Horror Tragedy Involved in The Greatest Sustained Loss of Human Life in History.

The dearth of statistical information on Indigenous births, deaths, and mortality for much of the twentieth century makes it impossible to precisely estimate the total number of excess deaths. But an estimate of about 200,000 total Indigenous deaths attributable to the legacy of colonialism and institutionalized racism since 1900 may be conservative.66 In sum, for the entire present-day United States from 1492 to the present, the total number of Indigenous deaths includes the 12 million estimated by Thornton; the additional approximately 790,000 deaths that occurred in Hawaii, Alaska, in Puerto Rico; and about 200,000 excess deaths since 1900. Thus, the Indigenous Holocaust in this country appears to have taken around 13 million lives. Signally, this horrific number of deaths was only a very small portion of the mind-numbing Holocaust throughout the Western Hemisphere. When Thornton’s estimated hemispheric population decline of 70 million is multiplied by 2.5, the total number of Indigenous deaths throughout the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1900 appears to be about 175 million.67 And the number of Indigenous people who have died in the hemisphere because of war, repression, racism, and harsh conditions of life since 1900 surely runs into the millions.68 By any reckoning, the Indigenous Holocaust in the Western Hemisphere was, as Stannard has pointed out, “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed.” No words or numbers can adequately convey the scale of the horror and tragedy involved in the greatest sustained loss of human life in history. Still, it seems to this researcher that understanding the scope and dimensions of the Indigenous Holocaust is an important first step toward collective political action which addresses the needs, interests, and aspirations of Indigenous people today—and which ensures that such a holocaust will never happen again.