The fun fact that I learned this week was that apparently the European explorers that came over to the Americas must have had some major deficiencies in people skills. In every case, the Spanish, French, and English, these explorers were going deep into Indian territory and for some reason thought I would be ok to capture, kill, rape and enslave some of the Natives that they met. Seriously, what were they thinking?! How in the world did they think that by doing this they would be forming good relations with the groups they encountered? It seems that most of these tribes had no problems trading with the Europeans. If that was the case, why didn’t the explorers trade for labor instead of enslaving Indians?
The other interesting thing was that from the very beginning the different European nations were trying to gain an advantage over the others through the Natives. For example, the French trying to blame smallpox on the English in an attempt to increase their own trade. I knew that later on these both sides would use the different Indian groups as allies in the French and Indian War, but it appears that they got the conflict started much earlier.
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You do have to wonder how ill-informed or pompous the European explorers were to go to a strange place and immediately assume they could take over people who were totally unknown to them. But then again, the Europeans had fought with each other for hundreds of years. And religion was a major contention in Europe for years. Kingdoms revolved around religion, which is why King Henry Viii founded the Church of England to get his way and a divorce. Religion played a major force in history. So I guess it isn't surprising that religion was a major focus when they tried to explore and take over land in the New World. But if you were the European explorers, you might have thought the native peoples had their own religion they didn't want to give up.
I came away from this week's lessons on European invasions with the same feeling. What could have been going through the European's minds? They went to a strange land and decided to make enemies of all the people who were already there. The competition between the Europeans wasn't surprising to me at all though. No one wants to be the biggest failure so they blame problems on the other groups in order to gain just a little bit of self respect back. The stories about the Europeans remind me a lot of quarreling children, only the children are carrying deadly disease and weapons.
I too agree that European settlers were quite aloof when it came to thier indian counterparts. as to how and why this detachment from reality and the native american plight came about, i think a strong arguement could be made that Europeans were just simply doing what they had been doing ever since the Crusades. By detaching themselves from the Indians and treating thier relationship as one of subserviancy rather than mutual agreement, they were able to run thier oversees possessions in a much more business-like manner, thus being able to conviently sweep the yucky things under the rug.
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