The Native Americans And The Europeans

This land bridge was over 600 miles wide was present for thousands of years and that there was life here as it had its own flora and fauna. While the Bering Land Bridge Theory does not directly challenge Traditional Native American history, the Beringia Standstill Theory does. This theory implies that the Native Americans ancestors were not originally from North America. The idea is that the Native American’s ancestors originally were from Northeast Siberia. The Siberian people lived there for tens of thousands of years before the ice age, but after the ice age took effect the Siberian people began to abandon the region some going south towards the mainland while others went north away from the mainland. The split occurred roughly 23,000 years ago and the Siberia people who went North away from the mainland settled on the Bering Land Bridge. Because this land bridge known as Beringia had flora and fauna the living conditions here were suitable for settlement and so these people did so for over 5,000 years. Approximately 18,000 years ago, the Bering land Bridge began to melt and is believed to have completely melted away about 12,000 years ago. With the end of the ice age near the inhabitants of Beringia were forced to migrate as massive flooding began

According to Peggy Baker, of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, the fur trade between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans began sometime around 1625. The Pilgrims were in enormous debt with investors in Europe and needed money to repay this debt. They knew that one of the best ways to make the money was through fur trade and they knew the best furs to trade were beaver furs. However, the beavers were in Maine with the American Indians. Hence, the Pilgrims began the fur trade with the Native Americans. The Native Americans would hunt the beaver and trade the fur with Europeans for goods such as grain, cooking pots, tools, clothing, and blankets. As the fur trade continued throughout America, the impact on the Native Americans began.

As any society does when two cultures are put together, there is assimilation and anguish. This is shown by the Native Americans and the Europeans, when the latter came to the Americas in hope of land and wealth, which did not belong to them. The Europeans encountered great diversity when stepping foot into the Americas. Cultures of the Indians had them shocked; while they regarded them as “noble savages,” the Indians had a society much more complex than any European society. They had language, government, social organization, and intellect skilled in mathematics, astrology, and astronomy. Civil interaction between the two only occurred when the Europeans needed something, such as gold, fur and land. Although they helped the Europeans as much as possible, with food and shelter, these Native cultures found themselves disrupted, if not destroyed, by the European’s arrival. In this essay, I hope to analyze the relationship between the Native Americans and the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch and how they affected one another.

Long before the Western countries discovered North America, the Native Americans lived and thrived here. Historians believe these wandering peoples crossed over a land bridge that formed when the earth froze over, officially named Beringia, to get to North America. These nomadic Natives began spreading and forming different tribes around North America. One of the many tribes was the Ais Indians of Florida. By themselves, the tribes reigned the New World, but contact with the Westerns began their tragic demise.

The moment when Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas was the beginning of the interactions between American Indians and European colonists. These very first interactions were mostly positive due to the the generosity of the Indians but turned violent when the Europeans began to mistreat, kidnap, enslave, and kill the American Indians. Actions taken by the American Indians and European Colonists, especially actions of violence, during the 1600s caused the relationship between the two parties to be negative and conflicting in New England and Chesapeake.

At first Native Americans, Europeans and Africans were separated by the vast oceans in between their continents, but as technologies and trade in Europe advanced the three region’s worlds collided. There were various similarities and differences in policy, economy and religion amongst the three regions but alas, contact between these empires reaped inevitable change among all these for the better or worse.

Europeans lived a much more modern way of life than the primitive lifestyle of Native Americans. Europeans referred to themselves as “civilized” and regarded Native Americans as “savage,” “heathen,” or “barbarian.” Their interaction provoked by multiple differences led to misunderstanding and sometimes conflict. These two cultures, having been isolated from one another, exhibited an extensive variation in their ideals. Europeans and Native Americans maintained contradictory social, economic, and spiritual practices.

English colonists first came to America late 1500s with the lost colony of Roanoke. English settlers then tried again for a permanent settlement in the early 1600s with Jamestown. Following Jamestown the English were consistently sending new colonists from England to America. The first English settlers had faced quite the hardships. None of the colonists were prepared or equipped with the knowledge to survive in their new environment. This is where Native American and English colonists interactions began. Prior to English settlers, the Native Americans had also had interactions with the Spanish. At first people believed that English colonists would treat the Natives better than the Spanish colonists. But as history has shown,

Without making Europeans out to be vile, cruel and violent, we should recognize that they had superior power but they gave new additions to Native Americans.

To better understand the conflict between the Europeans and the Native Americans, one must closely examine the state of Europe’s economy at the time. Europe struggled with difficult conditions. This included poverty, violence and diseases like typhus, smallpox, influenza and measles. There were widespread famines which caused the prices of products to vary and made life very difficult in Europe. Street crimes and violence were prevalent in cities: “Other eruption of bizarre torture, murder, and ritual cannibalism were not uncommon”.2 Europeans

These people that we broadly categorize as Native Americans descended from a small band of men and women who had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge between Alaska and Siberia about 12,000 years ago. The bridge closed about a thousand years after their arrival, effectively barring anyone else from joining them. As a result, they effectively closed themselves out from the rest of the world for thousands of years. This gave them the chance to thoroughly “explore the entire continent” and learn how to properly cultivate the land around them, and also grow their population to 10s of millions (Resendez 139).

Chapter one of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States discusses the differences between the culture and attitudes of the Europeans and the Native Americans. It further describes how the Europeans came to the New World and committed genocide against the Native Americans in order to get land and gold from them, which displayed the cruelty and greed of the European explorers coming to the Americas. However, many historians consider these actions by the European Conquistadors to be necessary in order for human progress to occur, but Zinn argues whether human progress needed all of these barbaric actions. He

Indians arrived in America some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. Archeological findings and Radiocarbon testing suggested that the prehistoric people who populated the Americas were hunters following the herds of wooly mammoths. They walked from Siberia across a land bridge into Alaska. They headed south toward warmer climates, slaughtering the mammoths as they went. As the glaciers melted, the oceans rose and covered this land bridge, creating the present-day Bering Strait and separating Alaska from Russia. By the time Christopher Columbus arrived, they were millions of what might be called First Americans or Amerindians occupying the two continents of Americas. The first noted documentation of the Beringia theory of the peopling of North America was by Jose de

Native American people arrived in the Americas approximately 15,000 and 600,000 years ago after venturing across the Bering Strait in groups known as the Paleo-Indians. They dispersed and split throughout this new world in concurrence with game routes, spreading from the northern Canadian regions, throughout Central America, and then further to South America.

Pre-colonial settlement began in the United States when Paleo-Indians, now known as Native Americans, crossed the Bering Strait, an ice bridge that connected the Eastern and Western Hemisphere. This was a crossover from Russia into to United States in which large groups began to settle and form a life. Although this large groups would constantly move around, in which they are known as Nomads, primarily the United States was their new found home. They would endure activities such as fishing and hunting as basic survival skills. Around 1492, “European nations came to the Americas to increase their wealth and broaden their influence over world affairs. The Spanish were among the first Europeans to explore the New World.” (Colonial America, n.d.) This exploration led to more groups of people travelling to seek a better world. “By 1650, however, England had established a dominant presence on the Atlantic coast. The first colony was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Many of the people who settled in the New World came to escape religious persecution. The Pilgrims, founders of Plymouth, Massachusetts, arrived in 1620.” (Colonial America, n.d.) The claim of the New World was taken by British settlers, although Native Americans were the first to settle. Native Americans helped to flourish the lands, along with the new settlers. “By 1650, however, England had established a dominant presence on the Atlantic coast. The first colony was