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something to think about
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"many indigenous groups, hundreds of miles in the interior, felt the scourge of these diseases long before they saw the first European. The death of many elders - often the most vulnerable to illness - the inability of spiritual leaders to explain or control the epidemics, and the loss of hunters and leaders to the diseases and other consequences, caused many serious disruptions of indigenous cultures... there is little doubt that the introduction of virgin soil epidemics killed many people over the years; some groups lost more than 50 percent of their population... the land that Europeans entered in the era of settlement was not virgin territory, but widowed land"
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070227
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