You are absolutely correct that the combined colonial cocktail worked to decrease host immunity and survival during periodic waves of infection, and then those same factors served to decrease chances of population rebound following those epidemics in the Americas.

Any examination of disease epidemiology after contact must incorporate a larger ecological perspective. Epidemics require the proper conditions for the host, the pathogen, and the environment to spread widely. Too often the narrative of “death by disease alone” in the Americas after contact fails to examine the greater context that facilitated the spread of epidemics. Infectious agents are treated as an inevitable miasma spreading ahead of contact. As the case study on the U.S. Southeast showed, the ecological context underscores how pathogens spread in conjunction with the repercussions of conquest. In the Florida missions, early disease outbreaks failed to travel beyond the immediate mission environs due to contested buffer zones between rival polities. Only after English slaving raids changed the social environment, erased these protective buffer zones, and destabilized the region did the first verifiable smallpox pandemic sweep the greater U.S. Southeast.

When attacks by slavers disrupted normal life, hunting and harvesting outside the village defenses became deadly exercises. Nutritional stress led to famine as food stores were depleted and enemies burned growing crops. Displaced nations attempted to carve new territory inland, escalating violence as the shatterzone of English colonial enterprises spread across the region. The slave trade united the Southeast in a commercial enterprise involving the long-range travel of human hosts, crowded susceptible hosts into dense palisaded villages, and weakened host immunity through the stresses of societal upheaval, famine, and warfare (Kelton). All of these factors were needed to propagate a smallpox epidemic across the Southeast, and all of these factors led to increase mortality once the epidemic arrived.

The popular story of catastrophic disease spread often cites an incredibly high case fatality rate (number of people infected who die of that disease) for introduced pathogens in the Americas. We hear that an infectious organism like smallpox, which historically has an overall fatality rate of 30%, killed 95% of infected Native Americans. Taken without reference to the greater ecological situation, and assuming the validity of colonial mortality rates (a large assumption), the myth arises of an immunologically weaker Indian population unable to respond to novel pathogens.

Examining the greater context reveals how the cocktail of colonial stressors often stacked the deck against host immune defense before epidemics arrived. Plains Winter Counts recount disease mortality consistently increased in the year following nutritional stress (Sundstrom), and this link was understood by European colonists who routinely burned growing crops and food stores when invading Native American lands, trusting disease and depopulation would soon follow (Calloway). Mortality increased in populations under nutritional stress, geographically displaced due to warfare and slaving raids, and adapting to the breakdown of traditional social support systems caused by excess conquest-period mortality. Context highlights why many Native Americans, like modern refugee populations facing similar concurrent physiological stress, had a decreased capacity to respond to infection, and therefore higher mortality to periodic epidemics.

Traditionally, the discussion of epidemic disease after contact contains an element of a post hoc fallacy. Archaeologists uncover evidence of population dispersal in the protohistoric and assume disease led to the abandonment of the site. Historians read de Soto’s retelling of the Plague of Cofitachequi and assumed the population perished from introduced infectious disease. This assumption rests on the flawed notion that the New World was a relatively disease-free paradise, that site abandonment can only be attributed to disease, and the belief that observed epidemics arose solely from introduced pathogens.

A full discussion of the New World disease load before contact is beyond the scope of this post, but populations in the Americas were subject to a wide variety of intestinal parasites, Chagas, pinta, bejel, tick-borne pathogens like Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, syphilis, TB, and zoonotic pathogens. Those infectious organisms didn’t stop infecting Native Americans after European arrival. Changes in host ecology associated with conquest could alter the transmission cycle of native infectious organisms, and transform a benign, or at least contained, infectious organism into one capable of causing massive mortality. Researchers propose the devastating cocoliztli epidemics, which killed millions in 1545 and 1576 in Mexico, were the work of a native viral hemorrhagic pathogen similar to our modern Hantavirus rather than an introduced infection. The authors hypothesize that extended drought altered the interaction of the mouse host with human populations and, combined with other shocks of conquest, allowed for the virus to jump to humans. The story of cocoliztli encourages us to at least entertain that notion that epidemics after contact could occur from pathogens indigenous to the New World, and not solely from introduced infectious organisms.

The “death by disease alone” narrative ignores the myriad of factors influencing the demography of Native American populations after contact. Introduced infectious disease mortality was awful. However, the popular story tends to ignore abundant evidence of persisting Native American communities, and fails to place epidemics in the larger context of vibrant populations adapting, resisting, accommodating, and negotiating in the post-contact environment. Southeastern populations responded to the shocks of conquest by coalescing into powerful confederacies. Violent resistance to conquest continued throughout the Americas, and periodic waves of disease could not diminish the vitality of mission inhabitants across the northern border of New Spain. Epidemics were not an automatic cultural death sentence.

Humans are demographically capable of rebounding from high mortality events, like epidemics, provided other sources of excess mortality are limited. In the mid-twentieth century when the Aché of Paraguay moved to the missions ~38% of the population died from respiratory diseases alone. However, the Aché rallied quickly and are now a growing population. The key factor for population survival after high mortality events is limiting other demographic shocks, like violent incursions from outsiders, providing sufficient food resources, and the territory needed for forage and hunt to supplement food intake.

When the colonial cocktail arrived in full force demographic recovery became challenging. Warfare and slaving raids added to excess mortality, while simultaneously displacing populations from their stable food supply, and forcing refugees into crowded settlements where disease can spread among weakened hosts. Later reservations restricted access to foraged foods and exacerbated resource scarcity where disease could follow quickly on the heels of famine. The greater cocktail of colonial insults, not just the pathogens themselves, decreased population size and prevented rapid recovery during the conquest.

Sources

Acuna-Soto et al., (2002) “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico”

Calloway One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark

Cameron, Kelton, and Swedlund, eds. Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America

Etheridge & Shuckhall, editors Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South

Kelton Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast 1492-1715

Panich & Schneider, editors Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory

Andrés Reséndez The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America

Sundstrom (1997) “Smallpox Used Them Up: References to Epidemic Disease in Northern Plains Winter Counts, 1714-1920.”

Wilcox The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact