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Native americans and colonialism
Native americans and colonialism
Native americans and colonialism
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Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette are French explorers best known for their joint discovery of the Mississippi River in 1673, an area which the Native Americans called the “Mesipe”. Being the first white men to see and explore this area, they brought various information about the character of the river, the animals, the Indians living on its shores, the forests, the soils, and the minerals that surrounded the river back to the French. They also told people about the magnificence of the vast country that lay outside their borders which encouraged people to move westward. These explorers are credited with the first exploration of the Mississippi River however, they are not the first. Hernando DeSoto was a Spanish Explorer who was the first
In the late 1800s, tensions were rising between white Americans and Native Americans. The white Americans wanted the Native Americans to conform to their definition of civility. The Native Americans had clung tightly to their culture and religious practices during a time of continuous encroachment and governmental pressure by the white Americans. By this time, Native Americans had already been forced westward onto reservations through government action. Andrew Jackson had set this migration in motion earlier in the century, and the migration pattern would later be referred to as the “Trail of Tears”.
Humans have been fighting wars and conquering each other since they set foot on this world. We fight like dogs and cats, taking each other's wealth, land, and power, yet we still say it is wrong to take something away from someone. Why is it wrong for the Americans to take the Native American's land when the Native Americans take other people's lands too? Whether the land is yours or not depends solely on how strong your army is and how large your land is. If Whites developed more advanced weaponry, better battle strategies, and were more determined than the Native people already on the land, then the land they take belongs to them.
The relations between the early settlers and the native Americans were sour from the start of American settlement. The main cause of this bitterness was that fact that the first settlers aka puritans only saw Indians as savages and that the Indians would be never be equal to them, and the start of this conflict was when puritans started seizing native American land for their own use illegally. and even though most native Americans didn 't like the settlers some tribes sided with the settlers in future wars to come. The Pequot war was a long ongoing feud between settlers and some native tribes against the most powerful tribe in Rhode island:
When the settlers of Europe first came to the new world, they were introduced to the Native Americans. The settlers wanted the Natives to follow their culture and its benefits such as education, religion, and the usage of the environment. The Native Americans refused the request, stating they have their own type of culture, believing it to be the most superior; as a result, the Natives’ statement angered the ethnocentric settlers. Consequently, this caused a conflict between the two groups because of their culture differences. Firstly, the main culture difference consists of religion, tradition, and way of living.
When European settlers first broke land in American, several differences divided them from natives previously inhabiting this "new" land. Back home the Europeans were accustomed to large masses of people inhabiting small areas with well defined borders under a single government. The native Americans however were the exact opposite; they were accustomed to smaller groups of people in large vast areas with socially defined borders. The native Americans were also, for the most part, self governed within their respective tribes. With these stark differences, coupled with the ethnocentric perspective of the Europeans, it is easy to see how conflict quickly exploded into violent incidents.
With the arrival of Anglo-Americans, Native Americans lost much more than just their land. Tribes were forced onto reservations, stripped of their culture, wealth and place in society, with no hope of regaining what they owned unless by complete assimilation. For the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Anglo-Americans continually pushed for Native Americans to abandon their cultures and “savage” ways. However, despite the many attempts to force Natives into Anglo-American culture, many Native Americans found ways to negotiate with the demands of the Anglo-Americans through mainly social, economic and legal means.
Two animals that dominated the lives of the tribe’s were the horses and buffalo. Horses gave them mobility the tribes tended not to stay in one place they stayed two weeks at the most they were constantly moving. More important than the horse were the buffalo there were millions of buffalo that lived on the plains. When the civil war was over there were fifteen to thirty million buffalo living on the plains wildly freely grazing. When Spaniards traveled to the Plains and planned to stay and see how many buffalo passed.
wars with Native Americans. During 1860, Americans kept on migrating throughout the Great Plains to get more land and discover gold, silver, and other minerals. There was a land called the Black Hills that was considered sacred by many Native Americans. In 1875 the U.S. government opened up the land to allow gold mining. The Native Americans who inhabited that land refused to leave, so the U.S. military decided to relocate them using force.
The Indians, known to be peaceful and loving people; suddenly after the arrival of the prominent Christopher Columbus in the New World became faced with the ultimate challenge to conquer, or to be conquered. Columbus imposed his quest on them, although they had already established their own colony. This group of natives that faced enslavement, misery and death, were often wanted and needed for the success of many colonists. While Columbus and the Spaniards motive was to obtain wealth from the Indians, their ultimate goal along with the English who supervened in 1607, followed by the French, was to increase their superiority through European colonization. The hardworking, resourceful, independent Indians reacted in different ways towards colonization
Contacts between the Native Americans and the Europeans brought changes to the American Indian societies through three ways. First, since the Spaniards established their settlements by taking over American Indians land, they lived with the Native Americans that survived during the war. As a result, this caused a formation of many different mixed societies. For instance, when the Taino women began to marry Spanish men, they produced a mixed society called the mestizos. After a generation, the Tainos were evolved into another group, and they were no longer distinct as a people or group.
Native Americans flourished in North America, but over time white settlers came and started invading their territory. Native Americans were constantly being thrown and pushed off their land. Sorrowfully this continued as the Americans looked for new opportunities and land in the West. When the whites came to the west, it changed the Native American’s lives forever. The Native Americans had to adapt to the whites, which was difficult for them.
The American Revolution lasted six years and the impacts of it were everlasting(Schultz, 2010). The effects were felt by every group of people in North America and many worldwide. Even though George Washington had all of his troops vaccinated against smallpox, the colonists were not so fortunate and as a results some estimates are that as many as one hundred and thirty thousand people died from this dreaded disease. This loss of life combined with the divisions among the colonies into those loyal to Britain and those who wanted freedom would forever change the way of life for the colonists.
“The Other” is a term, in this instance, is used to explain ways in which Europeans and Native American were polarized. “The Other” is when 2 groups meet each other they both seem as “the other” and they're both outsiders. Europeans and Native Americans’ first contact was jarring because of the familial, religious, and societal differences the two had. An example of the difreence of Native Aericans and Europeans were their perceptions on ownership.
The central idea of this passage is that we all come from different places, we all have different lifestyles, we all have different religions we live upon, but the one thing we all do have in common is that God created us and put us on this planet for a reason. The passage explains that we are all different, and that religion may have something to do with that. The Christians say they aren 't as good to the Indians as the Indians are to them. The Christians are beginning to realize that the Indians are barbaric animals like they see them, them are now realizing that they are humans, too.