CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS: THE IMPACT OF COLONIZATION ON NATIVE AMERICANS
The arrival of European settlers had a devastating impact on Native Americans. These hundreds of tribal ecosystems—deeply spiritual, deeply rooted in oral tradition and cultural practices, and deeply tied to specific areas of the land—were decimated by the introduction of foreign germs, foreign ways of life, and by the dominating, foreign forces of Western violence and constant expansion.
Original Population
Some scholars estimate that the original population of Native Americans in North America before Columbus was somewhere around 10 million people, representing 600+ tribal peoples, languages, and ways of life. Between 1492 and the late 1500s when greater and great numbers of settlers began to arrive, recent historians have estimated that there was a catastrophic loss of American Indian life—possibly up to 90% of the Native population simply wiped out by the introduction of measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, and other Western diseases. As one scholar puts it,
The 150 years after Columbus’s arrival brought a toll on human life in this hemisphere comparable to all of the world’s losses in World War II.”
The Destruction Continues
This biological extermination was only the first wave of atrocity, but it set the stage for the type of relationship that Western settlers would have with a once flourishing ancient civilization. The destruction continued as Western expansion pushed the tribes that remained further and further westward.
Over the next 500 years, Native Americans were abused, killed, and relocated from their ancestral lands in a slow genocide for the sake of ambitious settlers who began to make their home in the bountiful land of North America. By the 1830s, the United States government was actively forcing tribes into treaties; under the treaty system, tribes were treated as independent nations with the right to govern themselves in exchange for giving up large sections of their ancestral lands. Tribal nations moved onto small, geographically isolated tracts of land out West—the beginnings of the reservation system that exists to this day. By the 1870s, a federally funded boarding school system, consisting of hundreds of schools, began educating generations of Native children far from their tribes and families.
In many cases, Native children were forcibly removed from their parents in order to attend the boarding schools. At these schools, they were forbidden to express any part of their Native culture, language, or identity. Sexual, physical, and emotional abuse was common, and most schools forced Native children into intense forms of physical labor.
A famous speech delivered by Captain Richard H. Pratt of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1892 captures the general spirit of these boarding school efforts:
That all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
The great cultures of the Native American tribes that once filled the land of North America slowly dwindled. In the dominant Western culture of the United States, it was commonly accepted that Native peoples were a “vanishing race” and that their traditions and bloodlines were unlikely to last through the 20th century.
Nevertheless, they persisted. Under a series of laws passed throughout the 20th century, Native American tribes increasingly gave up sections of tribal land, but retained their self-governance and self-determination. Many tribal communities have attempted to preserve some traditional forms of life and to encourage economic flourishing amid modern Western culture.
Native Americans Today
Today, there are 574 federally recognized tribes existing in the United States, with 229 of these located in Alaska. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 6.9 million American Indian and Alaska Natives living in the United States, and they make up roughly 2% of the total population. In the wake of centuries of abuse and disruption, these resilient peoples are on a journey of rediscovery and healing.
