Ironically, in North America the presence of the native cultures made it possible for the first English settlers to maintain a foothold on the new continent. The Jamestown colony and the New England Pilgrims certainly owed their mere survival to the help and assistance of Indians. The Indian cultures that the Europeans encountered were in many ways just as sophisticated, or in some instances even more sophisticated, than the European cultures that arrived in the first ships. The Indians never thought of themselves as inferior to whites; in fact, the opposite was often the case.
The arrival of the Europeans also upset the balance of power among the North American Indian tribes, both in the eastern woodland regions and later on the Great Plains and in the deserts of the Southwest. Europeans frequently had a romanticized view of the Indians as "noble savages," and some Europeans believed them to be one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. In eastern tribes women frequently held power, and in fact some were tribal chiefs. Despite the Native Americans' obvious survival skills and social organization, Europeans often rated Indians as inferiors, which then justified their harsh treatment of the Indians later on.
Probably the greatest misunderstanding between Europeans and Indians was their differing concepts of land, or land ownership. The European believed that you could drive four stakes in the ground, parcel off a square of land, and claim ownership of that piece of ground. Such individual ownership of a section of land was completely alien to the Indian way of thinking. Certainly Indian tribes fought over the use of land on which to hunt or fish or even practice agriculture, though the agricultural tribes tended to be less warlike than hunting tribes. But the idea of "ownership" of land was something they did not understand. For some Indians the land itself was sacred, held as a mother goddess. For many Indians the idea of plowing soil to plant crops was as good as blasphemy, and many aspects of nature-rivers, ponds, even rocks-performed similar functions as the saints in Christian cultures. Even after they had made deals with the Europeans for the purchase of land, the meaning of what they had done was often unclear, which led to further conflict.
Many Indians tribes were traders and had built complicated economic relationships with their neighboring tribes, so they understood the idea of commerce as it existed within their own system of barter and exchange. The European impact on this trading culture was often destructive, however, as the Europeans sought to trade and exchange different kinds of goods from what the Indians were used to.
The nature of warfare also illustrated cultural differences and heightened the conflict between Europeans and Indians. Native Americans fought hard, and the ability to sustain pain and suffer physical punishment with stoicism was a sign of honor. The booty in Indian warfare often took the form of captured women and children of enemy tribes, especially when the population of an aggressor tribe was threatening for some reason. Thus many Europeans saw Indian ways of warfare as primitive and barbarous, while Indians in turn thought European practices such as hanging were destructive of the soul.
Despite all the conflicts, in certain ways the Indians benefited from the contact with the Europeans. The horse, for example, had become extinct in North America long before the Spaniards arrived. But when the Spaniards brought their superior breed of Arab horses to North America, the Indians of the Southwest took to the horse with amazing speed. The horse transformed the culture of the Plains Indians almost immeasurably; consider the difficulty of tracking and killing a fast-moving buffalo on foot, compared with the ability to run one down on horseback. Plains Indians became the greatest light cavalry in the history of the world. Armed with rifles or bows and arrows, Plains Indians could hold their own against any cavalry detachment anywhere on the open plains. That they eventually succumbed to the superior military power of the United States was less a factor of individual skill than it was of organization and numbers.
The history of the interaction between the Indians and whites begins with Columbus, and the story is a long, tragic tale of greed; relentless pushing, shoving, and grabbing of land; insensitivity; xenophobia; and even genocide. The cultural differences between Indians and Europeans and their American descendants continue to this day. As we go through the history of Americans and the United States, we will pick up the thread of this story again.
World History
