Summary Of Building Noah's Arch

Building Noah’s Arch would be simpler than trying to sum of the history of Native North Americans in one six-hundred-word essay and any attempt to do it justice would be futile. Using simplicity and generalities the history of natives in North America could be summed up as a complicated, sophisticated, series of relationships built on mutual survival. The building and preserving of trade networks was at the center of that survival. Peace and conflict were often as a result of these issues. Natives like their European counterparts attempted to manipulate circumstances for their own benefit to strengthen their holds on the trade routes that dominated early American history.
Facts brought forward by Witgen in his book highlights the complexity of issues faced by all parties during the early encounters with natives and Europeans, it also sheds light on how failures to address difficulties first encountered would eventually lead to European desire to push natives further and further west. Witgen does a credible job of highlighting how the French policy of native assimilation was at the center of their expansionist policies, rather that the perceived notion of European disregard for natives as human

He wrote, “the middle ground was created during the course of formal ritual encounter, and through the daily lived experience of the fur trade when French and Native peoples figured out how to solve the problems that came from their need to live with one another.” Without cooperation of the native populations there could not have been French North American Empire. The did not have the military strength to dominated that part of the world at that time. Expansion required cooperation with the natives. That is the strength of Witgens book, his effort to show just how important the natives were to everything that happened in early American