Welcome to the project, How Epidemics and based at the University of Oxford.
My name is Erica Charters.
And in these videos I discuss with experts how they research disease as well as their investigations into how epidemics end.
And today, I'm here with Paul Kelton, who's professor of history at Stony Brook University in New York.
Paul, you hold a chair in American history,
but I know that you've trained and ethno history and ethno history might be something that people aren't so familiar with.
Can you explain a little bit about what ethnic history is and how it's different from traditional history?
Sure. And thanks for that question.
Ethno history is a field that combines the sources and methodologies of history and anthropology in order to understand history
and culture change of peoples who are underrepresented or not represented at all in the traditional archival source material.
So the sources of history are those archival sources and hard data that we can get our hands on.
But archaeology adds sources that are very important to understand that history as well.
So the material record in the ground, ethnography, oral history, folklore that anthropologists traditionally have analysed are used to understand,
again, the history and culture change of those people are underrepresented.
Now, those people tend to be the indigenous peoples of the Americas, as ethno historians have focussed on those groups.
So, yes, I've been trained in ethno history since graduate school and brought that
methodology to bear on my research on the impact of diseases on indigenous peoples.
So this, of course, is your your real area of expertise,
not only the history of indigenous peoples in North America, but especially the role of disease.
And many people might know that smallpox, along with other diseases by the Europeans, really devastated the indigenous populations.
Can you tell us a little bit more about disease and especially smallpox in this early period
of American history and how it affected relations between Europeans and indigenous groups?
Sure, absolutely. So make no mistake about it, the diseases that Europeans brought over did have devastating impact.
And Europeans brought over a variety of diseases that were in the Americas prior to fourteen
ninety two and a disease like smallpox and measles and other diseases in which disease,
which indigenous peoples did not have experience with. They lacked acquired immunity.
So when introduced to those diseases, you did have high rates of infection and high rates of mortality.
Smallpox in particular becomes, I think, the most devastating disease and the one we talk about most because of the nature of smallpox.
Smallpox for any body in the early modern period was devastating high rates of mortality.
I think epidemiologists estimate that mortality rates are up to 40 percent from variola major.
Well, smallpox, unique nature made it the most devastating disease of colonisation because one incubates in the human body for a fairly extended time,
10 to 14 days, compared to something like influenza, which incubates for a small amount of time.
And so that longer incubation period allows a person that's infected to travel further.
Moreover, smallpox remains contagious for a fairly lengthy time for an acute infectious disease.
So someone that has smallpox may be contagious for up to two weeks.
And add on that the scabs from smallpox can transmit the disease to people that come into close contact with those scabs.
And so you have a disease that spreads much more widely than other diseases that's highly lethal.
And that's why smallpox becomes so devastating to indigenous peoples.
That's a story that maybe many people know.
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.
Right.
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.
So not just disease that was part of this process, this kind of this process of devastation.
So can you explain a little bit about what your research has found and argue?
Yeah, yeah. I think the grand narrative is diseases came that indigenous peoples didn't have and they they spread like wildfire.
And native peoples had this extreme mortality that allowed Europeans to fairly easily conquer the Americas.
However, smallpox is still an acute infectious disease. It doesn't get from point A to point B without certain.
Processes involved and in the North America context that I've studied,
what I have found is that it is the slave trade that facilitates the spread of smallpox.
You certainly have large numbers of enslaved African-Americans or Africans being sent to the Americas that provide ideal circumstances for disease,
smallpox, to make the transatlantic voyage in the Americas.
You also have the English out of Virginia and South Carolina buying indigenous captives
from their trading partners and selling those indigenous captives to two European masters.
And that created a network of trade and violence that facilitated the spread of smallpox.
And it's not only the getting smallpox from point A to point B is that once it gets to point B,
the populations, they're much more vulnerable because of colonisation.
The native people that are being sought after, the source of slaves,
they're going to it themselves and small nucleated villages in which they're currently packed together,
which would facilitate universal spread of disease, slavery, AIDS, violence and guerrilla warfare.
All of those add to trauma for indigenous peoples that lessen their ability to respond to this disease and and malnourishment high pathogen load.
