Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate (review)

The major premises of Henige’s extended historiographical essay are well-known to scholars who follow the debate about the size of the Amerindian population at time of contact with the Old World. Sadly, he believes that his is a voice in the wilderness, because the general public has not yet benefited from the correctives that he recommends—correctives that any well-trained history graduate student knows well. According to Henige, in spite of repeated warnings concerning the reliability of primary published sources and the questionable use of quantitative methods, those who have posited larger and larger native American populations have been successful in establishing a new paradigm. The author’s introductory comment in the first chapter, “Do Numbers Lie?”, sets the stage for the exercise: “Earlier criticisms, both my own and those discussed herein, have not succeeded in stemming the tide of thinking that presumes the possibility of reaching defensible and definitive numbers for the contact population of the Americas (15).” Henige seems unaware that anyone with even a modest introductory social statistics course knows that numbers can lie and that they can be manipulated, as they have been to great effect countless times in the past. Indeed, many of the examples Henige provides in subsequent chapters to buttress his contention that it is impossible ultimately to provide definitive numbers for the contact Amerindian population have been used by prior authors.

In one of the largest chapters, and obviously one of the most important, “Damning the Torpedos,” the author examines part of the work done by the “Berkeley School”—Woodrow Borah, Sherburne F. Cook, and Lesley Bird Simpson, who have been major figures in the population debate. The critique recapitulates Henige’s well-known arguments in scholarly journals. He repeatedly mentions the reluctance of those that he critiques to defend themselves; the case of Borah, who is still alive, is most perplexing to him. “In the fifteen years or so since the appearance of the last of these challenges Borah has ignored them entirely and has been joined in his silence by most of the other High Counters (50).”

Henige suggests that Borah and Cook’s estimate of 25 million for Mexico “(or numbers very much like it) continues to be the single most cited figure both within and, even more, outside the field (51).”¹ His evidence for this suggestion, however, is slim, based more on impression than fact. One might argue instead that the downwardly revised figure of 12 million (or so) proposed by Denevan (based on an analysis by Sanders) in his introduction to Native Population of the Americas in 1492 is the most widely used figure.² Since a principal purpose of Henige’s text is to challenge the Cook-Borah paradigm, he should have provided a count of the references to the 25 million figure—with an attempt at quality evaluation. Herein lies the problem with Henige’s discourse: He charges his so-called enemies with using sources selectively, but he does so himself.

At times, Henige goes beyond normal academic discourse in a way designed clearly to offend and force rebuttal or challenge. Take, for example, the following provocation: “There is reason to suspect that Cook and Borah did not benefit from criticism at the front end of the process either. The volumes on Mexico were all published in Ibero-Americana, a series under their control, while the University of California Press—a house organ—published their other works” (331 n. 131). Perhaps nowhere is the abrasive rhetorical approach more pitched than in Henige’s attacks on Henry F. Dobyns. “In effect Dobyns treats his sources—in the 1966 paper and elsewhere—as a species of silly putty, to be shaped to conform to his own predispositions (82).” Dobyn’s 1966 article—“Estimating Aboriginal American Populations: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology, VII (1966), 395–449—was critiqued competently and professionally by a number of specialists...