Pestilence and Persistence: Yosemite Indian Demography and Culture in Colonial California - Hardcover

by Kathleen L. Hull (Author)

This innovative examination of the Yosemite Indian experience in California poses broad challenges to our understanding of the complex, destructive encounters that took place between colonists and native peoples across North America. Looking closely at archaeological data, native oral tradition, and historical accounts, Kathleen Hull focuses in particular on the timing, magnitude, and consequences of the introduction of lethal infectious diseases to Native communities. The Yosemite Indian case suggests that epidemic disease penetrated small-scale hunting and gathering groups of the interior of North America prior to face-to-face encounters with colonists. It also suggests, however, that even the catastrophic depopulation that resulted from these diseases was insufficient to undermine the culture and identity of many Native groups. Instead, engagement in colonial economic ventures often proved more destructive to traditional indigenous lifeways. Hull provides further context for these central issues by examining ten additional cases of colonial-era population decline in groups ranging from Iroquoian speakers of the Northeast to complex chiefdoms of the Southeast and Puebloan peoples of the Southwest.

Front Jacket

This is not just a book about the Yosemite Indians but a landmark contribution to the study of North American historical demography. Kathleen Hull's writing, remarkably lucid and flowing, is a delight to read.--Dean R. Snow, President, Society for American Archaeology

"Pestilence and Persistence evaluates competing theories about the effects of introduced diseases on historic Native American communities. Through comparative study of the Yosemite Indians with native groups in ten other regions of North America, Kathleen Hull demonstrates that Native American populations responded to colonial epidemics with flexible strategies that promoted cultural and demographic survival. This empirically rigorous and well-crafted book will be an invaluable resource for historians and anthropologists of North America's colonial era and for any scholar investigating the cultural consequences of epidemic disease."--Barbara L. Voss, author of The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis

Author Biography

Kathleen L. Hull is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Merced.