And then you get this high rates of mortality. So it's not just the spread of disease itself or the disease itself.
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.
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.
But smallpox remains this this I think this kind of almost symbolic but very important disease, especially for us indigenous groups.
And even though, of course, smallpox, there's vaccination that really develops across the 19th century,
it doesn't end for us indigenous groups until much later.
This is something that you've written about. So when, when and how does smallpox end?
Well, I really appreciated that challenge because before this project,
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.
And that was a tidy ending for my book, Cherki Medicine.
But I knew in the back of my head that Cherokee's had experienced a smallpox after that.
And so this kind of got me to rethink that. We did smallpox in and.
The best that I could tell by what I came up with is that it ended when it
generally ended in the United States in that in the turn of the 20th century,
you have this fairly widespread smallpox epidemic throughout the United States.
It's one that Michael Rurik writes about in his book, Pox.
He doesn't talk about indigenous peoples, but it's very clear that this was an epidemic in which finally in the United States,
you have effective public health measures,
isolation, quarantine and vaccination that put smallpox essentially on its path to eradication in the United States,
digitised people who are part of that. And to Indian reservations, you have a Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, tribal leaders,
tribal police enacting these public health measures and by and large, indigenous peoples cooperated.
There are some episodes of resistance because of the long legacy of colonialism and mistrust of the United States.
But by and large, indigenous peoples cooperated. And that cooperation led to, for most indigenous peoples, the turn of the century marks the end.
There's some sporadic cases after that of the very old a minor strain of smallpox, but then it fizzles out.
And then, of course, it's eradicated in the United States by the nineteen forties.
And so that's looking at from high from the hindsight of a historian.
That's when it ended the turn of the 20th century.
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,
but you've also written about what those groups who were involved in this vaccination, more kind of eradication campaign.
How do they remember the ending of smallpox?
What did it mean for them? Was this a kind of celebratory act?
Well, yeah, I mean, I'll I'll say there's two sides of that,
so the first side would be the United States and its agents enacting these public health
measures and they weren't fully aware that they were part of this historical milestone.
I mean, when you look back at it as very significant, this disease that was so devastating indigenous peoples is coming to an end,
but those enacting the policy were not that aware of that.
And in fact, what they were most concerned with was assimilation, putting indigenous peoples to give up their culture,
their identity and becoming US citizens and essentially erasing their indigenous identity.
And vaccination was part of that process. And it wasn't the most important process.
The most important process was probably education, forcing indigenous kids into boarding schools.
And so that's what they're most concerned about. They don't really write about, yay,
we're doing a great thing by eradicating this horrible disease that had plagued indigenous peoples for generations.
They're writing about how how many kids are going to boarding school, our indigenous peoples adopting private property and becoming Christians.
So it goes unnoticed by those enacting policy for indigenous peoples.
There is the best I can tell in their stories and their folklore in their oral history.
There's virtually no acknowledgement that smallpox came to an end at a certain point.
Instead, they tell stories about smallpox is beginning and that dominates their their the way they conceive history.
And often the stories are that smallpox comes as part of human malevolence, malevolence of the colonisers.
And those stories are told again and again.
And that dominates the narrative that to the extent that the the ending that happen is not recognised in indigenous histories,
they tell about their own people. And I would add that when smallpox ended for indigenous peoples,
it ended at a real low point for indigenous peoples in that they our cultures were being forcefully erased.
And also they're being plagued by a number of other diseases. In particular, tuberculosis is having a devastating impact on indigenous communities.
And so the perception that this is a major historical milestone,
is it that it would make sense to them because their indigenous peoples and for that matter,
Bureau of Indian Affairs officials are saying indigenous peoples are not seeing improvements in health.
In fact, they're seeing the opposite when smallpox is.
It's a it's a sobering reminder, again, to think about the context of the cultural and the social context of disease.
So even if we talk about smallpox, something that we need to think about,
what's actually going on with with a group's culture as much as the biological experience.
So thank you very much, Paul, and thank you all for for watching this video.
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Thank you very much. Thank you, Paul. Thank you.