Coronavirus and the Noble Savage

The face of smallpox.

An interesting and colourful visual about pandemics features an example of the Noble Savage myth that has messed up our relations with our indigenous people—and been so harmful to Canada’s “First Nations.”

“Disease and illnesses have plagued humanity since the earliest days, our mortal flaw. However, it was not until the marked shift to agrarian communities that the scale and spread of these diseases increased dramatically….

The more civilized humans became – with larger cities, more exotic trade routes, and increased contact with different populations of people, animals, and ecosystems – the more likely pandemics would occur.”

Anyone with a glancing knowledge of Canadian history should spot the problem. Was there ever a pandemic worse than the smallpox that wiped out the majority of our native people, soon after first contact? Some estimates put the rate of death at 90%.

That would surely make it the worst pandemic in history. And it happened to a non-agrarian people. Kind of killing this assertion of the superior health of hunter-gatherers.

If the most famous pandemics of history have occurred to agrarian societies, this is simply because hunter-gatherers tend to have no writing system, and so their epidemics are not recorded. They have no history. We know of the mass deaths from smallpox because they were observed by Europeans.

It is a fair point that, with greater trade and commerce, diseases can spread more easily. However, even today, sailors who venture far abroad for trade are a minority. For most folk, becoming agrarian means a more settled way of life, and less contact with others. Hunter-gatherers must range widely to acquire food. An Indian band might easily have ranged from the Rockies to Lake Superior within a year or two. Accordingly, more individuals come in contact with more and more distant people, and more distant ecosystems. They also come in close contact with a wider variety of animal species, as food, each of which might pass on some unknown virus species to species. Think bats and pangolins in Chinese wet markets. Think “bush meat,” the suggested source of Ebola in Africa.

Score one for civilization.

The “Noble Savage” myth wants us to believe that the native people of North America lived relatively disease free until smallpox, tuberculosis, and other awful diseases arrived with the Europeans, having been bred in the crowded cities of Europe. They think of the smallpox pandemic that killed so many Indians as a one-shot event, becauswe when first encountered the Indians, unlike the Europeans, had no immunity.

But this does not fit the historical record.

For centuries, wherever European explorers ventured in the New Word, they found the local populations devastated by some recent epidemic. When Cortez discovered Mexico, he found it depopulated by a recent plague. When De Soto travelled through the American southwest in the 16th century, he found it again depopulated by as recent plague. When Vancouver explored the Pacific Northwest in the 18th century, he found it again devastated by a recent plague. When Lewis and Clark crossed the Great Plains in the early 19th century, they found them devastated by a recent plague. Another great plague was recorded on the same Great Plains in the late 19th century.

This was not a question of one plague, devastating the native population all at once, caused by one contact. It was a series of plagues, occurring predictably about every two or three generations. None but the first could be blamed on first contact.

At the low population densities of hunter-gatherer societies, disease antibodies are unable to establish themselves in a population, producing herd immunities. As it turns out, the densely populated cities of Europe give a definite advantage here.

So it is not that the Indians encountered some new diseases from Europe to which they had no immunity. It is that any and all infectious diseases will have hit them every two or three generations, and each time they would have no immunity.

This was probably all going on every sixty years or so long before the first Europeans appeared.

After all, if Columbus’s visit set it all off, why didn’t the Vikings? We now know they were here five hundred years earlier.

There is even reason to believe that smallpox did not come to North America from Europe. Recent genetic sequencing at McMaster University suggests that, given rates of mutation, the modern smallpox virus could have emerged nowhere earlier than 1588 to 1645—both dates after Columbus. At that point, neither Europeans nor native Americans could have had any immunity.

Yet it became exponentially more deadly in America. First contact with an imported disease cannot explain that.

Tuberculosis, the second great pandemic among Native North Americans, has been found in South American cadavers from three thousand years ago.

It seems most probable that pandemics, with mass deaths, were a regular feature of aboriginal life long before first contact, and first contact did not change this. Something lethal to most of the population probably popped up every couple of generations. As tends to happen to wild animals: mass die-offs.

We do not know only because there is no record, before the Europeans came to note it down.