Christopher Columbus: The Decolonization Of The New World

In 1492, Christopher Columbus made a discovery that affected the lives of many different ethnic groups around the world, in the years to come. The Spanish were funding his trip were trying to find a quicker way to get to the ports of the Asia and Columbus thought that he could find it by sailing westward. Instead of finding said route, he instead found the West Indies and what would eventually become North and South America. Now this would lead the Spanish, French, and English to start colonizing the “unclaimed” ground in the New World. When the Spanish started to colonize the New World, the natives were first conquered but then eventually accepted into the Spanish hierarchy of things. The French made treaties with the natives that had them

Around 1609, Samuel de Champlain settled Quebec as a trading outpost to get goods from the New World back to Europe. The French survived due to the establishment of a treaty with the Huron against the Iroquois Confederacy. “The French Empire in North America is built on a interlinking network of alliances with native peoples and kept alive by traditions of gift-giving and reciprocity” The French used these alliances to keep their control on the beaver skin trade to Europe. The English were the most barbaric of the three major European powers to colonize the New World. When the English started to colonize the New World, they first tried to settle at a place called Roanoke. “At the end of the first year, all of the surviving colonists get on a supply ship to go back to England.” This might have stemmed from the fact that the colonists turned on the natives that were supplying them with food to survive.

John White returned to Roanoke in 1587, this time as governor of the colony. His journal from that expedition documents the increasing hostilities between the Algonquian Indians and the English settlers. In this excerpt, White relates one of the English colonists’ more devastating mistakes: inadvertently attacking and killing some of their own Indian

The Spanish started out by conquering nations and then tried to convert the Native Americans to Christianity. The French kidnapped 10 Native Americans but then made a long lasting treaty that benefitted them and their Native American allies for years to come. The English were the worst of the bunch, killing their Native American allies and not planting crops that they could actually eat to having one of the most profitable colonies in the Americas and having good relations with their Native