Why have Indigenous communities been hit harder by the pandemic than the population at large?

This column is an instalment in our series Apocalypse Then, in which cultural historian Ainsley Hawthorn examines the issues ofCOVID-19 through the lens of the past.

First Nations make up only around 10 per cent of Manitoba's population but, as of February, accounted for almost 70 per cent of that province's COVID-19 cases.In the same month, the Guardian reported that Native Americans are dying of the disease at twice the rate of white Americans the highest mortality of any racial group in the United States.

The numbers are shocking, but they haven't come as a surprise to either Indigenous leaders or public health officials, who warned from the outset that the pandemic could have a devastatingimpact on Indigenous communities.

You don't have to look far from home to find justification for their concern. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed almost one in three Labrador Inuit and wiped out entire settlements. Today, Nunatsiavut has the highest rate of tuberculosis in Canada, even though the disease has been all but eradicated in the south.

Contagious illnesses have posed a serious risk to Indigenous peoples since they first made contact with Europeans, but not because they're any more biologically susceptible to disease than other racial groups.

There were about 60 million people in the Americas before 1492, according to current estimates. By the beginning of the 1600s, barely a century later, 90 per cent of this Indigenous population had died.

That amounts to around 10 per cent of the earth's population at the time, making this the most severe mortality event in human history, far exceeding the fatality rates of the Black Death or the Second World War. The loss of human life was so extreme it altered the climate, contributing to a global cooling event.

Violence and disease

Thousands of Indigenous people died at the hands of conquistadors and colonizers, but the majority were swept up in a series of contact epidemics, disease outbreaks that followed meetings with Europeans.

If you learned anything about these epidemics in school, it was probably the "virgin soil" theory. Indigenous peoples lacked immunity to European germs, and, as a result, the newly introduced illnesses spread rapidly, infecting nearly everyone and killing a large portion of those afflicted.

Living conditions in Europe, so the thinking goes, led to the development of a wide array of dangerous diseases. Eurasians had domesticated several species of animal and had become carriers for zoonotic illnesses passed to them from their livestock. Many Eurasians also lived in densely packed cities that were ideal breeding grounds for contagious illnesses, and East-West trade across Eurasia would have allowed germs to spread over the entire continent.

When Europeans colonized the Americas, they brought with them this package of pathogens that spread to Indigenous people who had never encountered them before, with disastrous results.

The virgin soil theory, though, can't fully explain why Indigenous peoples suffered so greatly.

If lack of immunity was the decisive factor, why weren't all Indigenous nations affected equally by contact epidemics? Some communities had death tolls as low as 20 per cent, while other cultures were utterly extinguished.

And why was it European colonizers who spread disease to Indigenous populations instead of the reverse? We know from archeological evidence that Indigenous peoples hosted their own set of microbes, so why didn't they decimate European settler populations?

The germs imported by Europeans may have caused epidemics in Indigenous populations, but the severity of those epidemics was determined by social conditions.

The 'virgin soil' theory is flawed

As Europeans occupied Indigenous territories, it became more and more difficult for Indigenous people to grow crops, fishand hunt, causing nutritional deficiencies. The incursions led to crowded living conditions and created competition between Indigenous nations for resources.

People who are malnourished, overcrowded, and impoverished are less resilient against disease.

European settlers also captured and enslaved Indigenous people, often women and children, which made it harder for Indigenous societies to recover and repopulate once epidemics had passed.

The 'virgin soil' theory suggests that the deaths of Indigenous people were accidental and unpreventable, absolving European settlers of any moral responsibility for depopulation.

All without even taking into account the occasions when settlers intentionally used smallpox and other illnesses as biological weapons in their colonization efforts.

The virgin soil theory isn't just a flawed interpretation of the facts; it also has troubling political consequences.

It suggests the deaths of Indigenous people were accidental and unpreventable, absolving European settlers of any moral responsibility for depopulation.

It implies that Indigenous people, because they were more susceptible to disease, were less biologically fit than Europeans. This bolsters the ideology that Europeans were naturally superior to other races and therefore justified in ruling them.

The truth is, this catastrophe wasn't inevitable. Diseases don't strike randomly;they're shaped by the conditions of the communities they touch.

History has shown that, in every time and place, social and environmental factors like nutrition, housing, and sanitation are the most important determinants of how a population fares during a disease outbreak.

So, Indigenous people are at the highest risk in the COVID-19 pandemic for the same reasons they were so staggeringly affected by contact epidemics. Due to colonization, many Indigenous communities are still faced with food scarcity, overcrowded housing, dirty water and substandard health care.

Indigenous leaders expected the worst from COVID because they've been getting the worst from the Canadian government and its counterparts to the south.

To improve disease outcomes for everyone, we need to look past biology and start making meaningful, permanent changes to the circumstances people are living in day to day.

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