Efforts by Europe's Government to undermine Indian governmental Kingship.

2 Scholars have long had reliable information on the size of the Indigenous population in this hemisphere and this country at its nadir around the turn of the twentieth century. And in recent decades, investigators have developed a range of estimates of the Native population in the Western Hemisphere before 1492. Researchers have also amassed considerable knowledge about the role of diseases, wars, genocidal violence, enslavement, forced relocations, the destruction of food sources, the devastation of ways of life, declining birth rates, and other factors in the Indigenous Holocaust.3 This paper draws on the work of Russell Thornton, David Stannard, and other scholars in attempting to count the dead—that is, in developing informed and reasonable, if very rough, estimates of the total loss of Indigenous lives caused by colonialism in the Western Hemisphere and in what is today the United States of America. Although this analysis is inevitably grim and saddening, there is much to be gained by understanding the most sustained loss of life in human history—both for people living today and for future generations.  Native American populations were probably reduced not only by the direct and indirect effects of disease but also by direct and indirect effects of wars and genocide, enslavements, removals and relocations, and changes in American Indian societies, cultures, and subsistence patterns accompanying European colonialism.38    The Spanish missions in California, Florida, and Texas; the U.S. government’s attempts to make Plains Indians into cattle ranchers and southern Indians into American farmers…efforts by churches and governments to undermine Indian religious, governmental, and kinship systems… the often-deliberate destructions of flora and fauna that American Indians used for food and other purposes…the near extinction of the buffalo…50