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The Views of Native Americans and Europeans
During the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Europeans started to come over to the new world, they discovered a society of Indians that was strikingly different to their own. To understand how different, one must first compare and contrast some of the very important differences between them, such as how the Europeans considered the Indians to be extremely primitive and basic, while, considering themselves civilized. The Europeans considered that they were model societies, and they thought that the Indians society and culture should be changed to be very similar to their own.
The Europeans and the Indians had very contrasting ideas of personal wealth and ownership. The Europeans believed that only the rich should own land, and strongly followed the practice that when you passed away, the land stays in the family to keep the family honor and pride alive. In European society, what one owned decided one's identity, political standpoint, wealth, and even independence. The Indians believed that property was part of a tribe, not a personal possession to own. One of their beliefs was that the land was sacred, and each family should have a piece of the whole. As a general rule, the Indians followed their belief that states that everything on the earth is given to all, and each person deserves their own share. In 1657, a French Jesuit said that, "Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they ha...
English colonists that came to settle the New World had one conception of what property was; in their minds, property equaled money. This differed greatly from the Native Americans’ perspective, where property equaled survival. When the English colonists took land that naturally belonged to the Indians under the rights of the charter given to them by the English Crown, they misconstrued many of the conceptions of property that the Natives’ had. Even though the English were similar to the Natives in certain aspects, in most, such as who had the right to the land, how the land should be farmed, what value property actually had, and who pre-owned and could distribute the land, both cultures differed greatly, leading to eventual conflict between the English and Native Americans.
The English took their land and disrupted their traditional systems of trade and agriculture. As a result, the power of native religious leaders was corrupted. The Indians we...
Not only did the Indians and Europeans use the land differently but also defined ownership of the land differently. The Indian woman defined and claimed the land as theirs by the crops planted and the rest of the land could be free for improvement. The Europeans viewed that, ‘“To define property is thus to represent boundaries between people; equally, it is to articulate at least one set of conscious boundaries between ...
The Indians thought of land very differently to the white man. The land was sacred, there was no ownership, and it was created by the great spirit. They could not sell their land to others, whereas the white people could fence off the land which belonged to them, and sell it freely to whoever they wanted. The Europeans didn't think that the Indians were using the land properly, so in their eyes, they were doing a good favour to the earth. To the Indians, the land was more valuable than the money that the white man had brought with him, even though it didn't belong to them.
English Views In the seventeenth century, the English and many other Eastern countries came to the “new land” for a vast amount of reasons. Many of these foreigners came for religious freedom, some to seek fortune, and others were convicts being deported. However, for those who came across the sea, there was one thing they were not planning to have conflict with when they arrived. The natives, or as the English called them “savages”, which were a distinction on how some viewed these natives, had made this land their home long before settlers came exploring.
Analyze the major similarities and difference among European, Native American and African societies. What was the European impact on the peoples and the environment of the Americas and Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
Native Americans have had a long history of resistance to the social and cultural assimilation into white culture. By employing various creative strategies, Native Americans have attempted to cope with the changes stemming from the European colonial movement into the Americas. There are fundamental differences in world views and cultural and social orders between Indians and Europeans, which contributed to conservatism in Native American cultures. In this paper, two aspects of such cultural and institutional differences of Native American societies will be examined: holistic Native American beliefs versus dualistic world views and harmony versus domination. These two aspects are important in terms of explaining changes (or lack thereof) in Native American societies because they suggest that the Native American world view is more cyclical and its components are interlinked, while Western societies have a clear demarcation between cultural elements, such as religion, kinship, and morality. However, there are certain limitations to the theoretical frameworks that explain conservatism in Indian cultures because these theories are oriented around the Western world view and were developed based on the Western terms; therefore, indigenous population was not taken into account when these theories were developed.
The beginnings of colonialism, allowed Europeans to travel the world and meet different kinds of people. Their first encounter with the New World and these new peoples, created the opening ideas of inequality. These new people were called indigenous people and alien like. Europeans began to question if these people were really human and had the same intellectual capacity as Europeans did. “Alternative ideas about the origins and identities of indigenous peoples also began to appear early in the 16th century...
