This Persistent Myth About Native Americans Needs Debunking

No myth about Native people is as pervasive, pernicious, or self-serving as the myth of the vanishing Native, also known as “the vanishing Indian” or “the vanishing race.” The myth, which had been building for centuries, reached an extreme at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when the Indian wars of resistance had come to a conclusion, punctuated by the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. In 1900 the US census counted approximately a quarter of a million Indians, a small fraction of the Indigenous population in 1492 (even based on a modest population estimate of ten million), and census figures such as this have been used to “prove” the vanishing Indian myth.