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?