Could the great post-Colombian dying in the Western Hemisphere have been less?

For Thanksgiving, Jacobin Magazine reposted a provocative essay by Suresh Naidu, imagining what the United States would be like if its indigenous population had not died or been killed. Certainly it would have been fundamentally different.

Some of his demographic assumptions, as have been pointed out elsewhere, are problematic. Projecting a population of ten million Native Americans circa 1500 five centuries into the future, while using the rates of population growth of the medically advanced 20th century to do the projecting, has obvious issues. Were I to write this essay, I would have looked towards Africa during this time period as a control.

Naidu is correct, I think, in that the persistence of a substantial indigenous population in most of the United States will fundamentally alter the settlement patterns. South Africa may well be a useful paradigm, with the western and northern Cape being mostly Afrikaansophone thanks to the long settlement but the remainder of the country, conquered much more recently, being overwhelmingly non-white. The densely settled Mississippi, in this alt-US, may well be a significant barrier.

(The same principle, incidentally, holds for the other predominantly settler-descended societies of the Western Hemisphere, from the Southern Cone up to Canada.)

This is not an achievable alternate history, mind; some sort of epidemiological catastrophe was inevitable. It is possible, however, that it might have been less severe if there was less imperialism. The desire of European imperialists to take control of indigenous populations and to use their resources, labour and otherwise, to finance their empire-building aggravated the catastrophe that befell the peoples of the Western Hemisphere, "from Labrador to Araucanïa" as Naidu put it. If these people had been allowed time to recover and not (for instance) be made into serfs working for European overlords, I would be willing to bet that they could recover.

Thoughts? Could the death toll have been less, if there had been (for instance) a European retreat from empire in the 16th century? Is a scenario along the lines of what Naidu imagined, of a sort of prefiguring of apartheid in North America at all possible? What would these societies be like?
 
Don’t indigenous Americans still suffer more from things like the common cold to this day? I’m honestly not sure how much more could survive. If the West mostly ignores the America’s beyond trade I’m sure there would be more of them alive today, but I don’t know if they can even recover their pre contact population before the 1900s.

Just thinking of the butterflies, the US might not really exist here which removes the number one innovator of the last century and one of the top innovators of the one before. We might not even have many technologies to treat some of these diseases yet, making things even more complicated.
 
I suppose a stronger Vinland that kills off the populations as seen in the early 1500s (which was the big time of mass death from diseases) would lead to a culling of the Amerindians to the point that those left are the ones resistant, and therefore, the big empire building of the late 1300-early 1400s would have been possible, albeit with a smaller, more disease resistant population.

Basically, the idea is for the mass deaths to happen a few hundred years earlier than OTL.
 
Don’t indigenous Americans still suffer more from things like the common cold to this day?
The book "1491" has a chapter about native American people's genetic makeup and its ability to handle infections/attacks. I'd look up the chapter(s?) now, but, even though the book is within my sight across the room, I am so wiped out right now dealing with a flu bug that I haven't the energy or ambition to do so.
 
One way that could lessen the die-offs would be fewer contacts with Europeans, and one way to accomplish that would be if a comparable set of pandemics crossed back to Europe. After a return voyage brings another series of plagues across Europe (especially if it happens more than once, and with more than one disease), Europeans will be slower, and less numerous to venture to the New World in the first place.

There's an interesting (if gruesome) TL in this. The Americas immune to European diseases but Europe practically wiped out by American ones. With the Black Death already happening, could European civilization have realistically survived?
 
Yeah, I'm not sure why we are even bring this guy's opinion up when he mentions "zionists" and complaining about the author's race. Plus it seems like it's becoming more and more a "Chat" discussion.

The original article mentioned both-

While counterfactual history over five hundred years looks more like speculative fiction than social science, we can conjecture that the United States would look much more like apartheid settler states — Israel or predemocracy South Africa, for example — were it not for the epidemics and wars that wiped out the local population.

And there's tons of other native peoples and people of color pissed off at the article as well.
 
This is not an achievable alternate history, mind; some sort of epidemiological catastrophe was inevitable. It is possible, however, that it might have been less severe if there was less imperialism.

One way that could lessen the die-offs would be fewer contacts with Europeans

Once plague hits the New World it is going to spread like wildfire, it will be carried by the natives themselves, it seems that the Inca, the Pueblo People and the Villages of the Mississipi River started to suffer from plagues before entering in direct regular contact with the Europeans.

I suppose a stronger Vinland that kills off the populations as seen in the early 1500

IMHO it is too early, unless you are talking about it keeping regular contact with Europe, otherwise 500 years of new diseases are going to hit the New World with similar strength as it hit in 1500.
 
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