90% of Native people in the Americas died from disease.

This is a lie used to justify colonialism. Our ancestors didn't die of disease, they died of slavery, removal, war, and famine. I want to make a quick thread about how to argue against this 90% narrative that many believe.

First, as I always say, we have to discuss Native nations and not Natives as racialized others. In D/Lakota history, there was no event of disease that killed 90% of our people. There was one smallpox wave in the 1770s-80s that killed 80% of northern plains Dakota people.

Disease was a constant post-contact, this is very visible if you look at winter counts. But the worst it ever got, by far, was the event above. There was another sickness that struck Dakota people, and this was a sickness that hit while they were held captive at Pike Island.

Thousands of women, children, and old men were held on a small little island, where the disease was allowed to spread. The people were forced close together on an island concentration camp, given minimal food, and there was no treatment. Many died sick in these conditions.

You would see sickness hit other D/Lakota people who were forced onto reservations, where droughts would hit and cause famines. To be tired and hungry, threatened with death if you leave the reservation, is not how someone's body heals them from illness.

There are plenty of nations who were forced to go on thousand mile forced marches of removal. If a sickness caught on in a forced march, where either you could force your body to keep going, or stop and be killed by settlers, your body would have trouble keeping you alive.

In the Caribbean, where the myth of disease killing all Natives is the strongest, "deaths from disease" were really deaths from slavery, aggrivated by the illness. We see the same thing throughout the Americas where the encomienda system worked.

This is all to say, these people didn't die of disease. People would rightfully question ones intentions if they were to say that Jews in Nazi German death camps died of "disease" and not the conditions of the camps which helped spread any illness. The same should happen with us.

Slavery, removal, enforced famine, and war were the real causes of death of so many Native people to colonialism. These conditions do not allow one to attempt to recover from sickness. In the time of Coronavirus, this is important to remember, and should be kept in mind.