Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (review)

"In a simpler world," David S. Jones begins, "suffering would elicit compassion from those who observe it" (1). But ours is not such a world. Instead, we are left with a range of reactions to the meaning of sickness and death in American life. Interpreting these varied responses lies at the heart of this narrative. In Rationalizing Epidemics, Jones attempts to unravel the significance of American Indian mortality from the seventeenth century onward. Within Native American historiography, there exists a vast scholarship on epidemic disease: everything from Alfred Crosby's Columbian Exchange (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972) to Elizabeth Fenn's more recent Pox Americana (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). But Jones does not wish to add to that catalog. Rather, Rationalizing Epidemics examines the various ways contemporary Americans—as well as later historians—understood the disparities between the health of citizen settlers and their native neighbors. Throughout his text, Jones argues persuasively that differences in health were not rooted in native genetic susceptibility, but "were produced by social forces, interpreted through social biases, and used to perpetuate social advantage" (7).

This ambitious monograph tries to uncover the meaning of meanings. That is, in the effort to make sense of disease in America, Jones illustrates how the discussion of health necessarily engaged debates over medical theory, economics, race relations, politics, social theory, and everyday life. In using these debates as a lens to interpret society and social change, Jones highlights how both whites and Native Americans assigned significance to the defining (and often traumatic) events in their lives.

Rationalizing Epidemics is organized around four different test cases: the arrival of Europeans and the virgin soil outbreaks of colonial New England; the transmission of smallpox on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century western frontier; the impact of tuberculosis on the Sioux of the Great Plains later in the nineteenth century; and finally, the catalogue of ill health that affected the Navajo of the American Southwest in the twentieth century. Each setting provides a different context for analysis. In early colonial America, for example, Jones counters the long-accepted belief that whites saw native depopulation as a gift from providence. The idea that God was on their side and had removed the pesky Indian obstacles is replaced with a more complex (and ever evolving) relationship where an understanding of common suffering and common humanity marked Euro-Indian dynamics. It is in this section that Jonesmakes pointed reference to historian William McNeill and Pulitzer Prize-winning physiologist Jared Diamond by arguing that the "social contingency of depopulation" must be considered over biological determinism (57).

Similarly, by the time smallpox hit the frontier, nearly all discussions of godly induced diseases were replaced by new theories of causation that ranged from the social to the environmental. This reformed understanding of disease and its impact, while not exactly encouraging relief efforts by whites, still made such actions, including vaccination programs, possible. On the plains, Jones chronicles the misguided federal effort to transform nomadic Sioux into sedentary agriculturalists. Once confined to settlements and reservations, the Sioux felt the full force of tuberculosis. Here too, even as some federal officials accepted the notion of inherent racial inferiority, others linked tuberculosis to Native Americans through more sophisticated arguments about range depletion, contaminated water supplies, or the failure of the federal government to deliver promised supplies. The result, then, was not a black-and-white portrayal of Indian weakness, but a situation where federal officials acted to curb the spread of the disease even as they accepted some blame for its arrival.

The last case study is perhaps the most unusual and the most enlightening in that it profiles the more recent effort to battle sickness and disease onNavajo reservations. In most standard histories of twentieth-century contact between whites and Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) rarely wears a white hat. Not surprisingly, BIA officials do not come off as the good...