I suppose to answer this question its best if we take a look at societies that were not colonized until after the population had begun to recover after going into a period of dramatic decline. So to that end let me redirect our point of inquiry into the Pacific and consider a couple of the island chains there that were exposed to European diseases early on, but not annexed until much later and spared large scale foreign settlement until much much later..

One of the first things to keep in mind is that diseases did not often carry away 95% of the population at once. For example, on an island chain like the Marquesas, demographer Jean-Louis Rallu calculated that a series of epidemics each carried away about 10-15% of the population, and that population decline from disease also engendered low birth rates (both as a result of disease limited fertility- especially STDs, but also the decreasing food production as producers died off). Historian Greg Dening looked at this same time period in Marquesan history and could not help but be struck at the cultural disorder that seemed to follow the dramatic population decline; cultural practitioners, cultural leaders, all died off at alarming rates, sometimes before they could transmit their intimate knowledge of environment, cosmology, and ceremony to the next generation. Or in the words of Dening; “When depopulation set in, they had no institutional means to make a unity out of their dying parts. They never really made a boundary to keep Aoe out." (Aoe=outsider, or in this case the forces from the outside, or European disease). Ultimately there was no large scale settlement scheme in the Marquesas, so the local culture has been free to adapt and change as the population has recovered without being completely replaced by European- or outside settlement.

For further reading;

• Rallu, Jean-Louis. “Population of the French Overseas Territories in the Pacific, Past, Present, Projected.” The Journal of Pacific History 26.2 (1991): 169-186.

• Dening, Greg. Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 1774-1880. Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1988.

Another example could be found just next door to the Marquesas in Tahiti. In this case disease came again from the Europeans, likely from their first contact with Wallace and certainly from the next European visit by Bougainville. We know that these ships brought with them syphilis, but it is also possible they brought tuberculosis and small pox. It appears as though remarkable population decline began in the first twenty years or so of contact, as evidenced by the vastly different population estimates of European navigators (Wallace, Bougainville, and Cook) verses those of the London Missionary Society that came later (200,000 to 16,000). The population took nearly 150 years to recover- perhaps because of the colonial pressures exerted by the French who declared a protectorate over Tahiti in 1843 and then annexed the island in 1880. Without large scale European settlement into the islands, the culture has adopted and changed without being replaced. Tahitian is still a spoken and written language; and thanks in part to the missionaries who codified Tahitian customary law into written documents, the French never succeeded in replacing Tahitian land tenure/ alienating Tahitian land (except in notable places like Pape'ete or Makatea).

For further reading;

• MacArthur, Norma. “And, Behold, the Plague was Begun Among the People.” In The Changing Pacific: Essays in Honour of H.E. Maude, ed. Niel Gunson, 273-284.

• McArthur, Norma. Island Populations of the Pacific. Canberra: Australia National University Press, 1967.

• Roberts, Stephen. Population Problems of the Pacific. New York: AMS Press, 1969.

• Schmitt, Robert. "Urbanization in French Polynesia." Land Economics 38 (1)(1962): 71–75.

At least in these two brief case studies; admittedly not in the Americas; we can see disease came in and dramatically reduced populations over the course of a few generations. However, unlike the Americas, there was never any large scale land alienation or seizure. There was never any great settler community or mass migration of an outside culture. The island cultures certainly did change- cultures are always changing- but they were able to adapt to the world, at least in part on their own terms.

So to answer your question; yes, European colonization, settlement, and land alienation are very important elements in thinking about the 'decline' of Native cultures, civilizations, and ways of life in the Americas.

First, the 95% mortality figure is a generalization for the entire Americas and reflects excess mortality due to a wide variety of factors after contact, not just infectious disease. For example, in the Amazon ~75% of Brazilian groups became extinct due to excessive mortality after contact, and surviving groups lost 80% of their population. Second, your question is complex and difficult to answer, chiefly because the entire colonial cocktail of warfare, displacement, the Indian slave trade and famine worked together to (1) spread disease and (2) weaken host immunity to increase their susceptibility to infectious disease. We often can't just tease out the influence of disease alone. That said, high mortality events are not a death sentence for if the group is given adequate time to recover. When the full force of the colonial cocktail hit in rapid succession, like we see in areas of the Caribbean, the Native American population was unable to rebound. When years, and even decades, passed between waves of infectious disease, or years lapsed between slaving raids and territory encroachment, populations can partially recover. The Amazonian populations I mentioned before experienced a 4% growth rate within the first decade post-contact.

To better highlight how the entire colonial enterprise worked together to decrease Native American population size after contact, as well as those populations evolving to confront expansion, I'll present a case study for the introduction of one disease (smallpox) the U.S. Southeast (text taken from a previous post in another history subreddit). I hope to show how disease alone didn't cause irrecoverable decline, and that Native American populations in the Southeast actively responded to the changing landscape to oppose English and French encroachment.

If a Protohistoric Southeastern Village is Abandoned Do We Automatically Blame Epidemics?

In ~800 AD the Mississippian tradition emerged in the U.S. Southeast. Simple and paramount chiefdoms grew associated with large earthen mounds, supported by maize agriculture, and incorporating a distinct Southeastern Ceremonial Complex material culture. Mississippian culture spread and flourished for several hundred years before the eventual decline of many population centers, including the famous Cahokia complex, after 1400. By the time Columbus bumbled onto a new world many, but by no means all, mound sites had decreased in their power and influence. Various theories have been proposed for the decline of the Mississippian culture, ranging from increased warfare, resource exhaustion, climate change and drought. In the wake of chiefdom decline, a trend toward highly defensible independent towns begins to take shape.

For many early scholars evidence of epidemics in the 16th century includes any abandoned site, any decline in village size, and any population dispersal event. Smallpox must have spread north from Mexico, or west from the Atlantic Coast, and burned like wildfire through the region leaving abandoned villages and mounds of corpses in its wake. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond assumes 95% of the Native American population perished in these protohistoric plagues, and smallpox preceded de Soto’s 1539-1542 entrada. For perhaps the past half century this assumption seemed a stretched, but perhaps valid, interpretation of the data. However, as our knowledge of the period increases we must question this assumption for two reasons; (1) population dispersal is a common method of coping with resource scarcity or warfare throughout North America generally, and specifically in the context of Mississippian population dynamics, decentralization follows previously mentioned regional trends, (2) we lack concrete evidence of smallpox spreading into the interior. Ethnohistorical accounts of disease mortality events begin in the 17th century, but that evidence is absent in the 16th century record.

Finally, implicit in the abandonment=disease portion of the popular narrative of disease mortality is an assumption that major Southeastern chiefdoms, or population centers, could not long co-exist alongside European settlements due to disease transfer. The permanence of several chiefdoms, including the Natchez chiefdom which persisted until chronic warfare with the French caused their dispersal in 1730, reveals co-existence of larger population centers was possible even with continual contact with Europeans and their multitude of nasty pathogens. During the later mission period, Amerindian populations in New Mexico and Florida were both subject to periodic waves of infectious disease mortality when a pathogen was introduced to the community, followed by periods of relative calm when population size rebounded. When seen in the greater context of the turmoil and fragmentation surrounding the Mississippian decline, we must entertain that sites were abandoned in the protohistoric for a variety of reasons, not exclusively disease mortality.

Continued...