The Tragic Impact of Disease on Native American Cultures

#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America

Lex Fridman Podcast

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The Tragic Impact of Disease on Native American Cultures

This chapter dives into the rich complexities of Native American cultures and the devastating impacts of European colonization. It highlights how diseases, miscommunication, and well-intended actions contributed to a tragic loss of life, illustrated through a poignant story of a missionary's unintended consequences during an epidemic.

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Speaker 1

Speaker 2

a lot of the Native American cultures were also, I mean, they're sophisticated, warring cultures also. Yes,

Speaker 1

they fought, especially the Mississippians. Boy, they were tough. And so were the Five Nations, the Mohawk, the Huron. The ones that kicked the Vikings' ass up there, they were probably Algonquin speakers, but they were connected just above the Great Lakes. But they were all very tough people. When

Speaker 2

you think about the Spaniards and the Portuguese and the over 100 million people that were killed, do you see that as a tragedy of history, or is it just the way of history?

Speaker 1

I think that the epidemics, I consider it a tragedy. That did not have to happen. And that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it. It was just a tragic, perfect storm of events. I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what's been called the black legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That's not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone. In fact, there was a really poignant story I read of a Spanish priest in the Amazon, in the Brazilian northern part of the Amazon, where he made this utopian community, and he was bringing people in that were getting sick. And he wrote, you know, I'm baptizing everyone. You know, I have baptized 10,000 people a day, and yet God's still killing them. Why is he doing this to them? They're doing everything that I ask them to do. They are submitting to the will of God. But this guy doesn't realize that the same bowl of holy water that he's baptizing them in, he's just wiping the disease on everybody's faces. He's accelerating it when he doesn't even realize. He thinks he's saving them, but he's actually killing them. Yeah. That's a tragedy, you know? That's not just like spoils go to the victor stuff. That's just straight up tragedy. Yeah.

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