Natives Vs Settlers Analysis

The native populations suffered incredibly by the Europeans colonization, because of the purposeful mistreatment they put on them. For instance, a Spanish reporter for the government, wrote to his king in 1516 about the behavior his expedition put on the natives. He stated how the native populations had to ender limbs being cut off, and being eaten alive by dogs (Document 1). This is purposeful mistreatment because hearing the natives cry in agony, and watch in terror as their friends and family die in front of them, was not necessary. This could have been easily avoided if the Spanish weren’t so brutal. Secondly, Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was an energetic activist who aimed to protect the natives by writing a book in 1542. His book said that the native populations were kidnapped, abused and later killed. If the Spanish did not kill them directly, the natives would end up killing themselves because the brutal treatment was not worth living (Document 8). The consequences of this include a native population decrease, and suicidal tendencies on the natives. This

In America in the early years the colonists used to criticise and describe the Native as a savages in their eating habits but they didn’t realize that they used to judge the Native Americans comparing to the european standards not their own. Even today we keep judging people from another culture the way they eat and we compare with our own standards without acknowledging their own culture and respecting it.

The Spanish Conquest of Mexico and the Aztec people started when Hernán Cortés led the Spanish conquistadors to Tenochtitlán and conquered the Aztec Empire in 1519. The Spaniards had gunpowder, dogs, horses, and armor that would help fight against the Azteca. The Native Americans wanted to only wound their enemies with their woodened clubs tipped and sharp obsidian that was powerful enough to smash the Spaniard’s helmets. The use of the double-bladed swords helped the Spaniards fight close combat with the Indians. As soon as their chief died the Azteca would back down. Not only did the weapons cause a huge impact on the Aztec but also the spread of diseases such as smallpox that were carried by the Europeans affected the population. After conquering the Indians, the intensions of the Spanish in Mexico was to spread their beliefs about Christianity, find gold and use them as slaves. In drastic ways the Spaniards changed the native communities, for instance plagues spread throughout the whole country side after the defeat of Tenochtitlán. Smallpox, measles, and influenza were the outbreaks that hit urban cities the hardest. In 1520-1521 an outbreak of smallpox caused thousands to die because Azteca medicine was not affective against these diseases. The second outbreak occurred in 1531 and it was smallpox again but combined with measles and the third wave of the disease lasted from 1576 to 1581 killing 300,000 to 400,000 of the Aztec population. The Native Americans did not

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west and found himself on the shores of a new world. His mission was to secure new land for Spain. Other European countries heard of his findings, they too crossed the ocean in hopes of securing new opportunities in this newly discovered land such as fur trading and gold mining. Little did they know that a community of indigenous people had already settled in this land thousands of years before. The Europeans decided to negotiate with the natives in order to set up their own communities in the land but the Native Americans held beliefs about society and religion that were far different from their European peers. Europeans thought the Indians to be “Noble Savages, gentle and friendly, but uncivilized, brutal, and barbaric” (citation). They could not see past their own

Reséndez’s emphasis on the Europeans’ actions rather than the European disease changes the perspective of colonial studies and supplements, rather than replaces, existing theories of depopulation like Crosby’s epidemic theory. It assigns active responsibility to Europe for the decimation of native populations (Reséndez, conversation in HIST 900, 2017). By addressing the European responsibility for Native American decimation, Reséndez transforms the existing narrative of Europe’s impact on the New World and redefines the story of the depopulation of Native American tribes.

However, as people had never imagined, the close communication brought disasters in the American continent. Unknown diseases, such as smallpox, from Europe killed most of the native without immunity. For example, a modern analysis states that the result of smallpox epidemic “proceeded to kill nearly half of the Aztecs, including Emperor Cuitlahuac… By 1618, Mexico’s initial population of about 20 million had plummeted to about 1.6 million.” (Doc 8) The declining native population changed the American demographical pattern to a large extent, pushing the indigenous people to extinction. Moreover, the conditions of African slaves reveals the misanthrope of the merciless European colonists. For example, John Barbor eyewitnessed the terrible slave trade where “they are put into a booth or prison, marked on the breast with a red-hot iron, imprinting the mark of the French, English, or Dutch companies.” (Doc 9) The catastropy of American and African people greatly transformed the political pattern in the “New World.” In Twelve Years a Slave, in the nineteenth century, 300 years later, in the U.S., almost all of the Indians settlers were expeled and excluded from the white society. The slaves in American society were suffering the terrible atrocities. However, given the “expensive” price, the American continent became a cultural hodgepodge with the intermingle ethnic

