While I don't dispute that Indians were treated horribly, and I certainly
don't dispute the death statistics, you must remember that in the late 18th
and early 19th century child and female mortality rates were high for
everyone. The average life span for everyone was under 40 years of age
(however, if you survived through puberty, your life span increased
considerably). Infant death was very common, and it was not at all unusual
for women to lose more than half their children prior to puberty. Also,
having a population with more women than men is a twentieth century phenomena.
For instance, in the 1830s, the only state or territory in the USA with more
women than men (of any race) was Massachusetts. Throughout the 18th and 19th
centuries, child birth was the leading cause of female death. maggie coleman
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
In a message dated 98-01-29 15:39:25 EST, you write:
<< Recently, an analysis has been conducted on data from more than 11,000
Chumash Indians who passed through the missions of Santa Barbara, La
Purisima, and Santa Inies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century. Perhaps the most complete data set and detailed study ever done on
a single mission Indian group's vital statistics, this analysis shows that
36 percent of those Chumash children who were not two years old when they
entered the mission died in less than twelve months. Two-thirds died before
reaching the age of five. Three of four died before attaining puberty. At
the same time, adolescent and young adult female deaths exceeded those of
males by almost two to one, while female fertility rates steadily spiraled
downward. Similar patterns--slightly better in some categories, slightly
worse in others--have been uncovered in another study of 14,000 mission
Indians in eight different Franciscan missions. [These missions functioned
more as prisons than anything else. Indians were converted at gunpoint.]
"In short, the missions were furnaces of death that sustained their Indian
population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more
natives into their confines to compensate for the huge numbers who were
being killed once they got there. This was a pattern that held throughout
California and on out across the southwest. Thus, for example, one survey
of life and death in an early Arizona mission has turned up statistics
showing that at one time an astonishing 93 percent of the children born
within its walls died before reaching the age of 10--and yet the mission's
total population did not drastically decline.
"There were various ways in which the mission Indians died. The most common
causes were the European-introduced diseases---which spread like wildfire
in such cramped quarters--and malnutrition. The personal living for Indians
in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet per person for
unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex-segregated common
rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet. It was perhaps a bit
more space than was allowed a captive African in the hold of a slave ship
sailing the Middle Passage. Married Indians and their children, on the
other hand, were permitted to sleep together--in what Russian visitor V.M.
Golovnin described in 1818 as 'specially constructed cattle-pens.' He
explained:
I cannot think of a better term for these dwellings that consist of a long
row of structures not more than one *sagene* [seven feet] and 1 1/2-2
*sagenes* wide, without floor or ceiling, each divided into sections by
partititions, also no longer than two *sagenes*, with a correspondingly
small door and a tiny window in each--can one possibly call it anything but
a barnyard for domestic cattle and fowl? Each of these small sections is
occupied by an entire family; cleanliness and tidiness is out of the
question: a thrifty peasant usually has a better-kept cattle-pen.
"Under such conditions Spanish-introduced diseases ran wild: measles,
smallpox, typhoid, and influenza epidemics occurred and re-occurred, while
syphillis and turboculosis became, as Sherburne F. Cook once said,
'totalitarian' diseases: virtually all the Indians were afflicted by them."
Louis Proyect
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