Chief Powhatan Research Paper

954 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Native American and colonial relations

Over the years, the Native Americans have had multiple, very different opinions about the Europeans and the relationship between the indigenous people and some European powers has differed as well. In this essay, I will be discussing the various and complicated responses of Native Americans toward Europeans immigrants and explorers, and the relationship between indigenous people and European powers which include Virginia, New England, and France.

In Virginia, the Native Americans were generally not very pleased with the English and their decision to settle. The Natives and the English had been in disagreement since the moment the English first arrived. Chief Powhatan saw that the English settlers were in need of help and decided to be of …show more content…

The Puritans looked down upon the Natives and viewed them as “heathens in need of salvation,” but they also realized that some of their people might want to join the Natives because they did have ways of life that could be appealing to them such as equality of the sexes.(Crash Course, Natives and English, 3.0) In order to prevent betrayal, the Puritans created a sentence of hard labor for three years for those who choose to go native. They also used a lot of propaganda to sway people into not wanting to go native. In the early part of the 17th century after an English fur trader was killed by some Pequot, the English, and some Narragansett Indians, fired back by burning down a Pequot village killing about 500. (Crash Course, Natives and English, 3.0) Capitan John Mason was the brains behind this attack and had order the village burned and survivors killed. Even after being so brutally attacked, the Pequot still chose not to battle. (Steele, Warpaths, 92) Being that the Natives were obviously outnumbered, a few months later by the end of the war, most of them were either killed or sold in the Caribbean as slaves. Even though things weren’t looking so good for the Natives, they continued to resist.(Crash Course, Natives and English, …show more content…

In the 18th century, the teamed up to fight, in what is known as the Seven Years War, against the British. Although the British won the war, the Treaty of Paris made it so that America was independent. The war essentially just balanced out the power between the two continents. (Calhoun, War That Made America)

Overall, the Natives just treated the European immigrants and settlers the way that the European immigrants and settlers treated them. The golden rule to do unto others as you would have them do unto you plays a huge role in their relationship between the three different European powers I went over in this essay, but without all this having happened, we would not be where we are today. Everything in history happens for a reason and we will continue learn from our mistakes and make sure we don’t do the same thing all over again.

Steele, Ian K. Warpaths: Invasions of North America. . New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Calhoun, William. “The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War.” Naval War College Review 60, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 293. Accessed February 21, 2016. Questia Database. Mindtap-Cengage

Show More
Related

  • English Colonists vs Native Americans: Property Rights in the New World

    962 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...y robbing the Indians of their land, the English upset and hurt many of the Native American tribes, which lead to many disputes over ownership of the land.

    Read More

  • Chief Powhatan Speech

    321 Words  | 1 Pages

    Powhatan was the chief of a large Confederacy consisting of around thirty-two tribes living in the Virginia area. He was viewed as a strong and powerful leader who wants the best for his people. He explains that the reason for his speech is that he is near the end of his life and is concerned about their relationship when his successor takes place. Chief Powhatan wants peace between the English and the Powhatan people. “I exhort you to peaceable councils…” Willing to Chief uses the phrase “I wish their experience was equal to mine,” meaning he wants his children to have the same relationship with the colonists as his generation has enjoyed. Chief Powhatan states that Native Americans have the love for colonists, “not be less than ours to you”.

    Read More

  • Analysis of The Disquisition of Government by John Calhoun

    3726 Words  | 8 Pages

    Correspondence of John C. Calhoun. J. Franklin Jameson, ed. Annual Report of the American Historical Association 1899. II. 1900.

    Read More

  • Native Reactions To The Invasion Of America By James Axtell

    1019 Words  | 3 Pages

    Each European country treated the Native Americans distinctively and likewise the diverse Native Americans tribes reacted differently. The vast majority of the tribes didn’t wish to overtake the Europeans, but to rather just maintain their status quo. Moreover, Axtell mentions that during the inaugural stages of the encounter, the relationship between the two parties was rather peaceful since the Europeans were outnumbered by the natives. Axtell depicts that unlike the Europeans, the Native Americans treated the strangers equally or superior to themselves. The Indians would welcome the Europeans into their towns and shower them with gifts and blessings. The relationship between the two factions was going serene until the cultural differences became a burden on both

    Read More

  • Cruel and Inhuman Treatment of Native Americans by the Colonists

    1498 Words  | 3 Pages

    The process of assimilation, as it regards to the Native Americans, into European American society took a dreaded and long nearly 300 years. Initially, when the European’s came to the hopeful and promising land of the “New World”, they had no desire or reason anything but minimal contact with the Indians. However, starting in the 1700s the European colonists population skyrocketed. The need for more resources became evident and the colonists knew they could attain these necessities by creating a relationship of mutual benefit with the Native tribes. The Indians, at first skeptical, however became growingly open to the colonists and the relationship they were looking to attain. Indian furs were traded for colonial goods and military alliances were formed.

