Thomas wrote: ... but I'm always willing to be persuaded.)
Really? That's what I had always thought, too, Thomas.
Still do, by and large.
But you seem, like many, to have a stubborn streak for maintaining certain "hard earned" gems of knowledge.
The genocide of the American Indians by all the European settlers (English, French, Spanish, Portoguese) is the largest genocide ever commited in human hstory, I don't think we can doubt that.
Like the Spanish, the ancestors of today's Americans had a big part in the genocide. What percentage of USA's population today are Indians?
I wouldn't be real quick to agree with that....besides the fact that I personally don't see what happened to them as "genocide", but even if we do accept that term for the sake of the argument, it still revolves around the actual numbers involved.
There are no clear cut numbers to work with...the population estimates of Native Americans, pre Columbus, vary from 10 millon to 100 million, some even believe it's as high as 200-300 million. I myself tend to think the number is toward the lower end, but that's pure speculation...and I tend to think in very low numbers.
Anyway, whatever number you decide to work with...then you must decide what other races/cultures were actually treated to genocide...which is another problem. As far as massive loss of lives go...I always think of Stalin first, but his selections were so random, that I'm not sure if they fit into the genocide category either.
-----
The population of Native Americans is under 2% of the total.
The number of Americans who claim to have descended in part from Amerindians, however, is quite a bit higher than that.
Ellinas wrote:What percentage of USA's population today are Indians?
As of 1990, the percentage of US's population that are Native Americans are about 2%. That doesn't count the people who don't know if they are descended from Native Americans and the people who never reported themselves as being Native American on census reports.
