this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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To be more accurate, smallpox killed somewhere between like 65-95% of the native american population after contact with Europeans. And, of course, many of their remaining descendants ended up concentrated into reservations.
So, I imagine if you were going to find native american cuisine restaurants, they'd be rare but typically in and around reservations.
The initial Spanish expeditions had herds of pigs with them, which transmitted a ton of diseases to the natives. A hundred years later when other Europeans came the cities were almost completely depopulated.
People are weirdly against this idea, I think because they believe it diminishes the deliberate genocide that came later, which it doesn't. The horrible truth is that disease spread through completely biologically defenseless populations starting in the late 15th century. By the time European countries were consolidating colonial power, the Native population had been obliterated by somewhere between 65–89%. Those aren't extremes, that's a range of completely plausible figures. The variance is so large because it's hard to tell how many people used to live in a place when disease, unaided, killed every person in every settlement in unthinkably huge areas. To say entire tribes disappeared is an understatement, entire networks of multiple cultures were wiped out so thoroughly that their memory is lost forever. The Native American population in 1800 was a small fraction of the number of people who once lived.
Even in the american mythos of the mayflower it mentions them surviving off established food caches and stores from abandoned settlements. People dont think much about that, but they werent left behind because the natives were so welcoming to the Pilgrims.
Their diminished population just made it a whole lot easier for Europeans to commit further atrocities
Didn’t Lewis and Clarke note how often they found abandoned settlements?
Not sure about Lewis and Clark, but I have read that David Thompson did.
George Vancouver recorded beaches strewn with old human bones. Around the same time he wrote journal entries along the lines of, "Wow, look at all this rich, uninhabited land that would be ideal for settlements!" I don't recall Ol' George ever putting two and two together.
Never knew that, wow.
That was 2-300 years later
Many reservations are far from the original habitat of the people living in them, (see Trail of Tears) so the food materials for their original cuisine can't be found or grown
Guns, Germs, and Steel covers that in a brief but eye-opening way. When Hernando de Soto's crew first explored the Mississippi river in 1541 they wrote about all the people they found, but did not mention bison. A century later another set of Spanish explorers revisited the Mississippi and didn't record much at all about people, but commented on how prolific the bison were.
Worth noting GGS is incredibly poorly received in the anthropology community. If this was reddit most of the major history and anthro subs have a bot to debunk much of it.
Jarred Diamond, the author of GGS, is an eye doctor and bird expert. He isn’t a good source for this stuff.
CGP Grey is such an odd person. Charming, good presentation, sometimes has weird takes.
His video on how to solve traffic uses "mass automatic cars talking to each other" which ignores hundreds of thousands city planners and other actual experts advice: public transit.
Worth noting that "solution" was strongly promoted when I sold cars. If you do have some from of assistive cruise control you should use it.
Didn't know that. Thanks for the info.
If you want to look into it the askhistorians FAQ is great