    Read More

  • A Different Mirror

    346 Words  | 1 Pages

    In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.

    Read More

  • Beyond 1492-Native Reactions to Invasion

    963 Words  | 2 Pages

    “ [They] spent most of the conquest and colonial periods reacting and responding to the European strangers and invaders” (99). Both sides were different in many ways; Their communication, transportation, culture, and the way they survived differentiate the Europeans from the Native Americans. They both acted as wisely as they could when this encounters began after the discovery. “[Tribes] worked mightily and often cleverly to maximize their political sovereignty, cultural autonomy, territorial integrity, power of self identification, and physical nobility” (100). The Europeans were stronger, had better technology, better weapons, and had plenty of experience fighting people like the Native Americans. They could have easily conquer them , but they had a problem of resources, reinforcements and survival. Native American were many but they lacked the knowledge and experience of war and evolution. Europeans were technologically evolved and were experienced at fighting wars, but they ...

    Read More

  • The French And Indian War Sparknotes

    1813 Words  | 4 Pages

    Borneman, Walter. The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

    Read More

  • Talking Back to Civilization

    1481 Words  | 3 Pages

    Talking Back to Civilization , edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, is a compilation of excerpts from speeches, articles, and texts written by various American Indian authors and scholars from the 1890s to the 1920s. As a whole, the pieces provide a rough testimony of the American Indian during a period when conflict over land and resources, cultural stereotypes, and national policies caused tensions between Native American Indians and Euro-American reformers. This paper will attempt to sum up the plight of the American Indian during this period in American history.

    Read More

  • The Major Causes Of Bacon's Rebellion In The 17th Century

    1203 Words  | 3 Pages

    Even though the critical aid of Indians had saved the settlers in Virginia from extinction, conflict—rooted in both ideological and practical reasons—was a prevalent tone in the relations between Virginian settlers and Indians during the 17th century. The undesirable relations began in the first months of the Jamestown colony. The early colonists in Jamestown viewed the Indians as savages and expressed hostility towards them. Captain John Smith established an unstable relationship with the Indians, occasionally stealing food from them. Tensions increased even further when tobacco cultivation became prominent in Virginia, which increased the demand for land as farmers required large tracts of farmland for tobacco cultivation. This increased demand for land caused settlers to expand into areas claimed by Indians. In fact, one of the major causes of Bacon’s Rebellion, the most powerful uprising against authority in North America prior to the Revolution, was the desire to expand into Native American lands. The series of conflicts that triggered Bacon’s rebellion began when Doeg Indians assaulted a plantation in retaliation for intrusions upon native land. White settlers struck back at the Indians in

    Read More

  • Native American Relations

    481 Words  | 1 Pages

    During the numerous years of colonization, the relationship between the English settlers and the Native Americans of the area was usually the same. Native Americans would initially consider the settlers to be allies, then as time passed, they would be engaged in wars with them in a struggle for control of the land. This process of friendship to enemies seemed to be the basic pattern in the majority of the colonies.

    Read More

  • the development of slavery in America

    1202 Words  | 3 Pages

    It was a difficult life for the first colonists; they had limited labor and were constantly raided by Native Americans. Colonists tried to use the Native Americans as a source of slavery. Most of the colonist’s farms were in forest areas so Native Americans would just leave in to the woods. Colonists were afraid of pressuring them from the fear of getting ambushed by gangs of Native Americans. Another reason Native American men made bad slaves was because the women in the tribes did the agricultural work in the Native American villages.

    Read More

  • The Common Man’s Role in the American Revolution

    906 Words  | 2 Pages

    George Browm Tindall, David Emory Shi. American History: 5th Brief edition, W. W. Norton & Company; November 1999

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Peace Came In The Form Of A Women

    1385 Words  | 3 Pages

    Native American’s place in United States history is not as simple as the story of innocent peace loving people forced off their lands by racist white Americans in a never-ending quest to quench their thirst for more land. Accordingly, attempts to simplify the indigenous experience to nothing more than victims of white aggression during the colonial period, and beyond, does an injustice to Native American history. As a result, historians hoping to shed light on the true history of native people during this period have brought new perceptive to the role Indians played in their own history. Consequently, the theme of power and whom controlled it over the course of Native American/European contact is being presented in new ways. Examining the evolving

    Read More

  • American Indians

    1645 Words  | 4 Pages

    Tension and disputes are sometimes resolved by force but more often by negotiation or treaties. On the other hand, the Natives were described as strong and very innocent creatures awaiting the first opportunity to be christianized. The Indians were called the “Noble Savages” by the settlers because they were cooperative people, but sometimes, after having a few conflicts with them, they seem to behave like animals. We should apprehend that the encounter with the settlers really amazed the natives, they were only used to interacting with people from their own race and surroundings and all of this was like a new discovery for them as well as for the white immigrants. The relations between the English and the Virginian Indians were somewhat strong in a few ways.

    Read More

More about Chief Powhatan Research Paper

Open Document