-Christian, and untrustworthy. Native Americans were seen as capable of damaging the life and property of the colonists and as incapable of being assimilated by them. Colonists assessed the Indigenous groups as an unacceptable and intolerable risk that had to be eliminated, irrespective of the financial cost of waging war on them. This ideology of risk has continued to impact the lives and well-being of Indigenous people for more than five hundred years as demonstrated by the elevated deaths from COVID-19 for Native Americans and other persons of color. Structural inequalities derived from the ideology of risk are behind the deaths of Indigenous people even today.

Risk can be approached as the probability of occurrence of a hazardous event and its consequences (risk = probability of loss/gain * danger * exposure * vulnerability). Specialists in the social sciences know that risk involves a balance between profit and loss, and there is risk associated with every aspect of life (Douglas 1985; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). Indeed, risk-aversion behaviors may bring high opportunity costs, such as the loss of income to individuals or groups, and may be irrational from the point of view of classical economic theory (Blaikie et al. 1994). High risk, high returns is at the core of modern financial and insurance markets, on which the modern economy relies. Nevertheless, the public approaches risk based on the negative consequences and threats to human life, on bodily injury, or on loss of welfare due to external dangers outside their control. Risk assessment by most laypeople tends to be based on perception, and it is easily manipulated by propagation of irrational fear. We argue that the fear of the “other” by American colonists created a colonial ideology that drove and justified policies of exclusion, violence, and marginalization toward Native Americans and other groups who did not comply with the racial and religious ideals of the colonists. As Thomas Jefferson said, “the two principles on which our Conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice and fear” (Conn 2004, 3). Although he referred to the need to create fear among Native Americans, in fact, this reflects an exaggerated perception of risk based on the fear that Europeans felt for Indigenous people.

Beginning with the first European explorers, Indigenous people were seen as exploitable resources like the minerals, animals, and plants Europeans also desired. As part of the process of exploitation, Europeans defined them not only as less than human but as dangerous and requiring control. Soon after Columbus returned with news of a New World, Spanish rulers began to wrestle with the question of whether the newly discovered Indigenous populations could rightfully be enslaved. Enslavement of Indians was banned in the early 1500s by the Spanish Crown, but with exceptions: “cannibals” could be enslaved, natives could be taken in “just wars,” and people who had been slaves in Indigenous societies but were taken by the Spanish could remain slaves with new Spanish masters (Reséndez 2016, 41–42). Almost anyone could be easily slotted into one of these categories. The “othering” of Indigenous people had begun.

Brutal treatment of Indigenous Americans began with the first two large expeditions through North America, led by Spaniards Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. During de Soto's 1538–42 expedition through the American Southeast, his chroniclers reported that his men attacked and killed Indigenous people, pillaged their goods, took many captives to carry the goods they had stolen, and took young women as sexual partners. Coronado's vast expedition from 1540 to 1542 traveled from Mexico City through what is now the southwestern United States and eventually out to the Great Plains. Along this route, his men killed any Indigenous people who resisted demands for food and supplies, took many prisoners, and sexually molested Indigenous women.

Seventy years later, the English arrived and colonized eastern North America. They not only appropriated Native land and resources but also saw Natives as savages, largely beyond the redemption of civilization. For example, Pilgrims settling New England were tasked with converting the local Indians to Christianity, but Pilgrims saw themselves as the elect of God. Regardless of their attempts to conform to Christian teachings, Native Americans could never be full members of colonial communities (Thomas 1975). Throughout the seventeenth century, Pilgrim leaders allowed Natives to be attacked, bullied, and robbed by colonists, and when the Natives objected or fought back, they were brutally put down. As in other parts of North America, Anglo-American settlers defined themselves as the rightful owners of New World lands and enslaved, disinherited, killed, and misused Native peoples.

There is no doubt that diseases introduced from Europe played a role in the collapse of Indigenous population numbers throughout the New World. The Virgin Soil account (Crosby 1976), pushed by scholars for decades, however, puts all the blame on disease and ignores the myriad factors that prevented Indigenous population numbers from recovering after a pandemic struck. Indigenous people have capable and effective immune systems just like any other population (Jones 2015). But they were not fighting only disease. Europeans enslaved, overworked, and starved them. Their land was appropriated, and they were either forced into marginal desert or mountain regions or herded into mission settlements where disease was even more rampant. Perhaps most devastating was the loss of Indigenous medical knowledge and caregivers.

In California, Spanish agricultural and livestock practices quickly degraded the traditional resources that had long sustained Native peoples (Hull 2015). This left Native peoples few options other than to relocate to a mission or labor for a Spaniard on a nearby rancho. The result of these policies was the dispersal and collapse of Native communities, and with them went the social support and caregiving that had long sustained their members. Crowded conditions at missions contributed to the spread of disease, and harsh punishment by missionaries and associated military personnel led to poor health that rendered Natives susceptible to disease and death. Similarly, in Spanish colonial Florida, studies of human remains have shown that Natives forced into missions were overworked and underfed, had parasites, drank contaminated water, and generally suffered from poor health (Larsen 2015). When epidemic disease arrived, they were poorly prepared to fight it. Similar scenarios played out across the continent: As land and resources were appropriated by Europeans, Natives were forced into the bottom social strata of European settlements or retreated into remote and often barren lands where they struggled to survive. Such marginal social positions have ongoing health impacts, and recovering from epidemic disease was extraordinarily difficult for these dispossessed people.

The ideology of an exaggerated perception of risk from the “others” created during the colonial period has endured the passage of time. The country's “founders” continued and formalized its practice under the name of Manifest Destiny, beginning with President Washington's policy of purchasing Indian land by forceful means through the Indian Removal Act of President Jackson and through General Sherman's policy to destroy the buffalo—and the Indigenous way of life in the Great Plains. This policy was also applied to Mexicans from Texas to California after the Mexican–American War, since they were mixed-blood people (mestizo), in which European qualities had been diluted by miscegenation with Indian women. In addition, Mexicans practiced Spanish Catholicism and therefore were perceived as participants in fictitious popish plots against Protestantism.

Africans imported to the Americas beginning in the sixteenth century joined Native Americans and Hispanic Americans as a marginalized underclass. The effects of the recent COVID-19 pandemic on these minority groups mirror the devastation Native groups have suffered since Europeans arrived. During the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have learned that the death rate is higher for Black American (2.8 times), Hispanic (2.8 times), and Native American (2.6 times) groups than it is for white, non-Hispanic people. This is a reflection of an ideology of risk toward others that has maintained historically constructed inequities in which Native American, Hispanic, and Black communities are poor, forced to live in more densely populated neighborhoods and in smaller houses shared with extended families, afforded less access to healthy diets, and forced to perform jobs with greater health risks and with limited or no access to medical insurance. This colonial ideology of risk created a disaster process that has been unfolding for the last five hundred years in the territories that currently form the United States of America.