Native American Tribes Early Colonial Era

Presentation created by Robert MartinezPrimary Content: America’s History, 6th editionImages as cited.

Native Americans along the Atlantic coast of North America also lived in the New World, but for them it was a bleak and dangerous place.

Europeans had invaded their lands, introduced deadly diseases, and erected hundreds of

permanent settlements.

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Some Indian peoples, among them the Pequot in New England

and the Susquehannock

in Virginia, resisted the

invaders by force.

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Others, most prominently the

Iroquois, used European guns and manufactures to dominate other tribes. Still other native peoples

retreated into the mountains or moved west to preserve their

traditional cultures.

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As the Puritans embarked for New England, they pondered the morality of

intruding on Native American lands. “By what right or warrant can we enter into the land of the Savages?” they asked

themselves.

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Responding to such concerns, John Winthrop detected God’s hand in these events and

pointed to a recent smallpox epidemic that devastated the local Indian peoples. “If God were not pleased with our inheriting these

parts,” he asked, “why doth he still make roome

for us by diminishing them as we increase?”

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Citing the Book of Genesis, the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay Colony declared that the

Indians had not “subdued” their land and

therefore had no “just right” to it.

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Believing they were God’s chosen people, the Puritans often treated Native Americans with a brutality equal to that

of the Spanish conquistadors and

Nathaniel Bacon’s frontiersmen.

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When Pequot warriors attacked English farmers

who had intruded onto their lands in the

Connecticut River Valley in 1636, a Puritan militia attacked a Pequot village

and massacred some five hundred men,

women, and children.

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Like most Europeans, English Puritans saw the Indians as “savages” and culturally inferior

peoples. But the Puritans were not racists as the term is understood today. They did not believe that Native Americans were genetically inferior to them; in fact, they believed they were white

people with sun-darkened skin.

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“Sin,” not race, accounted for the Indians’

degeneracy. “Probably the devil” delivered these

“miserable savages” to America, Cotton Mather

suggested, “in hopes that the gospel of the Lord

Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or

disturb his absolute empire over them.”

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This interpretation of the Indians’ history inspired another Puritan minister, John Eliot, to

convert them to Christianity. Eliot translated the Bible into Algonquian and undertook

numerous missions to Indian villages in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

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Because the Puritans demanded that Indians understand the complexities of Protestant theology, only a few Native

Americans became full members of

Puritan congregations.

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The Puritans created praying towns that were similar to the Franciscan missions in New

Mexico. By 1670, more than 1,000 Indians lived in 14 special towns like Natick (Massachusetts)

and Maanexit (Connecticut).

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Even the coastal Indians who remained in their ancestral villages had lost much of their

independence and traditional culture.

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By the 1670s, there were 3 times as many whites as Indians in New England. The English population now totaled some 55,000, while the

number of Native peoples had plummeted – from an estimated 120,000 in 1570 to 70,000 in

1620, to barely 16,000.

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To Metacom, leader of the Wampanoags, the future looked grim. When his people copied

English ways by raising hogs and selling pork in Boston, Puritan officials accused them of

selling at “an under rate” and placed restrictions on their trade.

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When natives killed wandering livestock that damaged their cornfields, English

authorities, denounced them for violating

their property rights.

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Like Opechancanough

in Virginia and Pope in New

Mexico, Metacom concluded that

only military resistance could save Indian lands

and culture.

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So in 1675, the Wampanoags’ leader, whom the English called King Philip,

forged a military alliance with the Narragansetts and Nipmucks and began attacking white settlements throughout

New England.

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Bitter fighting continued into 1676, ending only when the Indian warriors ran short of guns and

powder and when the Massachusetts Bay government hired Mohegan and Mohawk

warriors, who ambushed and killed Metacom.

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The rebellion was a deadly affair. The fighting was long and hard, Indians destroyed 20

percent of the English towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and killed 1,000 settlers,

nearly 5 percent of the adult population.

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Had “the Indians not been divided,” remarked one settler, “they might have forced us [to evacuate] to Som Islands & there to have

planted a little Corne, & fished for our liveings.” But the Natives’ own losses – from famine and disease, death in battle, and sale

into slavery – were much larger.

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About 4,500 Indians died, a quarter of an already-diminished population. Many of the surviving Wampanoag, Narragansett, and

Nipmuck peoples migrated farther into the New England backcountry, where they intermarried

with Algonquin tribes allied to the French.

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Over the next century, these displace Indian peoples would take their revenge, joining with French Catholics to attack

their Puritan enemies.

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As English towns slowly filled the river valleys along the Atlantic coast, the

Indians who lived in the great forested areas beyond the Appalachian Mountains

remained independent.

Yet the distant Indian peoples – the Iroquois, Ottawas, Crees, Illinois, and many more – also felt the European

presence through the fur trade.

As they bargained for woolen blankets, iron cooking ware, knives, and guns, Indians learned to avoid the French at Montreal, who demanded two beaver

skins for a woolen blanket.

Instead, they dealt with the Dutch and English merchants at Albany, who asked

for only one pelt. Still, because the Indians had no way of knowing the value

of their pelts in Europe, they rarely secured the highest possible price.

Nor could they control the impact of European traders and settlers on their

societies. All Indian peoples were diminished in number and vitality as they

encountered European diseases,

European guns, and European rum.

Most Native societies also lost their economic independence. As they

exchanged furs for European-made iron utensils and woolen blankets, Indians

neglected their traditional artisan skills, making fewer flint hoes, clay pots, and skin

garments.

Religious autonomy vanished as well. When French missionaries won converts among the Hurons, Iroquois, and Illinois,

they divided Indian communities into hostile religious factions.

Likewise, constant warfare for furs altered the dynamics of tribal politics by shifting power from cautious elders to

headstrong young warriors.

The position and status of Indian women changed. Traditionally, eastern woodland

women had asserted authority as the chief providers of food and handcrafted goods. The disruption of farming by warfare and the influx of European goods undermined the economic

basis of women’s power.

Paradoxically, though, among the Iroquois and other victorious tribes, the influence of women may have increased because they assumed responsibility for the cultural assimilation of hundreds of

captives.

There is no doubt that the sheer extent of the fur industry – the slaughter of

hundreds of thousands of beaver, deer, otter, and other animals – profoundly

altered the environment.

As early as the 1630s, a French Jesuit worried that the Montagnais people, who

lived north of the St. Lawrence, were killing so many beaver that they would

“exterminate the species in this Region, as has happened among the Hurons.”

As the animal populations died off, steams ran faster (there were fewer dams) and the

underbrush grew denser (there were fewer deer to trim the vegetation). The native environment,

as well as its animals and peoples were now part of a new American world.

What were the major social and environmental developments that

made America a new world for both Europeans and Indians?