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Native American Tribes Early Colonial Era. Presentation created by Robert Martinez Primary Content: America’s History, 6 th edition Images as cited.
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Native American TribesEarly Colonial Era Presentation created by Robert Martinez Primary Content: America’s History, 6th edition Images as cited.
Native Americans along the Atlantic coast of North America also lived in the New World, but for them it was a bleak and dangerous place. Europeans had invaded their lands, introduced deadly diseases, and erected hundreds of permanent settlements. www.nps.gov
Some Indian peoples, among them the Pequot in New England and the Susquehannock in Virginia, resisted the invaders by force. ancientlights.org
Others, most prominently the Iroquois, used European guns and manufactures to dominate other tribes. Still other native peoples retreated into the mountains or moved west to preserve their traditional cultures. www.superstock.com
As the Puritans embarked for New England, they pondered the morality of intruding on Native American lands. “By what right or warrant can we enter into the land of the Savages?” they asked themselves. www2.needham.k12.ma.us
Responding to such concerns, John Winthrop detected God’s hand in these events and pointed to a recent smallpox epidemic that devastated the local Indian peoples. “If God were not pleased with our inheriting these parts,” he asked, “why doth he still make roome for us by diminishing them as we increase?” doctorpence.blogspot.com
Citing the Book of Genesis, the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay Colony declared that the Indians had not “subdued” their land and therefore had no “just right” to it. www.cherokeesofsouthcarolina.com
Believing they were God’s chosen people, the Puritans often treated Native Americans with a brutality equal to that of the Spanish conquistadors and Nathaniel Bacon’s frontiersmen. greensleeves.typepad.com
When Pequot warriors attacked English farmers who had intruded onto their lands in the Connecticut River Valley in 1636, a Puritan militia attacked a Pequot village and massacred some five hundred men, women, and children. www.historycentral.com
Like most Europeans, English Puritans saw the Indians as “savages” and culturally inferior peoples. But the Puritans were not racists as the term is understood today. They did not believe that Native Americans were genetically inferior to them; in fact, they believed they were white people with sun-darkened skin. demingbrew.com
“Sin,” not race, accounted for the Indians’ degeneracy. “Probably the devil” delivered these “miserable savages” to America, Cotton Mather suggested, “in hopes that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his absolute empire over them.” www.uh.edu
This interpretation of the Indians’ history inspired another Puritan minister, John Eliot, to convert them to Christianity. Eliot translated the Bible into Algonquian and undertook numerous missions to Indian villages in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. rifootprints.com
Because the Puritans demanded that Indians understand the complexities of Protestant theology, only a few Native Americans became full members of Puritan congregations. kids.britannica.com
The Puritans created praying towns that were similar to the Franciscan missions in New Mexico. By 1670, more than 1,000 Indians lived in 14 special towns like Natick (Massachusetts) and Maanexit (Connecticut). public.gettysburg.edu
Even the coastal Indians who remained in their ancestral villages had lost much of their independence and traditional culture. www.birdsofafeather.ca
By the 1670s, there were 3 times as many whites as Indians in New England. The English population now totaled some 55,000, while the number of Native peoples had plummeted – from an estimated 120,000 in 1570 to 70,000 in 1620, to barely 16,000. www.understandingrace.org
To Metacom, leader of the Wampanoags, the future looked grim. When his people copied English ways by raising hogs and selling pork in Boston, Puritan officials accused them of selling at “an under rate” and placed restrictions on their trade. 4.bp.blogspot.com
When natives killed wandering livestock that damaged their cornfields, English authorities, denounced them for violating their property rights. news.discovery.com
Like Opechancanough in Virginia and Pope in New Mexico, Metacom concluded that only military resistance could save Indian lands and culture. www.warpaths2peacepipes.com
So in 1675, the Wampanoags’ leader, whom the English called King Philip, forged a military alliance with the Narragansetts and Nipmucks and began attacking white settlements throughout New England. en.wikipedia.org
Bitter fighting continued into 1676, ending only when the Indian warriors ran short of guns and powder and when the Massachusetts Bay government hired Mohegan and Mohawk warriors, who ambushed and killed Metacom. www.gutenberg.org
The rebellion was a deadly affair. The fighting was long and hard, Indians destroyed 20 percent of the English towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and killed 1,000 settlers, nearly 5 percent of the adult population. pipenozzle.com
Had “the Indians not been divided,” remarked one settler, “they might have forced us [to evacuate] to Som Islands & there to have planted a little Corne, & fished for our liveings.” But the Natives’ own losses – from famine and disease, death in battle, and sale into slavery – were much larger. media.portland.indymedia.org
About 4,500 Indians died, a quarter of an already-diminished population. Many of the surviving Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck peoples migrated farther into the New England backcountry, where they intermarried with Algonquin tribes allied to the French. www.questgarden.com
Over the next century, these displace Indian peoples would take their revenge, joining with French Catholics to attack their Puritan enemies. www.thepirateking.com
As English towns slowly filled the river valleys along the Atlantic coast, the Indians who lived in the great forested areas beyond the Appalachian Mountains remained independent.
Yet the distant Indian peoples – the Iroquois, Ottawas, Crees, Illinois, and many more – also felt the European presence through the fur trade.
As they bargained for woolen blankets, iron cooking ware, knives, and guns, Indians learned to avoid the French at Montreal, who demanded two beaver skins for a woolen blanket.
Instead, they dealt with the Dutch and English merchants at Albany, who asked for only one pelt. Still, because the Indians had no way of knowing the value of their pelts in Europe, they rarely secured the highest possible price.
Nor could they control the impact of European traders and settlers on their societies. All Indian peoples were diminished in number and vitality as they encountered European diseases, European guns, and European rum.
Most Native societies also lost their economic independence. As they exchanged furs for European-made iron utensils and woolen blankets, Indians neglected their traditional artisan skills, making fewer flint hoes, clay pots, and skin garments.
Religious autonomy vanished as well. When French missionaries won converts among the Hurons, Iroquois, and Illinois, they divided Indian communities into hostile religious factions.
Likewise, constant warfare for furs altered the dynamics of tribal politics by shifting power from cautious elders to headstrong young warriors.
The position and status of Indian women changed. Traditionally, eastern woodland women had asserted authority as the chief providers of food and handcrafted goods. The disruption of farming by warfare and the influx of European goods undermined the economic basis of women’s power.
Paradoxically, though, among the Iroquois and other victorious tribes, the influence of women may have increased because they assumed responsibility for the cultural assimilation of hundreds of captives.
There is no doubt that the sheer extent of the fur industry – the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of beaver, deer, otter, and other animals – profoundly altered the environment.
As early as the 1630s, a French Jesuit worried that the Montagnais people, who lived north of the St. Lawrence, were killing so many beaver that they would “exterminate the species in this Region, as has happened among the Hurons.”
As the animal populations died off, steams ran faster (there were fewer dams) and the underbrush grew denser (there were fewer deer to trim the vegetation). The native environment, as well as its animals and peoples were now part of a new American world.
What were the major social and environmental developments that made America a new world for both Europeans and Indians?