The smallpox disease took a major toll on the Tenochtitlan, killing them in the horrible ways, in document 7 they talk about how the smallpox would leave anyone with it, bedridden and not able to move because of the pain caused by the disease (document 7). This shows how bad the spaniards were by how they did not even care that so many of these Native Americans were dying and dying in horrible ways, all caused by

Nowadays we all know that Native Americans were part of a civilized culture. Some pieces of evidence that Native American cultures were civilized are there immense cities, abundance of rituals, and their unique, and advanced, technology, altered to fit their different needs based off geography and climate. The civilization was misunderstood by the Europeans for a couple of reasons. One being, the fact that some travelers only saw limited Native Americans and never came across full cities of them, only the leftovers of where they once resigned. Another reason being, some Europeans couldn’t deal with the fact that another group of people who seemed so savage and different to them could be capable of great feats of technology and

“The Indians were totally deprived of their freedom and were put into the harshest, fiercest, most horrible servitude and captivity which no one who has not seen it can understand. Even beasts enjoy more freedom when they are allowed to graze in the field” (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas).

As Tindall and Shi put it, “ tribal cohesion and cultural life disintegrated, and efforts to resist European assaults collapsed” (15). The Spanish and Portuguese immediately began to enslave the surviving Indians and put them to work in mines and on sugar plantations under a system they called the, “encomienda system”. Many of the elite American Indians who survived disease did not fare any better, as their legitimacy as chiefs and religious leaders was stripped away from them. This system was meant to colonize, subjugate, and forcefully assimilate the Native Americans to cruel and harmful condition, all in the name of profit (Parker 54). Soon, however, the European empires faced a problem regarding the low amount of laborers due mainly to the smallpox epidemic. This caused the Spanish and Portuguese empires to switch from American Indian labor, to African slave labor. Bringing the African slaves to the Western hemisphere began a long history of bondage that would continue in the American continents until Brazil finally abolished slavery in 1888. To add to all of that, the African slaves brought their own diseases that not even the white europeans were immune to such as, malaria, yellow fever, and cholera among others. The diminution of American Indian populations continued even after the fall of the Incan and Aztec empires. As the

Europeans sailed to explore and find new lands where they could share their religions and gain glory for the finding of new islands. The indigenous people were on the verge of extinction due to the exploration and colonization of the Americas. Everyday, the Natives were forced to destroy their own culture, former beliefs, and selves. The Spaniard colonizers used inhumane acts as attempts to control the Natives and force them to complete tasks for them. The Spaniards viewed their lifestyle as superior and attempted to convert the indigenous people to follow their clean lifestyle. Spaniards did not view the Natives as equals which caused the justification of why they treated the Natives so poorly. The exploration of the Americas resulted in the

In the larger centers of highland Mexico and Peru, millions of people died. On some Caribbean islands, the Native American population died out completely, stripping the America much of its culture. When the Europeans were first introduced, the Native people had no natural immune defence against them and thus culminated in lives being lost, cultures being lost and monocultures being acquired. Another effect of the global trade was the promotion of Transatlantic Slave trade. Not many Natives were left to do the labour that the Spaniards were requiring them to do.

From what we learned in chapter one, Native Americans had a thriving civilization and Samuel de Champlain's sketch verifies the fact that Indians had a well-structured society. Before the arrival of English immigrants, Indians had societies that were much more advanced than what they were depicted as back in England. They cultivated fields, innovated canoes in order to fish, and were people that had developed a highly functional community, that greatly contradicted the statements of the English settlers. Colonists wrote accounts to England and prospective immigrants about how the New World's natives were nothing more than savages and immoral people that did not deserve the area they resided in because they did nothing to "improve" the land

Overall, one very important aspect that I have learned from this course is how to interact with people who criticize Native Americans. Since the conquering of the United States and up to the reform era, many people lacked “all appreciation of the Indian cultures, they were intent on forcing upon the natives the qualities that they themselves embodied.” (Prucha, 1986, p.199). Some non-natives have said and believe that: “the Indians were conquered, they should have just assimilated.” Staring into their eyes knowing, at this day in time, if their eminent domain was threatened or subject to being attacked or “conquered” they would not assimilate. There would be a fight! A fight much like the Indians did to keep their culture, their homestead,

During the sixteenth century in western hemisphere, approximately ninety percent of the native inhabitants perished within one century right following the European discovery of the Americas, which was due to the natives, they were irresistible to the various infectious diseases brought by the Europeans. In order to fill the vacancies of labor force, starting from the sixteenth century, a huge amount of African slaves