Assuming, for whatever reason, European settlers don't move west of the Mississippi. How long would it take for Native American populations rebound?
Native American Population Rebounds?
- Thread starter da Racontor
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This could easily go to PolChat. The indigenous polulation of North America actually is rebounding.
Due to the difficulty of estimates, Pre-Columbian US population estimates range from 2 million to 18 million. The population of Native Americans by 1800 was around 600k. So your time frame for population recovery is somewhere between a while and centuries.
FillyofDelphi
Banned
The question is... complicated. One key factor would be what kind of lifestyle/society/level of technological and economic innovation they end up adopting, since that's going to have a major impact on birth rates, the carrying capacity/productivity of the land, migration out into other areas in search of economic oppritunities, the extent of continued inter-tribal warfare, ect. Without that information we can't make any useful predictions
Yeah it must be with all the uptick in self-reporting like a certain presidential hopeful.
Probably centuries. Europe took a long time to recover from the black death. Some regions of France never recovered their former populations even to this day.
The population of Ireland still hasn't recovered from the Famine of 1845, so the answer is: we can't know at what point the native american population would have recovered or if it even would, it depends on too many variables.
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The native population in the United Stated bottomed out at around 250,000 in 1900 and has quadrupled over the last 120 years. It is expected to be at around 8-10 million by 2050.
But that is in a US population that will be between 350-400 million at that same time, yes a rebound but that will be less that the US Jewish population.
This is aided by the way the US counts racial groups (the "one drop of blood"). My understanding is that there are very few people of full Native ancestry.
FillyofDelphi
Banned
The later point is true. Technically, if you take admixture and distill it out of the population into full Amerindian people via some weird blood magic, their population never dropped far below 2 million. But yah... there's this weird cultural thing here were people place a greater weight on non-Caucasian portions of their ancestory in terms of self-identification. I guess it's the same for most non-local majority groups in various places.
What do we make of the 10's of millions of US Hispanics who are for the most part a mix of Indigenous themselves?
They aren't indigenous to the US though, they are indigenous to other parts of the Americas. From a US perspective they are still immigrants.
can we shy a from the "what makes an ethnic group discussion". The intent of the post was if Europeans did not settle west of the Mississippi River how long would the people that were already there need to rebound in population size.
California which had a large chunk of the Native population west of the Mississippi and had lots of interaction with Spanish missionaries, didn’t seem to suffer significantly from European diseases until the 19th century. The real drop only came when settlers violently pushed them off their land. So in this case, no settlers = no rebound necessary.
It gets tricky because the indigenous groups themselves of course didn't see any of these borders until the Europeans came around and often moved about.
The Aztec are believed to have originated from the southwestern us states before migrating down to Southern Mexico.
There are many native tribes that have memberships on both sides of the borders in Canada and Mexico.
California which had a large chunk of the Native population west of the Mississippi and had lots of interaction with Spanish missionaries, didn’t seem to suffer significantly from European diseases until the 19th century. The real drop only came when settlers violently pushed them off their land. So in this case, no settlers = no rebound necessary.
What a drastic decline. That's astonishing. So they lost 100,000 people, fully two-thirds of their population, between 1845 and 1855. Wow.
So even by 1855 they were essentially relegated to being a curiosity, a novelty, all but vanished from their former range.
A loss of 66% of the current California population would be equivalent to 26.1 million deaths today. That's a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
Thanks for sharing.
Its to do with the 1849 Gold Rush. Some "towns" and villages created by the settlers were offering bounties for native american heads, bounties then reimbursed from the state treasury in many cases. It was a deliberate policy of driving off and, in many instances, outright extermination.