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The And Native American Populations

Decent Essays

From a European stand point, altering the lives of the Native Americans was a perfectly justifiable action. They were uncivilized, and thus must be welcoming of their attempts to convert them to a more advanced manner of living. At the same time, however, they must have notions of owning land, of claiming sections of the Earth as their own, of trade and association of certain objects with high value. This, however, was a paradoxical viewpoint. The main problem that resulted from the intermixing of European and Native American populations was a misunderstanding of what each culture maintained as important within their lives. To the natives, mourning wars, gods who were part of the Earth itself, sacrifices, and any other number of various traditions were natural to who they were. The Europeans, in contrast, valued war as a means of gaining territory, not people; they often were monotheistic, with odd customs all their own, such as self-torture or confession. The differences between the two cultures could have been overcome, perhaps, if there had been some attempt to understand one another’s values. However, as evidenced, Europeans did not attempt to understand without an ultimate aspiration to change. One of the defining aspects that shaped Native American life after exposure to the Europeans was the disease they brought along with them. In The Jesuit Relations, as well as in other readings, the fathers explained this illness as a sort of cleansing designed by God. They

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