One of the most potent myths of mainstream U.S. historiography concerns what Indigenous archaeologist Michael V. Wilcox calls “terminal narratives”: an obsession with the death, disappearance, and absence of Indigenous people rather than their continued, visible presence and challenge to colonialism. The most obvious example of this tendency are historical models that assign blame for the mass killing of the Indigenous to invisible, chance forces—above all, the diseases colonizers unwittingly carried with them—rather than to calculated warfare and theft over centuries of relentless European invasion.
Debates about the epidemiological vulnerability of Indigenous people first came to prominence in the 1970s as historians backed away from narratives of European cultural superiority in search of more scientific explanations. This biological turn identified microbes as a primary culprit in the mass death of the Indigenous, suggesting that the depopulation of the Americas was an inevitable result of Native communities’ contact with diseases from the old world. In a 1976 essay, the historian Alfred W. Crosby put forth the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis, which posited that Europeans brought diseases—in particular, smallpox and measles—that wiped out 70 percent or more of Native people in the Western Hemisphere because they lacked immunity. In what was framed as the most extreme demographic disaster in human history, the most affected regions experienced a 90 percent depopulation rate, including deaths related to disease, which is estimated to have reduced the population of the Americas from one hundred million to ten million.
Crosby’s thesis soon gained wide traction in the academy. In his classic 1991 study The Middle Ground, the historian Richard White wrote that Indigenous people, cut off from European pathogens, “had not been selected over time for resistance to such diseases” and were therefore “doomed to die.” Indigenous people had “no opportunity to build up immunological resistance,” Colin Calloway similarly argued in his 1997 book New Worlds for All; they “were doomed to die in one of the greatest biological catastrophes in human history.” That same year, Jared Diamond published his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, in which he endorsed the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis, thereby bringing it into the popular consciousness.
Indigenous scholars have long contested this thesis—though few were paying attention to their rebuttals. Disease as a result of colonial policy and actions “was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. For the Lenape historian Jack D. Forbes, it was not so much the Indigenous who were suffering affliction, but the Europeans who had been infected with what he called wétiko, the Algonquin word for a mind-virus associated with cannibalism. The overriding characteristic of wétiko, as he recounted in his 1979 book Columbus and Other Cannibals, is that “he consumes other human beings” for profit. This concept is nearly synonymous with the European psychosis of domination and plunder.