No, "Europeans and Their Diseases" Didn't Kill the Native Americans
Agricultural Collapse Did
Legend has it that European explorers brought their diseases to the Americas, which caused the collapse of, say, the Incan and Mayan civilizations. The image of “filthy Europeans” going around the world killing “more advanced people” just to “steal their resources” has been with us ever since. More likely, American civilizations collapsed due to the natives’ own failure to produce food.
About an hour from Cuzco city, Peru, Moray, is the “amazing agricultural research center” built by the ancient Incas. It’s a rice field but for trying out different crops at different temperatures in different types of topsoil. Indeed, different kinds of soils were imported from around Latin America to experiment with food production.
There’s a catch, though, in the form of this question: Why would the Latin American people have had a need to experiment with different agricultural crops? The answer is blatantly obvious: they were starving.
The existence of Moray proves that the natives were having trouble feeding their people. Either they had over-used their soil, exhausted certain species of crop, or were losing yield to natural plant diseases. In response, the natives panicked to find new types of crop-soil combinations that might provide the necessary food yields to feed a hungry population.
And clearly, they failed. And they failed just as the Europeans happened to be arriving.
It means that the natural extinction of the Native Americans—due to starvation—happened to coincide with the Spanish conquest. My argument makes sense, for had the native Latin Americans not been starving, i.e., if their economies had been strong, they would have certainly been able to resist a handful of conquistadors arriving on their shores.
Starving natives, however, faced with the collapse of their agricultural system, would not have been able to resist the Europeans.
In the end, Europeans “and their diseases” didn’t kill the Latin Americans at all. Diseases that never killed the European en masse (not even the Bubonic plague extinguished us) certainly wouldn’t mean the end to foreign peoples either. Unless you like to imagine “viruses flying ahead of the conquistadors to kill off entire towns of locals before the Europeans even found them”.
It’s time for Europeans to start correcting the record. We were never “diseased evil people”. We were good Samaritans looking to advance humanity.
People who keep pinning their own civilizations’ failures on the arrival of Europeans ought to be called out for what they really are: they are racists.