Native Americans By James Axtell

Native Americans have existed in the different regions-the plains, mountains, marshes- of the North American continent- long before the United States existed. Yet, most were not treated with the respect and dignity that the white American settlers were given. Viewed as outlandish and savage by white settlers, series of negotiations to “correct” the Indian way of life were implemented- through forced relocation, war, and assimilation into white culture. Those who stood up against the American government were viewed as beacons of hope by their fellow Native Americans. Many Native American traditions still exist today, but unfortunately most of them have been lost along with their people.

The Lakota, an Indian group of the Great Plains, established their community in the Black Hills in the late eighteenth century (9). This group is an example of an Indian community that got severely oppressed through imperialistic American actions and policy, as the Americans failed to recognize the Lakota’s sovereignty and ownership of the Black Hills. Jeffrey Ostler, author of The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground, shows that the Lakota exemplified the trends and subsequent challenges that Indians faced in America. These challenges included the plurality of groups, a shared colonial experience, dynamic change, external structural forces, and historical agency.

Throughout the course of history there have been numerous accounts regarding Native American and European interaction. From first contact to Indian removal, the interaction was somewhat of a roller coaster ride, leading from times of peace to mini wars and rebellions staged by the Native American tribes. The first part of this essay will briefly discuss the pre-Columbian Indian civilizations in North America and provide simple awareness of their cultures, while the second part of this essay will explore all major Native American contact leading up to, and through, the American Revolution while emphasizing the impact of Spanish, French, and English explorers and colonies on Native American culture and vice versa. The third, and final, part of this essay will explore Native American interaction after the American Revolution with emphasis on westward expansion and the Jacksonian Era leading into Indian removal. Furthermore, this essay will attempt to provide insight into aspects of Native American/European interaction that are often ignored such as: gender relations between European men and Native American women, slavery and captivity of native peoples, trade between Native Americans and European colonists, and the effects of religion on Native American tribes.

The relationship between the English and the Native Americans in 1600 to 1700 is one of the most fluctuating and the most profound relationships in American history. On the one side of the picture, the harmony between Wampanoag and Puritans even inspires them to celebrate “first Thanksgiving”; while, by contrast, the conflicts between the Pequots and the English urge them to antagonize each other, and even wage a war. In addition, the mystery of why the European settlers, including English, become the dominant power in American world, instead of the indigenous people, or Indians, can be solved from the examination of the relationship. In a variety of ways, the relationship drastically alters how people think about and relate to the aborigines. Politically, the relationship changes to establish the supremacy of the English; the English intends to obtain the land and rules over it. Socially, the relationship changes to present the majority of the English settlers; the dominating population is mostly the English settlers. Economically, the relationship changes to obtain the benefit of the English settlers; they gain profit from the massive resource in America. Therefore, the relationship does, in fact, change to foreshadow the discordance of the two groups of people.

The Native Americans once thrived on the rich land of the Americas, and they built a long-lasting civilization with the help of nature, gods, and organized roles within the tribes. However, the thriving population plummeted after their encounter with diseases and forced labor brought upon them by the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores. Although at first the conquistadores mistreatment of Native Americans seem shallow and unethical, their conquest of the Americas only partially reflects the claims of the English Black Legends..

"No study of acculturation in colonial America would be complete,"(272) exclaims James Axtell in his book the european and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, "without giving equal thought to the question of how English culture was altered by its contacts with Native America." (272) during this anthropology and ethnohistory based work, James Axtell clearly lays on the table that this analysis inter-piled into a book wasn't meant to be simply a general assortment of Native american encounters and battles with the Europeans; but a real, real, and factual assessment of how they intermingled with one another. Showing how they were each able to interact as well as react to each others own beliefs and ways shows the

No written history means much of Native American history is unknown, causing misconceptions and stereotypes about Native Americans to exist. Royal also discusses the name of this group that people label today as “Native Americans.” He questions, “ ‘America’ was a name formed in the wake of another Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci. It is difficult to see how being named after an Italian is less Eurocentric than being named after an East Native American” (Royal 46). The discussion about their name shows Europe’s influence on the Americas; it also shows that Native Americans yearn for their own identity without Europe’s input.

