Native People Vs New World Essay

As much as history paints it in the opposite, it was really the native people who benefited the Old World in the collision of the two worlds. First, New World people were healthier than those in the Old World. They had less polluted air, less animals to spread disease, and healthier, more plentiful food. New World innovation came not from creating machines, but from building on and expanding on the environment around them. For example, the dyes produced by the native people were revolutionary. Red dyes in Europe were mottled and orange, and the only true red colors were expensive. The Native people, however, were able to make these dyes out of bugs found on prickly pear cactus. Another huge contribution that the Natives made to the Europeans was their advancements in food. Scholars are now thinking that millions more people than originally thought were in the new world before Columbus arrived. These people made small seeds into corn, they survived off corn, potatoes and tomatoes.
Despite the way history paints them, Native people were not content to relinquish their entire culture. Things like religion were topics they were not willing to let go. When the Spanish landed in the Americas, they were insistent on converting to the entire population to Catholicism and Christianity. Less than twenty years after first contact, there were convents built, and those buildings housed abandoned children of Spanish men and Indigenous women. Once these girls grew older, some became nuns, about some moved away from the Church, and had children of their own. But the natives were not the only ones displaced. African slaves were brought into Mexico, and 500 years after the fact, their descendants were still living there. The African people who were free fought in the conquest of America alongside the