The Initial Impact of the Europeans

The European colonization of the Americas decimated the populations and cultures of the American Indians. During the 15th through 19th centuries, their populations were ravaged by displacement, disease, enslavement, and warfare against European explorers and colonists.

The first American Indians group encountered by Christopher Columbus in 1492, were the 250 thousand to 1 million Island Arawaks (more properly called the Taino) of Boriquen (Puerto Rico), Dominican Republic (Quisqueya), the Cubanacan (Cuba), and Haiti.

It is said that only 500 survived by the year 1550, and the group was considered extinct before 1650. Yet DNA studies show that the genetic contribution of the Taino to that region continues, and the mitochondrial DNA studies of the Taino are said to show relationships to the Northern Indigenous Nations, such as Inuit (Eskimo) and others.

In the fifteenth century, Spaniards and other Europeans brought horses to the Americas. Some of these animals escaped and began to breed and increase their numbers in the wild. Ironically, the horse had originally evolved in the Americas, but the early American horses were game for early human hunters, and went extinct about 7,000 BC, just after the end of the last ice age. The re-introduction of the horse had a profound impact on Native American culture in the Great Plains of North America. 

This new mode of travel made it possible for some tribes to greatly expand their territories, exchange goods with neighboring tribes, and more easily capture game.

Europeans also brought diseases, against which the American Indians had no immunity. Chicken pox and measles, though common and rarely fatal among Europeans, often proved fatal to American Indians, and more dangerous diseases such as smallpox were especially deadly to American Indian populations.

 It is difficult to estimate the total percentage of the American Indian population killed by these diseases. Epidemics often immediately followed European exploration, sometimes destroying entire villages. Some historians estimate that up to 80% of some Native populations may have died due to European diseases.

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