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Comparing and contrasting europeans and native americans
Impact of india colonization
Comparing and contrasting europeans and native americans
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As an important event in history, historians write the first encounter of Europeans invading America in different perspectives. Taylor’s illustration of the colonial contact between Europeans and native Americans is more convincing than Cronon’s. He wrote from a more human-centered perspective that Europeans destroyed Native American belief, rather than the perspective of change in the ecosystem. Such a narrative that incorporates data and objective facts about this encounter makes readers have a stronger sympathetic feeling, whereas Cronon describes the difference between what happened in the environment before and after the Europeans conquered the Americas. Taylor states objective facts of the stark human-centered contrast between Native Americans and Europeans’ resources for war but in Cronon’s article, he only shows the de-speciation in American land. In Taylor description the first invading, he shows how great the difference between Indians and Europeans’ weapons to show that Europeans destroyed Native Americans physically. Indians had no technology of steel …show more content…
“The Mandian Indians of the northern Missouri Valley escaped the worst ravages until 1837, when, in the course of a few weeks, smallpox destroyed all but 40 of their 2000 people” (Taylor, “Epidemics”, 39). The number that Taylor provides directly shows how many Mandian Indians died due to smallpox which is only one of the epidemics. “….the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey etc. etc” (Cronon, 4). Cronon’s evidence gives a list of animals that are hardly found in America, which is disable to show exactly how much the de-speciation happened after Europeans conquered America. For readers, direct numbers give stronger feelings to them and make them believe more in the
Modern day Native American are widely known as stewards of the environment who fight for conservation and environmental issues. The position of the many Native American as environmentalists and conservationists is justified based on the perception that before European colonists arrived in the Americas, Native Americans had little to no effect on their environment as they lived in harmony with nature. This idea is challenged by Shepard Krech III in his work, The Ecological Indian. In The Ecological Indian, Krech argues that this image of the noble savage was an invented tradition that began in the early 1970’s, and that attempts to humanize Native Americans by attempting to portray them as they really were. Krech’s arguments are criticized by Darren J Ranco who in his response, claims that Krech fails to analyze the current state of Native American affairs, falls into the ‘trap’ of invented tradition, and accuses Krech of diminishing the power and influence of Native Americans in politics. This essay examines both arguments, but ultimately finds Krech to be more convincing as Krech’s
Dr. Daniel K. Richter is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at University of Pennsylvania. His focus on early Native American history has led to his writing several lauded books including Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past, and The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Richter’s Facing East is perhaps, a culmination of his latter work. It is centered from a Native American perspective, an angle less thought about in general. Through the book, Richter takes this perspective into several different fields of study which includes literary analysis, environmental history, and anthropology. Combining different methodologies, Richter argues Americans can have a fruitful future, by understanding the importance of the American Indian perspective in America’s short history.
Alan Taylor is trying to prove that the story of America does not begin with the American Revolution. When, humans first encountered America between 12, 000- 15,000 years is where the story of American first starts. Alan Taylor's thesis is true because, prior to the American Revolution the Siberians arrived in America and settled from the tip of South America to as high as Alaska. Later European empires invaded and conquered several regions of America. Alan Taylor proves that the settlement of America does not begin in the 1492 but rather about 12,000 to 15,000 years earlier. The early Americans migrated from North Eastern Asia and entered in small boats along the coast. Some other hypothesis is that the earliest humans walked along a land
Cronon raises the question of the belief or disbelief of the Indian’s rights to the land. The Europeans believed the way Indians used the land was unacceptable seeing as how the Indians wasted the natural resources the land had. However, Indians didn’t waste the natural resources and wealth of the land but instead used it differently, which the Europeans failed to see. The political and economical life of the Indians needed to be known to grasp the use of the land, “Personal good could be replaced, and their accumulation made little sense for ecological reasons of mobility,” (Cronon, 62).
This book is complete with some facts, unfounded assumptions, explores Native American gifts to the World and gives that information credence which really happened yet was covered up and even lied about by Euro-centric historians who have never given the Indians credit for any great cultural achievement. From silver and money capitalism to piracy, slavery and the birth of corporations, the food revolution, agricultural technology, the culinary revolution, drugs, architecture and urban planning our debt to the indigenous peoples of America is tremendous. With indigenous populations mining the gold and silver made capitalism possible. Working in the mines and mints and in the plantations with the African slaves, they started the industrial revolution that then spread to Europe and on around the world. They supplied the cotton, rubber, dyes, and related chemicals that fed this new system of production. They domesticated and developed the hundreds of varieties of corn, potatoes, cassava, and peanuts that now feed much of the world. They discovered the curative powers of quinine, the anesthetizing ability of coca, and the potency of a thousand other drugs with made possible modern medicine and pharmacology. The drugs together with their improved agriculture made possible the population explosion of the last several centuries. They developed and refined a form of democracy that has been haphazardly and inadequately adopted in many parts of the world. They were the true colonizers of America who cut the trails through the jungles and deserts, made the roads, and built the cities upon which modern America is based.
Beginning in the fifteenth century with the arrival of Columbus, natives of the Americas were infected with European diseases that proved to be deadly to the Indians. The population in northern Mexico suffered an immense decimation of 2,500,000 peoples to less than 320,000 by the end of the sixteenth century (Vargas, 30). The Spaniards’ cruel treatment of the natives aided this vast reduction in the Aztec and Mexican population, enabling the Spaniards to conquer the lands of the Aztecs and other native tribes. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards had expanded their conquests into the southwest region of what is now known as the United States of America.
