Henry Farmer Dobyns, Jr. (July 3, 1925 – June 21, 2009) was an anthropologist, author and researcher specializing in the ethnohistory and demography of native peoples in the American hemisphere.
Dobyns believed that the Indian population of the United States and Canada was 9.8 to 12.2 million people in 1500 and was reduced by 90 percent in the 16th century by continent-wide epidemics of disease introduced by European explorers and settlers.
Dobyns worked with Native American tribes on land claims and a water rights case while he was a graduate student at the University of Arizona in 1952.
From 1952 to 1956, he gathered ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence for the Hualapai Tribal Nation’s land claims case and acted as an expert witness before the U.S. Supreme Court with much of the information in his M.A.
He also spent three decades working as a consultant for the Gila River Indian Community in their litigation over water rights.
In 1983 he directed seminars on Native American Historical Demography, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
[7] Dobyn's assertion was that continent-wide epidemics of diseases introduced in the Americas by European explorers and settlers in the 16th century reduced the Indian population by 90 to 95 percent.
Dobyns based that view on evidence of 16th century epidemics impacting Indian societies in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru shortly after those places were visited or colonized by Europeans.
[8] Dobyns' high estimates of North American Indian populations also called into doubt the "national myth" that the United States and Canada were a mostly-empty wilderness ripe for exploitation when European settlers arrived in the early 17th century.
They accepted that pre-Dobyns estimates of American Indian populations were too low, but found little evidence to sustain Dobyns' opinion that 16th century epidemics were continent-wide in the Americas.