Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

Few challenge the numbers, but some ask whether this was a natural or a social catastrophe. After all, most died of disease—smallpox, specifically. Yet this hardly relieves the settlers of responsibility. As Dunbar-Ortiz points out, Europe lost at least a third of its population to medieval pandemics, but it recovered; why didn’t the Indians? “If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the European colonizers in America found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—nearly three hundred years of colonial warfare,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes. Besides, there is evidence that settlers were aware of the natives’ extreme vulnerability to smallpox and sought to employ the disease for purposes of germ warfare: “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?” the English general Jeffery Amherst wrote in 1763 to his subordinate Colonel Henry Bouquet. “We must, on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.” The colonel promised to do his best.