The article, “Native Reactions to the invasion of America”, is written by a well-known historian, James Axtell to inform the readers about the tragedy that took place in the Native American history. All through the article, Axtell summarizes the life of the Native Americans after Columbus acquainted America to the world. Axtell launches his essay by pointing out how Christopher Columbus’s image changed in the eyes of the public over the past century. In 1892, Columbus’s work and admirations overshadowed the tears and sorrows of the Native Americans. However, in 1992, Columbus’s undeserved limelight shifted to the Native Americans when the society rediscovered the history’s unheard voices and became much more evident about the horrific tragedy of the Natives Indians.
Talking Back to Civilization , edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, is a compilation of excerpts from speeches, articles, and texts written by various American Indian authors and scholars from the 1890s to the 1920s. As a whole, the pieces provide a rough testimony of the American Indian during a period when conflict over land and resources, cultural stereotypes, and national policies caused tensions between Native American Indians and Euro-American reformers. This paper will attempt to sum up the plight of the American Indian during this period in American history.
Overall, There were so many differences between Native Americans cultures And the Europeans. Some of the examples are, the ideas of the lands owner, religion, and the gender. Their differences are more than the similarities. The impact of their cultures it still remains in today’s society. The cultural differences and the religions differences led to a bloody was that remains for 500 hundreds
The Native Americans of the southeast live in a variety of environments. The environments range from the southern Appalachian Mountains, to the Mississippi River valley, to the Louisiana and Alabama swamps, and the Florida wetlands. These environments were bountiful with various species of plant and animal life, enabling the Native American peoples to flourish. “Most of the Native Americans adopted large-scale agriculture after 900 A.D, and some also developed large towns and highly centralized social and political structures.” In the first half of the 1600s Europeans encountered these native peoples. Both cultures encountered new plants, animals, and diseases. However, the Indians received more diseases compared to the few new diseases to the Europeans. The new diseases resulted in a massive loss of Native Americans, including the Southeast Indians which had never encountered the new diseases. Three of the main tribes in the southeast were the Cherokee and the Creek. They were part of a group of southeast tribes that were removed from their lands. These tribes later became known as “The Five Civilized Tribes because of their progress and achievements.”
Daniel Richter's Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, turns many heads as Richter changes the traditional outlook of the Westward expansion all the way to the American Revolution by viewing certain events through the eyes of the Native Americans who were settled in this land years before the new colonizations started. It was not easy to try and make a complete work about the different perspectives that the Natives had, due to the fact that many sources are works from Europeans or they were filtered by them. Richter explains that Native people sketch out elaborative paintings in their house or on barks of living trees, many of these sources obviously have not lasted long enough for us to examine. This book, however gives great detail and fully analyzes the "aggressively expansionist Euro-American United States" (p. 8-7) that rose from what belonged to Indian Country. Richter challenges you to compose a new framework of the Indian and European encounters reforming the "master narrative" of early American colonization from the Native point of view.
During the European expedition in America, they founded colonies in North America that attracted thousands of settlers. The Europeans tried to get rid of the Native Americans in order to get what they wanted, which was economic wealth, landowning, slave trade, property ownership, and tobacco. M. Zylstra writes about “Colonization of History”, hybridization of history, and what the colonization of the natives by the Europeans lead to. Zylstra states.
Early American history began in the collision of European, West African, and Native American peoples in North America. Europeans “discovered” America by accident, then created empires out of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. Yet conquest and enslavement were accompanied by centuries of cultural interaction—interaction that spelled disaster for Africans and Native Americans and triumph for Europeans, to be sure, but interaction that transformed all three peoples in the process.
In Thomas King’s novel, The Inconvenient Indian, the story of North America’s history is discussed from his original viewpoint and perspective. In his first chapter, “Forgetting Columbus,” he voices his opinion about how he feel towards the way white people have told America’s history and portraying it as an adventurous tale of triumph, strength and freedom. King hunts down the evidence needed to reveal more facts on the controversial relationship between the whites and natives and how it has affected the culture of Americans. Mainly untangling the confusion between the idea of Native Americans being savages and whites constantly reigning in glory. He exposes the truth about how Native Americans were treated and how their actual stories were
The Native Americans or American Indians, once occupied all of the entire region of the United States. They were composed of many different groups, who speaked hundreds of languages and dialects. The Indians from the Southwest used to live in large built terraced communities and their way of sustain was from the agriculture where they planted squash, pumpkins, beans and corn crops. Trades between neighboring tribes were common, this brought in additional goods and also some raw materials such as gems, cooper. seashells and soapstone.To this day, movies and television continue the stereotype of Indians wearing feathered headdresses killing innocent white settlers. As they encountered the Europeans, automatically their material world was changed. The American Indians were amazed by the physical looks of the white settlers, their way of dressing and also by their language. The first Indian-White encounter was very peaceful and trade was their principal interaction. Tension and disputes were sometimes resolved by force but more often by negotiation or treaties. On the other hand, the Natives were described as strong and very innocent creatures awaiting for the first opportunity to be christianized. The Indians were called the “Noble Savages” by the settlers because they were cooperative people but sometimes, after having a few conflicts with them, they seem to behaved like animals. We should apprehend that the encounter with the settlers really amazed the natives, they were only used to interact with people from their own race and surroundings and all of this was like a new discovery for them as well as for the white immigrants. The relations between the English and the Virginian Indians was somewhat strong in a few ways. They were having marriages among them. For example, when Pocahontas married John Rolfe, many said it has a political implication to unite more settlers with the Indians to have a better relation between both groups. As for the Indians, their attitude was always friendly and full of curiosity when they saw the strange and light-skinned creatures from beyond the ocean. The colonists only survived with the help of the Indians when they first settler in Jamestown and Plymouth. In this areas, the Indians showed the colonists how to cultivate crops and gather seafood.The Indians changed their attitude from welcome to hostility when the strangers increased and encroached more and more on hunting and planting in the Natives’ grounds.