On the "Cultural Genocide" of Canada's "First Nations"

Apparently, European-Canadians are guilty of suppressing Indian culture, if only by their mere presence for the past 400 years or so.

Ah yes, Indian culture. 

How extensive could that culture have been, given that the local tribes had never come up with the wheel, or metals, or the domestication of animals? The early French explorers described the Indians they met, including the relatively advanced Huron and Iroquois, as “Sans loi, sans foi, sans roi.” Without law, without religion, without government.

What then did they have?

It is hard to get far as a culture with no writing system. Some things can be passed on orally, but oral witness is unreliable. Beyond the length of one lifetime, it is hearsay. What is passed on orally must also depend on a body of people able to grasp its meaning and significance, for it to be memorized and preserved. A written record, by contrast, can sit for some time ignored and forgotten, and then be rediscovered by some solitary keen mind able to receive it.

And was there any great body of oral record-keepers available? Each tribe, even each language group, was quite small, and not in much communication with their neighbours. Supposedly, wisdom was passed on by the few elders—distinguished only by being old.

Other than on the West Coast, these tribes were nomadic. They followed the game. They had no beasts of burden nor vehicles. They could not, as a practical matter, carry anyone who could not keep up. On top of that, many starved every winter, young and especially old. Often they could not afford to feed someone who could not hunt. Elders were eventually left to die. 

This tended to limit the number of elders available for cultural transmission.

And that’s not all. On top of the sparse population, it seems there were epidemics about every two generations that killed most of the tribe. Whenever the Europeans came to a new area, from the 16th through the 19th centuries, from Champlain through Lewis and Clarke, they found abandoned villages and clearings, the majority of the local population recently wiped out. How is it possible that this could all be due to first contact with European diseases, even three centuries later? By then, they should have developed natural immunity, even if they had none in 1492.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, trading with the Indians in the Northwest for several centuries, actually witnessed local tribes being devastated by repeated epidemics about every forty years.

Which is to demonstrate that the story that the Europeans wiped out the native people by disease, even inadvertently, seems to be another myth. 

There is an epidemiological advantage to a relatively high population density. It allows a virus to abide in a population and in its cattle, spreading at low levels, naturally inoculating and preserving herd immunity. When your population density is too low, as in nomadic hunter-gatherers, the virus can die out in that population in a generation or two, leaving everyone once again with no immunity. Within about two generations. 

This had probably been going on for thousands of years, with or without Europeans.

Now, what does it mean for a culture when almost all its members die off every forty years? How much gets passed on orally? 

So it is not as if contact with the Europeans could have wiped out Indian culture. After all, if learning something new wipes out your culture, if your culture is preserved only by ignorance of any other, what does that say about your culture? 

Anything of value will naturally be, and has been, preserved—the canoe, lacrosse, toboggans, moccasins, snowshoes, parkas, and so forth. If some cultural element was not preserved, it is because people found it was not useful. Culture is for man, not man for the culture.