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Welcome to the project, How Epidemics and based at the University of Oxford.

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My name is Erica Charters.

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And in these videos I discuss with experts how they research disease as well as their investigations into how epidemics end.

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And today, I'm here with Paul Kelton, who's professor of history at Stony Brook University in New York.

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Paul, you hold a chair in American history,

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but I know that you've trained and ethno history and ethno history might be something that people aren't so familiar with.

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Can you explain a little bit about what ethnic history is and how it's different from traditional history?

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Sure. And thanks for that question.

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Ethno history is a field that combines the sources and methodologies of history and anthropology in order to understand history

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and culture change of peoples who are underrepresented or not represented at all in the traditional archival source material.

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So the sources of history are those archival sources and hard data that we can get our hands on.

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But archaeology adds sources that are very important to understand that history as well.

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So the material record in the ground, ethnography, oral history, folklore that anthropologists traditionally have analysed are used to understand,

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again, the history and culture change of those people are underrepresented.

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Now, those people tend to be the indigenous peoples of the Americas, as ethno historians have focussed on those groups.

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So, yes, I've been trained in ethno history since graduate school and brought that

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methodology to bear on my research on the impact of diseases on indigenous peoples.

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So this, of course, is your your real area of expertise,

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not only the history of indigenous peoples in North America, but especially the role of disease.

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And many people might know that smallpox, along with other diseases by the Europeans, really devastated the indigenous populations.

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Can you tell us a little bit more about disease and especially smallpox in this early period

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of American history and how it affected relations between Europeans and indigenous groups?

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Sure, absolutely. So make no mistake about it, the diseases that Europeans brought over did have devastating impact.

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And Europeans brought over a variety of diseases that were in the Americas prior to fourteen

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ninety two and a disease like smallpox and measles and other diseases in which disease,

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which indigenous peoples did not have experience with. They lacked acquired immunity.

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So when introduced to those diseases, you did have high rates of infection and high rates of mortality.

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Smallpox in particular becomes, I think, the most devastating disease and the one we talk about most because of the nature of smallpox.

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Smallpox for any body in the early modern period was devastating high rates of mortality.

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I think epidemiologists estimate that mortality rates are up to 40 percent from variola major.

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Well, smallpox, unique nature made it the most devastating disease of colonisation because one incubates in the human body for a fairly extended time,

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10 to 14 days, compared to something like influenza, which incubates for a small amount of time.

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And so that longer incubation period allows a person that's infected to travel further.

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Moreover, smallpox remains contagious for a fairly lengthy time for an acute infectious disease.

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So someone that has smallpox may be contagious for up to two weeks.

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And add on that the scabs from smallpox can transmit the disease to people that come into close contact with those scabs.

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And so you have a disease that spreads much more widely than other diseases that's highly lethal.

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And that's why smallpox becomes so devastating to indigenous peoples.

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That's a story that maybe many people know.

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But you've also done this wonderful research in which in some ways you've challenged this kind of what we might call a straightforward narrative.

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Right.

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So you've said we shouldn't see disease as an especially smallpox as a biological inevitability, but we need to think about how those other factors.

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So not just disease that was part of this process, this kind of this process of devastation.

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So can you explain a little bit about what your research has found and argue?

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Yeah, yeah. I think the grand narrative is diseases came that indigenous peoples didn't have and they they spread like wildfire.

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And native peoples had this extreme mortality that allowed Europeans to fairly easily conquer the Americas.

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However, smallpox is still an acute infectious disease. It doesn't get from point A to point B without certain.

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Processes involved and in the North America context that I've studied,

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what I have found is that it is the slave trade that facilitates the spread of smallpox.

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You certainly have large numbers of enslaved African-Americans or Africans being sent to the Americas that provide ideal circumstances for disease,

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smallpox, to make the transatlantic voyage in the Americas.

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You also have the English out of Virginia and South Carolina buying indigenous captives

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from their trading partners and selling those indigenous captives to two European masters.

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And that created a network of trade and violence that facilitated the spread of smallpox.

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And it's not only the getting smallpox from point A to point B is that once it gets to point B,

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the populations, they're much more vulnerable because of colonisation.

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The native people that are being sought after, the source of slaves,

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they're going to it themselves and small nucleated villages in which they're currently packed together,

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which would facilitate universal spread of disease, slavery, AIDS, violence and guerrilla warfare.

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All of those add to trauma for indigenous peoples that lessen their ability to respond to this disease and and malnourishment high pathogen load.

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And then you get this high rates of mortality. So it's not just the spread of disease itself or the disease itself.

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It's this whole package of colonialism. I think that's such a useful reminder to help us to remember that disease takes place within a context, right.

