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Article ID: CBB001201587

“Rooted in Demographic Reality”: The Contribution of New World Censuses to Indigenous Survival (2014)

History and Anthropology
Volume: 25
Pages: 246--262

DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2014.882832

Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Part of the special issue: “Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities”.
Language: English

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Statistics Applied statistics Demography; population research Indigenous peoples; indigeneity Colonialism Science and culture Genetics Population genetics Maori (New Zealand people) Native American civilization and culture Census tabulation 19th century North America New Zealand

One of the most powerful narratives deployed by colonists in the nineteenth century was that the colonized natives were inherently too weak to survive contact with those who were colonizing them---the Dying Native story. I argue that to understand the history of this story, we should differentiate between three senses in which it could be taken as true or false: physical destruction, genetic adulteration and loss of distinct culture. The physical destruction version of the Dying Native was contested by some settler-colonial governments as they developed the capacity to manage and measure the numbers of those whom they classified as Indian or M ori or Aboriginal. However, the Dying Native story persisted as a narrative of these peoples' loss of genetic and/or cultural distinction. One strategy of Indigenous intellectuals has been to assert that they have survived as populations by adapting as peoples. In this paper, I show how an authoritative demography of colonized Indigenous populations in North America and New Zealand afforded discursive opportunities to some Indigenous intellectuals.

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Article Bennett, Tony; Dibley, Ben; Harrison, Rodney (2014) Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities. History and Anthropology (p. 137). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001201587/

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