What Made Native American Peoples Vulnerable to Conquest by European Adventurers

American Indians at European Contact

Originally published equally "Primeval American Explorers: Adventure and Survival"

by John W. Kincheloe, III
Used with permission from Tar Heel Inferior Historian 47: 1 (Fall 2007): six-8, copyright Northward Carolina Museum of History.

European explorers came to the "New Globe" of North America in the 1500s. Before that fourth dimension, the continent was an unknown place to them. These adventurers saw it equally an entirely new state, with animals and plants to detect. They also met new people in this exciting New Earth—people with fascinating lifeways that the Europeans had never seen and languages they had never heard. This New World for Europeans was actually a very quondam world for the various people they met in Northward America. Today we call those people American Indians.

Archaeologists tell u.s. that American Indians may have been on the North American continent for fifty thousand years. They were the first Americans, and they were neat explorers, too. They didn't come up to this continent all at one time. It is thought that these ancient adventurers arrived at dissimilar times, over several thousands of years. They journeyed from Asia on foot or by boat. Their explorations took them through icy landscapes and along the coastlines. Eventually these earliest American explorers spread out over the entire continent.

Over time, their lives changed as they adjusted to dissimilar environments. American Indians were creative. They found ways to live in deserts, in forests, along the oceans, and on the grassy prairies. Native peoples were great hunters and productive farmers. They built towns and traded over big distances with other tribes. These were the people the European explorers met when their ships landed in America.

Every bit the English, French, and Castilian explorers came to North America, they brought tremendous changes to American Indian tribes. Europeans carried a hidden enemy to the Indians: new diseases. Native peoples of America had no immunity to the diseases that European explorers and colonists brought with them. Diseases such equally smallpox, influenza, measles, and even craven pox proved mortiferous to American Indians. Europeans were used to these diseases, but Indian people had no resistance to them. Sometimes the illnesses spread through direct contact with colonists. Other times, they were transmitted equally Indians traded with one some other. The issue of this contact with European germs was horrible. Sometimes whole villages perished in a short time.

As early as 1585, English language explorer Thomas Harriot observed how European visits to the small villages of littoral North Carolina Indians killed the Natives. He wrote:

Within a few days after our departure from every such [Indian] town, the people began to die very fast, and many in brusk space; in some towns nearly twenty, in some xl, in some sixty, & in one six score [6 x twenty = 120], which in truth was very many in respect of their numbers. . . . The disease was as well so strange that they neither knew what it was nor how to cure it.

The introduction of European diseases to American Indians was an accident that no ane expected. Neither the colonists nor the Indians had a good agreement of why this affected the Native people so badly.

The neat impact of affliction on the Native population of America is an of import part of the story of European exploration. Experts believe that every bit much as xc pct of the American Indian population may have died from illnesses introduced to America by Europeans. This means that but one in ten Natives survived this hidden enemy. Their descendants are the two.5 million Indians who live in the United States today.

New trade goods represented another big alter that European explorers and colonists brought to American Indians. Shortly after meeting their European visitors, Indians became very interested in things that the colonists could provide. In a short fourth dimension, the Indians began using these new materials and products in their everyday lives. Native hunters were eager to trade prepared deer hides and other pelts for lengths of colored cloth. Metal tools such as axes, hoes, and knives became valuable new resources. Shortly American Indian men put aside their bows and arrows for European firearms, powder, and lead shot. Trade items like metallic pots often were cut upwardly and remade into new tools or weapons. The desire to become European appurtenances inverse ancient trading patterns. The tradition of simple hunting for food began to go less important than getting brute hides to trade. Soon American Indians depended on European items for daily needs. Colonial traders as well brought rum, and this beverage caused many problems for some tribes. New trade goods brought from across the Atlantic Ocean inverse American Indian lives forever.

A third big modify continued to this new trade was slavery. Europeans needed workers to assistance build houses and clear fields. They soon realized that they could offer merchandise goods similar tools and weapons to certain American Indian tribes that would bring them other Indians captured in tribal wars. These captured Indians were bought and sold every bit slaves. You might think that Africans brought to America were the just enslaved people. Information technology is surprising to learn that before 1700 in the Carolinas, one-fourth of all enslaved people were American Indian men, women, and children. Before 1700 the port city of Charleston shipped out many Native slaves to work in the Caribbean area or to be sold in northern cities like Boston. Slavery led to warfare among tribes and to much hardship. Many tribes had to movement to escape the slave trade, which destroyed some tribes completely. In fourth dimension, the exercise of enslaving Native peoples concluded. However, it had greatly afflicted American Indians of the South and the Southwest.

Many large changes happened to the first Americans soon later on Europeans met them. Only Indian people survived diseases, huge shifts in their cultures, and even the destructive slave trade. North Carolina recognizes eight proud and enduring tribes today: the Eastern Ring of Cherokee, Lumbee, Haliwa-Saponi, Sappony, Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Waccamaw-Siouan, Meherrin, and Coharie. They are now greatly outnumbered by the descendants of the European colonists, but their strong presence honors their distant ancestors—those earliest of American explorers.

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Source: https://www.ncpedia.org/history/early/contact

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