 Like Ward Churchill, he believes that the American natives were deliberately and systematically exterminated over the course of several centuries, and that the process continues to the present day.Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been disputed because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease.In response, political scientist R. J. Rummel has instead estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million American indigenous people were the victims of what he calls "democide."