by PRABIR PURKAYASTHA
A recent paper in Science addresses an intriguing question: Did North America have settled agriculture before the arrival of Europeans? Or were the people in what would come to be known as North America still in the hunter-gatherer stage—unlike Mesoamericans, who had advanced civilisations, such as the Mayans, Aztecs, and the Incas?
The answer is that indigenous populations in North America did have significant agriculture, which “disappeared” only after their encounters with the invading Europeans settling on their lands. Researchers have used Lidar tools to map areas of Michigan associated with the Menominee people, showing that settled agriculture existed not only in the lower latitudes—modern Mexico—but even in the much harsher north, near the Great Lakes bordering Canada.
Recent advances in the use of Lidar technologies—particularly drones, low-cost and lightweight Lidar sensors, and ground-penetrating radar—make it easier to survey both surface and subsurface features. Lidar surveys have led to significant advances in our understanding of the past. This article will look at how new historical knowledge about agriculture in North America informs the debate on the mass death of indigenous people in North America in the early period of European settlement. Was it genocide, or were their weak immune systems to blame? American historians today increasingly, though reluctantly, accept that disease, coupled with direct violence—mass killings and uprooting people from their ancestral lands—caused the massive population decline of the indigenous people.
A significant body of opinion—expressed particularly in popular books such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel—ascribes the killing of native peoples primarily to their lack of immunity to diseases brought to by Europeans. This view airbrushes out of history the colonists’ repeated massacres, seizure of native lands and means of sustenance, and continuous displacement of indigenous communities. It depicts the drastic fall in the latter’s population as merely an unfortunate accident of history: “The microbes did it, not us.” As we shall see, this not only contradicts what we know about history, but also about epidemics and immunity: the silent battle between germs and our immune system.
It is here that the actual history of agriculture in the North America becomes significant. The Lidar survey of Michigan brings out the extent of Menominee settlements and their agricultural practices in the Great Lakes area of Michigan. We also know that the Menominee previously occupied a much larger territory, estimated at 10 million acres. Treaties with the US government reduced their land base to only 2.5 percent of their original lands, coinciding with a sharp drop in their population.
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