European Influence On Native American Culture

The trappers of the Canadian wilderness and the American wilderness liked and respected Native Americans. They even interbred with them and sold them guns, which was very often illegal. Traders had a special status in Native American society. A trader could travel thousands of miles in his canoe without once being robbed or molested. Contrast that with Europe, where anyone from another town was fair game.

However, the English settlers, after a very brief period of good relations in Massachusetts, came to loathe Native Americans. There was a serious culture clash here between stone age Native Americans (who had no land as private property, property belonged variously to the family, clan, or tribe) and Iron Age Europeans. Europeans had a totally different concept of private property. Your own property could be sold, transferred,
Perhaps these came from the Spanish or from visitors to America who’d had bad experiences with the locals.

Whichever the case, Indians were often described in very unflattering terms. Among these descriptions were terms like, “Flesh eating primitives,” “Savage, hostile and beastlike,” and “Crafty, loathsome half-men.” These various metaphors could not have inspired much confidence in the people who heard them.

The European colonization of the Americas forever changed the lives and cultures of the Native Americans. In the 15th to 19th centuries, their populations were decimated, by the privations of displacement, by disease, and in many cases by warfare with European groups and enslavement by them. The first Native American group encountered by Columbus, the 250,000 Arawaks of Haiti, were violently enslaved. Only 500 survived by the year 1550, and the group was totally extinct before 1650. Over the next 400 years, the experiences of other Native Americans with Europeans would not always amount to genocide, but they would typically be disastrous for the Native