In West of the Revolution, Saunt explores eight notable moments of interaction, and often first contact, between “old world” colonial powers and indigenous peoples in North America that were occurring simultaneously with the English colonists’ declarations of independence and armed revolt. By providing the reader with a broader perspective of what was happening throughout America in 1776, Saunt illustrates that our collective understanding of what constituted America at that time tends to be remarkably limited and that colonial struggles were multi-faceted, depicted here in a series of snapshots of our land’s history that challenge, complicate, and clarify our conception of what America was. What emerges from this mosaic is a pattern of European national, economic, and religious interests, arrogant and ignorant in equal measure, infiltrating into native lands with consequent uneasy alliances and outright hostilities

The massacre at Mystic was an attack by English white puritans in a colony called the Massachusetts Bay Colony, on a group of Native Americans called the Pequot Indian Tribe. It was the sudden influx of immigrants from England that ultimately resulted in repeated contacts with Native populations. Upon meeting the natives, they set about trying to convert the Indians into Christianity which turned out to be unsuccessful. On May 26, 1637, John Mason and his fellow colony members went ahead and burned down a Pequot fort, setting the tone for future encounters with Native Americans. What continues over the next hundred years is the steady degradation of the Native’s relationship such as the Indian Removal Act.

Author Alan Taylor believes that our traditional views of colonial history need to be revised in order to truly appre-ciate the events leading to a developed American society. Taylor offers a reconsidered approach in his book, Ameri-can Colonies, along with explanation to the new inclusions that will offer a substantive variation of perspectives as opposed to more conventional historical summarization. In the introduction, Taylor formulates his claim: That the traditional story of American uplift makes too many generalizations on the groups of people involved in the coloni-zation process to warrant a truthful narrative of the settling of America. Previous volumes of similar matters fail to be mindful that not all of colonial America was English, as native peoples encountered the Spanish from Mexico, the Russians travelling through Siberia, and the French navigating around the Great Lakes region (xi). Furthermore, plenty of English colonists did not prosper in the

"In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" is a nursery rhyme that can be heard repeated incessantly by elementary school students in America. It is used to help them remember when Christopher Columbus made his journey to the New World. Something that is conveniently left out of this nursery rhyme is how Columbus lead to the genocide of over a million Native Americans. Columbus is a villain that lead to the genocide of so many Native Americans. Howard Zinn and Arthur Schlesinger both evaluate Columbus’s role in the genocide of the Native Americans, however Zinn provides much better evidence, thus making his article the better of the two.

Throughout American history, different types of explorers from other continents have settled in this nation. By the seventeenth century, the amount of English settlers had increased tremendously, while the Indian settlers who were Indian chief, Powhatan, had decreased from 14,000 to 600. More than 95 percent of Powhatan’s settlers was exterminated due to the decrease in population of the Indian settlers. The author of this passage explains how, due to the diversity, the amount of tribes and settlers that escaped and were exterminated was high and it had a negative impact on them.

Talking Back to Civilization , edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, is a compilation of excerpts from speeches, articles, and texts written by various American Indian authors and scholars from the 1890s to the 1920s. As a whole, the pieces provide a rough testimony of the American Indian during a period when conflict over land and resources, cultural stereotypes, and national policies caused tensions between Native American Indians and Euro-American reformers. This paper will attempt to sum up the plight of the American Indian during this period in American history.

I agree with you on how you interpreted the tittle he was defiantly using it to alert the reader tot eh fact that there are “real” and “unreal” Indians. However; thinking back on the reading and remembering that he was writing this book for native Americans. I can see another alternative explanation. this alternative was that he was trying to tell other natives people who may have themselves lost touch with their own history what is “real” and “unreal”. I am sure that there are some parts of native history and stereotypes that many native people believe to be false. so in this chapter he was trying to not just let us to the facts and the truth but to alert native people to what was actually true about their history and what was false.

I have read two books about Native Americans; I thought this culture would be “}interesting to learn more about. To be honest with you, I’m not much into other cultures as much as Native Americans. There’s nothing wrong with other cultures, I just like the Indians the most. On the contrary, I thought the Egyptians we’re pretty cool to learn about too. Since, the Natives’ we’re actually from America, I’ve decided to do them, instead. I’ve always loved learning about what happened in my country in ancient times.