Indigenous Knowledge of the Americas
The Genocide Record
The documented record for the Americas — compiled research, sourced throughout; never softened, never inflated beyond what the sources carry.
The demographic frame — how many stood here in 1492
Every count on this record stands on a question that comes first: how many people lived in the Americas when the Europeans arrived? The scholarship's estimates, printed apart and never averaged:
| Estimate | The hemisphere, 1492 |
|---|---|
| Kroeber (1939) | 8.4 million |
| Rosenblat (1954) | 13.4 million |
| Steward (1949) | 15.5 million |
| Sapper (1924) | 37–48.5 million |
| Denevan (1992) — the consensus volume | 53.9 million |
| Koch et al. (2019) — 119 published regional estimates | 60.5 million (interquartile range 44.8–78.2 million) |
| Borah | upward of 100 million |
| Dobyns (1966) | 90.0–112.6 million |
The hemisphere's weight did not sit in the north: at Denevan's regional consensus, the north of Mexico held 3.8 million, central Mexico 17.2 million, and the Andes 15.7 million — the regions sum to about 29.6 million inside the 53.9 million consensus, because the hemisphere's people stood in its cities and farmed valleys, not evenly on the map.
The floors the primary records give: some 5–6 million remained by about 1600 (Koch), independently 5.6 million by 1650 (Denevan) — a removal of nine-tenths within a century at both syntheses. Central Mexico fell from 25.2 million (1518) to 1.075 million (1605) and 0.75 million (1622) — about 3% of contact (Cook & Borah). Peru fell from about 9 million (1520) to about 600,000 (1620) (N. D. Cook). The counted floor of the north: 248,253 in the United States census of 1890 and about 104,000 on Canada's register in 1927 — floors of the counts, printed as floors.
Today, each figure at its own method and never summed silently: the United States counts 9,666,058 American Indian and Alaska Native people alone-or-in-combination (2020; the Census Bureau's coding-change caution stands on the figure); Canada counts 1,807,250 Indigenous people (2021); Mexico counts 23,232,391 by self-ascription (2020), beside 7,364,645 speakers of an Indigenous language; Latin America stands at about 58 million (ECLAC, 2020). An honest broad sum is about 69.5 million — the same order as Koch's figure for 1492, measuring a different thing. The peoples fell to about a tenth of themselves. They were not extinguished.
Disease caused the vast majority of deaths. No figure on this page is distributed among causes, and no toll here is converted into intention; the intention instruments stand on this record's own pages, at their documents. Read beside this frame: Demographic Collapse — the estimates and the collapse at full depth — and Disease and Intent, where the deliberate-disease question stands at evidence level.
Record: THE_GREAT_DYING_NUMBERS_2026-10-30.md §§1–5 (panel placed 2026-10-30). The frame states the demographic ground only; the register's own lines, counts, and levels below are untouched by it.
- Caribbean and ConquestHispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was the first site of sustained Spanish colonisation after 1492 and of the first catastrophic collapse.
- Demographic CollapsePublished hemispheric estimates have ranged from about 8 million to 112 million. That spread is the honest starting point.
- Disease and Intent — The Deliberate-Disease Question at Evidence LevelThis is the one colonial-era deliberate-infection episode supported by contemporaneous documents at every level: a trader's journal, an officer's certified account/invoice, and the commander-in-chief's correspondence. Th
- Framing and Findings — The Genocide RecordTwo elements matter for everything that follows in this record:
- Massacres and RemovalsAt the Moravian mission village of Gnadenhutten, Ohio Country, Pennsylvania militiamen under David Williamson killed 96 pacifist Moravian Christian Indians — primarily Lenape (Delaware) and Mohican — who had returned fro
- Schools — Residential Schools in Canada, Boarding Schools in the United StatesThe NCTR (University of Manitoba), created by the TRC to hold its archive, maintains the National Student Memorial Register under TRC Calls to Action 72–73.
- Sterilization and ChildrenWhat the GAO actually documented — the floor, not an estimate:
- The Indian Act Offences — A Register — draft at the cultural-review gate (added 2026-10-30)
- Gladue and Ipeelee — The Remedy and Its Recorded Failure — draft at the cultural-review gate (added 2026-10-30)
- Child Welfare — The Successor Machinery — draft at the cultural-review gate (added 2026-10-30)
- Oakalla — The Prison Farm and the Potlatch Prisoners — draft at the cultural-review gate (added 2026-10-30)