Native Americans. I do not believe that you intended any racism in mentioning that, and I am not accusing you of it. But perhaps you are not aware that the disease explanation for diminished numbers of Native Americans is used in both overt and subtle racism as a means of whitewashing history. Very common among academics and in American History courses in high schools and colleges.
It is true that huge numbers of Natve people died from European diseases that they had no immunity to.
It is also true that wars between Native people and European colonists and (later European Americans) were brutal on both sides.
But some causes of Native deaths and anihilations of whole tribes often left out are: Europeans stirring up wars in order to get Native captives for the slave trade (popular in both colonial New England and the Carolinas); taking over Native land, leaving them without survival resources (throughout American history); forced relocations, e.g. the Trail of Tears (ethnic cleansing); slaughters of subdued tribes out of white fears and ignorance of religious practices (Wounded Knee); deliberate starvation on reservations by not delivering supplies agreed on in surrender treaties; offering federal bounties for the scalps of every Native man, woman, and child found off of a reservation. (When supplies did not come in, many Natives slipped off the reservations to locate food for their families.)
In more modern times, from the mid 1800s up to the 1970s, there were the forced assimilation boarding schools where hundreds of Native children died from abuse and neglect, were buried in unmarked graves, and recorded as runaways.
There is still a large problem today in the US and Canada of Native women "disappearing." Their bodies are often never found, but even when they are, the deaths are often not investigated. In some communities, Native women, from puberty to adulthood, are considered "fair game."
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