top of page
Tom Monto

14M Indigenous in N. America reduced to 250,000 - what happened?

Updated: Feb 10, 2021

An estimated 14 million Natives inhabited the different parts of North America at the time of its first settlement by Anglo Americans (in the 16th Century. This figure was provided in the 1853 book On the Probable Number of the Native Indian Population of British America...by John Henry Lefroy.


On the Prairies, Mr. Rowand, one of the Prairies' oldest resident traders, estimated in the 1850s the Blackfoot at 300 tents, the Peigan at 400, the Blood at 250, and other southern Alberta tribes or groups, with an average of 8 per tent, giving an estimated total of about 13,000 persons.

Assiniboines [AKA Stonies], centred at Stony Plain, were estimated at 3,600.

Rowand estimated for the Woods "Strongwood Crees" near Edmonton a figure of 4,000 and for Plains Cree 2,000, and for Ojibways or Chippewas of the Saskatchewan river valley a figure of 200.

Over the whole Prairies the a figure of 23,000 was estimated. One authority estimated it at 35,000, but other authorities said that was too large.


Then there was an estimated 5,000 Cree predominantly north of the plains and south of Churchill River, including 2000 occupants of the "Red River dependencies" of which one-third were Metis.

And 2500 on the north shores of the Great Lakes Superior and Huron, plus more around Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake making another 9,000.

And an estimated 18,000 Natives in Ontario and Quebec.

2,000 for New Caledonia (interior BC)

10,000 to 20,000 on Vancouver Island

7,000 to 10,000 on Queen Charlotte

Coastal BC (including some in the Russian Territory [Alaska]) was estimated by artist and ethnographer Paul Kane as 63,000.


Total thus was 125,000 for the British colonies of North America and the HBC trading area. This figure left out those resident in the U.S. and Alaska, which had perhaps the same number.


Lefroy noted 125,000 was barely double what de la Hontan had estimated for the Six Nations of the Iroquois alone in 1690, and that 250,000 was only a fraction of the 10 to 20 millions Natives that the whole Americas had had only 300 years before.


Lefroy wrote in making his estimate of 125,000, that "where there are no trading posts, there are no Indians, and where there are no Indians, there are no trading posts, and that where there are trading posts, all the Indians of the district frequent them, habit having rendered the articles of European trade essential to their existence."


But this dependency had not apparently lengthened their life span or increased their numbers, as the following list of factors for their population drop signifies.


Physical (technology/health) causes:

- the substitution of inferior European clothing for their Native robes of furs,

- the use of stimulants, tobacco almost universally, alcohol partially

- the gradual loss of native arts and appliances with the acquirement of anything better

- the introduction of new forms of disease

- a marked deterioration in their dwellings, due to the skins of which they were formerly made acquiring a market value and being traded for things less essential for their health.


Moral causes for the decline:

- consciousness of decline

- pressure of new necessities

- hopeless sense of inferiority to the whites in many respects, and

- the administration of potions by medicine men (particularly among the Cree) destined sometimes to induce abortion and sometimes infertility in females, used out of jealousy or revenge. (pointing to breakdown of the social order).


Alvin Finkel, in his book Working People in Alberta, wrote that if a Native group maintained its food supply and was able to negotiate its relations with newly-arrived Europeans, it could turn around a short-term demographic upset, such as European-caused epidemics, within several generations.


(This is borne out by the fact that even something as serious as the 1918 flu epidemic on the average "only" doubled the natural death rate, causing "only" an additional two percent death rate.)


Finkel instead states that European exploitation and robbery of resources, not European germs, were responsible for genocides and near-genocides of Native peoples in North America.


The recent (and much-reported) increase in Indigenous population as per the Canadian Census seems to arise from many Metis newly reporting their ancestry.


A seeming renaissance of Indigenous allegiance is remarked on in The Comeback How Aboriginals are Reclaiming Power and Influence (2015) by John Ralston Saul.


Here is another book that may bear fruitful study:

Standish Motte, Outline of a System of Legislation for securing Protection to the Aboriginal Inhabitants of all countries, 1840. [available on the CIHM website]


Source:

Lefory [Lefroy?], On the Probable Number of the Native Indian Population of British America... (1853?)

Working People in Alberta, p. 21.


Thank you for reading.

======================================

1 view

Recent Posts

See All

Early Labour culture

Clarissa Mackie "Elizabeth's Pride A Labor Day story"    Bellevue Times Dec. 5, 1913

Comments


bottom of page