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The indigenous people had nothing in common with the settlers. What's more, they were vulnerable in the face of the technology, diseases and weapons the Europeans brought with them.
When the Susan Constant landed on the Virginia coast in 1607, a small party of pioneers landed, crossed the sand dunes and gasped at the open meadows and tall forests. As night fell, five Native Americans, who had followed them without being seen or heard, fired arrows at them. The Europeans replied by firing their muskets and the attackers withdrew. This encounter sums up the mutual suspicion between the two peoples.
The Europeans and Native Americans, or First Nations, differed in their attitudes to almost everything. For example, the English pioneers seeing the wolf as a danger to their precious livestock, offered a bounty in exchange for any wolf skulls, which they displayed on pikes as they did the heads of executed criminals. They expected the indigenous people to provide skulls as evidence of their help in killing these predators, and saw the gift of skulls as a sign of Indian submission. But in the Native Americans' wolf lore, the giving of skulls was a powerful sign of equality.
The first pioneers soon became aware that other human beings were already living in North America, and the Virginia Company issued instructions to take care not to offend them. Pioneers were also advised to trade with them for food, in case their supplies or their crops failed to materialise.
The wide coastal plain which the Europeans called Virginia was home to some 24,000 Native Americans who shared the Algonquian language but were divided into about 30 tribes. They were ruled by a chief-of-chiefs called Powhatan. Pocahontas was his daughter. Her fate was to be kidnapped, to marry an Englishman, John Rolfe, and to die in England at the age of 21.
Native Americans lived by farming, fishing, hunting and berry-picking. Their lifestyle was mobile: they spent the winters huddled together in small villages and the spring wandering in smaller groups, fishing and gathering food around rivers and bays. Every winter Powhatan organised large-scale deer hunts and raids on distant Native American villages.
They had little to spare during lean times when the year's harvest had been consumed. This made it hard for them to share with the Europeans, who often assumed the Native Americans would be happy to feed them.
Further north, the Native Americans also spoke Algonquian languages. The leading tribes included the Pequot and Mohegan of Connecticut, the Wampanoag and Patuxet of Plymouth colony and the Massachusett, Nipmuck and Pennacook of Massachusetts Bay. They lived in small bands and had no supreme chief.
They were efficient farmers, cultivating maize, squash, pumpkins and beans in the same fields, in a sustainable mix. This baffled the Europeans, whose way of farming was to grow each crop in a separate field. They didn't realise that the Native American way provided a balanced diet and replenished the soil. Each year, the native people also burnt the undergrowth of forests, making them easier to move through, and killing vermin.
Their mobile way of life meant that Native Americans had few possessions and shared what little they had. They valued generosity rather than hoarding, and chiefs acquired honour through feasting and entertaining other chiefs. No one worked for wages and they didn't lock their homes. Theft was unknown. No one starved unless everyone starved.
The Native Americans' social hierarchy was not based on property ownership. Their mobile lifestyle meant their homes had none of the possessions that were the sign of status in Europe. Using matting, bark and pelts, they lived in easily built lodges. They divided tasks on gender lines, with women farming and men hunting.
The conflict between Europeans and Native Americans was a clash of two civilisations. The English valued everything in money terms; the Native American' goal was to live in balance with nature. While the English tried to buy land from the Indians by getting them to sign deeds and giving them goods in exchange, the Native Americans saw deeds as simply an offer to share nature's abundance with the newcomers.
While the Native Americans tried to make political alliances with the pioneers, the Europeans were more interested in grabbing as much land as possible and punishing the native people whenever they tried to use what had recently been their land and their wildlife. As the European population grew, so did their power.
In 1636, the first major conflict, the Pequot War, exploded between the New England settlers and the Narragansett and Mohegan Indians living in Connecticut, Plymouth and Massachusetts. But instead of the native style of warfare, which took hostages but had few casualties, the Europeans massacred the Native Americans, including women and children. These terror tactics shocked the First Nation people.
As the colonists grew strong, and unwittingly introduced European diseases such as smallpox, against which the Native Americans had no immunity, the traditional populations collapsed. By 1670, there were 52,000 pioneers in New England, and they already outnumbered the indigenous people by three to one. In Virginia, some 90% of the Native Americans had been wiped out by disease as early as 1650.
Trade had an equally significant impact. To make a profit, the colonies had to export materials back to England. These included furs, which were valuable and not bulky, and wampum – polished seashell beads. In exchange, they gave Native Americans metal products which they couldn't make themselves, such as axe-heads and knives. Soon afterwards, realising that guns were not magic, the Native Americans began to show an interest in acquiring muskets.
But although the First Nations had a sophisticated view of tribal politics and lived a sustainable lifestyle, their world-view couldn't cope with alcohol. They saw getting drunk as a way of bypassing the fasting and discipline previously needed to gain access to manitou (spiritual power). Believing that alcohol was an animate force, they thought drunk people were not responsible for their actions, so they used it for settling old scores through drunken violence, killing other Native Americans rather than the colonisers who had provided the drink in the first place.
In 1621, the first Thanksgiving Day was held in New England. The myth is that this celebrates the joining of Pilgrims and Native Americans in a friendly three-day harvest feast to give thanks for the bounties of God. In fact, the Wampanoag tribe joined the feast for political reasons: they had heard gunfire and wanted to know what the settlers were up to.
Today, Thanksgiving is held on the fourth Thursday of November, a date set not by the Pilgrims but by President Franklin D Roosevelt in 1939 (approved by Congress in 1941). However, Native Americans have nothing to celebrate – they think of their oppression as starting on that day.
Native Americans suffered a disintegration of their culture due to invasion of their lands, the spread of disease, the introduction of alcohol and the creation of praying towns, where native people were taught to adopt European ways, especially Christianity. On top of that, the Europeans brought slavery to America.
Cultivating the profitable crops of tobacco, sugar and rice was labour intensive and conditions of work were gruelling. Since neither Europeans nor Native Americans were willing to do it, large numbers of Africans were kidnapped, enslaved and brought over to labour in the fields under brutal taskmasters.
So the origins of slavery and racial segregation were present at the start of the creation of the United States. This was especially true in the southern colonies: Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia. Soon, Europeans and slaves together outnumbered Native Americans. By 1720 in the Carolinas, there were 37,000 Europeans and 27,000 slaves. The Native Americans had been decimated by disease, leaving only 4,000 indigenous people.
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