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And we need to think about the economic, political, military context in order to really make sense of the spread and the incidence of disease.

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But smallpox remains this this I think this kind of almost symbolic but very important disease, especially for us indigenous groups.

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And even though, of course, smallpox, there's vaccination that really develops across the 19th century,

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it doesn't end for us indigenous groups until much later.

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This is something that you've written about. So when, when and how does smallpox end?

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Well, I really appreciated that challenge because before this project,

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I actually didn't know I really stopped in 18 20 for my research when the group that I focussed on, Cherokee's underwent fairly extensive vaccination.

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And that was a tidy ending for my book, Cherki Medicine.

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But I knew in the back of my head that Cherokee's had experienced a smallpox after that.

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And so this kind of got me to rethink that. We did smallpox in and.

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The best that I could tell by what I came up with is that it ended when it

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generally ended in the United States in that in the turn of the 20th century,

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you have this fairly widespread smallpox epidemic throughout the United States.

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It's one that Michael Rurik writes about in his book, Pox.

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He doesn't talk about indigenous peoples, but it's very clear that this was an epidemic in which finally in the United States,

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you have effective public health measures,

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isolation, quarantine and vaccination that put smallpox essentially on its path to eradication in the United States,

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digitised people who are part of that. And to Indian reservations, you have a Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, tribal leaders,

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tribal police enacting these public health measures and by and large, indigenous peoples cooperated.

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There are some episodes of resistance because of the long legacy of colonialism and mistrust of the United States.

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But by and large, indigenous peoples cooperated. And that cooperation led to, for most indigenous peoples, the turn of the century marks the end.

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There's some sporadic cases after that of the very old a minor strain of smallpox, but then it fizzles out.

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And then, of course, it's eradicated in the United States by the nineteen forties.

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And so that's looking at from high from the hindsight of a historian.

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That's when it ended the turn of the 20th century.

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So then because I think it's interesting, you say from the hindsight of a historian, that's what you can see probably looking at official documents,

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but you've also written about what those groups who were involved in this vaccination, more kind of eradication campaign.

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How do they remember the ending of smallpox?

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What did it mean for them? Was this a kind of celebratory act?

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Well, yeah, I mean, I'll I'll say there's two sides of that,

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so the first side would be the United States and its agents enacting these public health

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measures and they weren't fully aware that they were part of this historical milestone.

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I mean, when you look back at it as very significant, this disease that was so devastating indigenous peoples is coming to an end,

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but those enacting the policy were not that aware of that.

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And in fact, what they were most concerned with was assimilation, putting indigenous peoples to give up their culture,

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their identity and becoming US citizens and essentially erasing their indigenous identity.

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And vaccination was part of that process. And it wasn't the most important process.

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The most important process was probably education, forcing indigenous kids into boarding schools.

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And so that's what they're most concerned about. They don't really write about, yay,

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we're doing a great thing by eradicating this horrible disease that had plagued indigenous peoples for generations.

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They're writing about how how many kids are going to boarding school, our indigenous peoples adopting private property and becoming Christians.

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So it goes unnoticed by those enacting policy for indigenous peoples.

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There is the best I can tell in their stories and their folklore in their oral history.

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There's virtually no acknowledgement that smallpox came to an end at a certain point.

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Instead, they tell stories about smallpox is beginning and that dominates their their the way they conceive history.

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And often the stories are that smallpox comes as part of human malevolence, malevolence of the colonisers.

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And those stories are told again and again.

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And that dominates the narrative that to the extent that the the ending that happen is not recognised in indigenous histories,

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they tell about their own people. And I would add that when smallpox ended for indigenous peoples,

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it ended at a real low point for indigenous peoples in that they our cultures were being forcefully erased.

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And also they're being plagued by a number of other diseases. In particular, tuberculosis is having a devastating impact on indigenous communities.

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And so the perception that this is a major historical milestone,

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is it that it would make sense to them because their indigenous peoples and for that matter,

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Bureau of Indian Affairs officials are saying indigenous peoples are not seeing improvements in health.

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In fact, they're seeing the opposite when smallpox is.

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It's a it's a sobering reminder, again, to think about the context of the cultural and the social context of disease.

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So even if we talk about smallpox, something that we need to think about,

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what's actually going on with with a group's culture as much as the biological experience.

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So thank you very much, Paul, and thank you all for for watching this video.

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I will encourage you to fill out our feedback form if you're watching on YouTube to find the form just immediately underneath the video with the text.

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If you're watching on the project website, the feedback form is just to the right.

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It only takes a few seconds and it will help to inform research at the University of Oxford.

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Thank you very much. Thank you, Paul. Thank you.