Throughout the course of history, the majority of people have always been shown to eventually and always, die. This was especially shown when the people were colonizing for the English and were trying to colonize the Americas. Many colonists escaped Europe by means of transportation to escape a harsh life, and in hopes of finding a new land where they would not be kept down by something they all called a glass ceiling. The colonists wanted to choose for themselves and wanted a place where they could freely practice their religion and their cultures. In addition, they wanted to establish a stable colony and also wanted a stable trade to the mainland of Europe. Unfortunately, the Americas were not as hospitable as everyone thought it to be.
Considering historical evidence, the notion: Native –Americans was not the first inhabitant of America is a complete false. For centuries, history kept accurate and vivid accounts of the first set of people who domiciled the western hemisphere. Judging by those records, below are the first set of Native-American people who inhabited America before the arrival of another human race; the Iroquois: The Iroquois of Native Americans was one of the tribes that lived in America before other people came. Based on historical evidence, it is believed that the Native Americans came from Asia way back during the Ice Age through a land bridge of the Bering Strait. When the Europeans first set foot in America, there were about 10 million Native Americans
As white settlers poured across the mountains, the Cherokee tried once again to compensate themselves with territory taken by war with a neighboring tribe. This time their intended victim was the Chickasaw, but this was a mistake. Anyone who tried to take something from the Chickasaw regretted it, if he survived. After eleven years of sporadic warfare ended with a major defeat at Chickasaw Oldfields (1769), the Cherokee gave up and began to explore the possibility of new alliances to resist the whites. Both the Cherokee and Creek attended the 1770 and 1771 meetings with the Ohio tribes at Sciota but did not participate in Lord Dunnmore's War (1773-74) because the disputed territory was not theirs. On the eve of the American Revolution, the British government scrambled to appease the colonists and negotiate treaties with the Cherokee ceding land already taken from them by white settlers. To this end, all means, including outright bribery and extortion, were employed: Lochaber Treaty (1770); and the Augusta Treaty (1773) ceding 2 million acres in Georgia to pay for debts to white traders. For the same reasons as the Iroquois cession of Ohio in 1768, the Cherokee tried to protect their homeland from white settlement by selling land they did not really control. In the Watonga Treaty (1774) and the Overhill Cherokee Treaty (Sycamore Shoals) (1775), they sold all of eastern and central Kentucky to the Transylvania Land Company (Henderson Purchase).
There is no doubt that without the feat of explorers then, there would be no world as we know it now. It is merely the manner of how this new world was “discovered” and how the natives of the land were handled and viewed that draw true reservation. I will give a brief description of the views that Columbus, Cabeza de Baca, de Verrazzano, Hakluyt, and Champlain had of the natives of the land they inhabited..
In his essay, “The Indians’ Old World,” Neal Salisbury examined a recent shift in the telling of Native American history in North America. Until recently, much of American history, as it pertains to Native Americans; either focused on the decimation of their societies or excluded them completely from the discussion (Salisbury 25). Salisbury also contends that American history did not simply begin with the arrival of Europeans. This event was an episode of a long path towards America’s development (Salisbury 25). In pre-colonial America, Native Americans were not primitive savages, rather a developing people that possessed extraordinary skill in agriculture, hunting, and building and exhibited elaborate cultural and religious structures.
The Native Americans were the earliest and only settlers in the North American continents for more than thousands of years. Like their European counterparts, the English colonists justified the taking of their territories was because the natives were not entitled to the land because they lacked a work ethic in which shows that the colonists did not understand the Native Americans system of work and ownership of property. They believed the “Indians seemed to lack everything the English identified as civilized” (Takaki, Pg. 33). Because the settlers were living far away from civilizations, to ensure that they were civilized people, the settlers had negative images of the Native Americans so that they would not be influenced and live like the how the natives do, ensuring that these groups are savages who are uncivilized. Many began to believe this was God’s plans for them to civilize the country in which many would push westward and drive the Indians out to promote civilization and progress. While the United States was still in its early stages of development,
The First "Europeans" reached the Western Hemisphere in the late 15th century. Upon arrival they encountered a rich and diverse culture that had already been inhabited for thousands of years. The Europeans were completely unprepared for the people they stumbled upon. They couldn't understand cultures that were so different and exotic from their own. The discovery of the existence of anything beyond their previous experience could threaten the stability of their entire religious and social structure. Seeing the Indians as savages they made them over in their own image as quickly as possible. In doing so they overlooked the roots that attached the Indians to their fascinating past. The importance of this past is often overlooked. Most text or history books begin the story of the Americas from the first European settlement and disregard the 30,000 years of separate, preceding cultural development (Deetz 7).