‘NOBODY’S PLAN’

The next section of Summers’ speech—in which he commented on the demographic history of North America—sparked the most uproar among attendees.

“[W]hat actually comes out if you study it, and I think this is a relatively established fact, is that for everyone who was killed or maimed in some attack by European-descended Americans on the Native American population, for every conscious death that came in war, 10 were a consequence of the diseases that came to North America with European immigrants,” Summers said.

He noted that in some instances, colonists intentionally infected Native Americans with smallpox. “But the vast majority of the suffering that was visited on the Native American population as the Europeans came was not a plan or an attack,” Summers said in the speech. “It was in many ways a coincidence...Nobody’s plan.”

Summers said yesterday that he based the remark on several works of demographic history, including UCLA geographer Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel.”

“Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords,” Diamond writes.

When The Crimson told Shelemay last night that Summers had cited Diamond’s work, she exclaimed, “Oh my goodness.”

“This is not a nuanced source on Native American history,” Shelemay said.

Snipp, the Stanford sociologist, said yesterday that Summers’ claim—that many more indigenous people died from disease than from direct combat—is “factually correct.”

But Yellow Bird said that Summers’ comment downplayed the culpability of settlers and U.S. officials who engaged in coordinated campaigns of genocide against indigenous groups.

“The point is that you don’t minimize people’s lives and their deaths by creating some kind of apologist stance for colonialism,” Yellow Bird said.

In an interview yesterday, Summers said that “the horror of war is in no way diminished by the concurrent incidence of deaths from disease.”

“I was attempting to make the point from a policy perspective that tragedies happen both as a consequence of malice and because of accidents and inattention,” Summers said.

But several attendees had a different interpretation of the president’s statements.

“I may be missing some kind of semantic shading on all of this, but it does seem to me that this helps perpetuate a myth of American innocence,” said Robert Warrior, an associate professor of English at the University of Oklahoma who attended the conference.