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.