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Native American Mentality Essay

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Many Europeans believed that they were superior to other cultures. They had a mindset that they were more deserving and more civilized than other peoples. This caused problems between the Europeans and other cultures. When the Europeans arrived in America, there was no hostility between the groups, but as time went on this European mentality caused many conflicts between the different cultures in the New World. Native americans were initially scared of the European settlers. A member of the Ojibwa tribe recounted a dream describing the Europeans. “Men of strange appearance have come across the great water…The men have long and sharp knives, and they have long black tubes which they point at birds and animals. The tubes make a smoke that rises into the …show more content…

An engraving of Dutch New Amsterdam shows Native Americans sharing the port and living close to the Europeans with no hostility between the groups. This all changed as the Europeans became more established and prosperous in the New World, and started thinking that they were better than other cultures such as the Africans and Native Americans. They forced the Native Americans into enslavement, and when they ran out of Natives they decided that the Africans would be good slaves too. From Slavery to Freedom discusses how slavery originated. “Virginians began to see . . . that Negroes . . . could be disciplined, even punished, [without regrets] since they were not Christians; and that the supply [seemed to be without end]. Black labor was precisely what Virginia needed in order to speed up the clearing of the forests and the [growing] of larger and better tobacco crops.” Slavery was extremely inhumane and cruel. Slave codes denied slaves basic human rights and treated them as property. Many slaves resisted or committed suicide during the transport to America, or middle passage, because of the nightmare that lay

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