Cultural Interactions Between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans

When English colonists on Roanoke Island in 1585 watched Algonquian villages sicken and die after their visits, they concluded that God was punishing their enemies. The Algonquians who survived concluded that the English were killing people with invisible weapons. Both groups were explaining the same epidemic with the ideas they already had. Early contact between Europeans, Native Americans and Africans was full of moments like this, when each side interpreted the other through its own beliefs about religion, family, land and power, and those interpretations, as much as guns or germs, shaped what happened next.

Different ideas about God, family, land and power

Europeans and Native Americans did not arrive at contact as blank slates. Each had settled ideas about how the world worked, and the differences were large. Native societies varied enormously (Topic 1.2 covers how they adapted to different environments), so the Native column below describes common patterns, not a single "Native view."

Each difference produced specific conflicts. On religion, Spaniards believed conquest was justified if Native people refused Christianity. The pope's bull Inter caetera (1493) and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal, and from 1513 Spanish commanders were required to read aloud the Requerimiento, a legal statement ordering Native people to accept the pope's and the Spanish king's authority or face war and enslavement. It was read in Spanish, sometimes to empty beaches or from ships, to people who could not understand a word. To the Spanish the ritual made conquest lawful; to Native listeners it meant nothing.

On gender, Europeans who saw Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) or Algonquian women working in fields concluded that Native men were lazy and that women were treated as drudges, since in Europe field labor was men's work and hunting was a pastime of nobles. They missed that among the Haudenosaunee, clan mothers chose and could remove the men who served as chiefs, and that women's control of food gave them real power. On land, a Native leader who accepted gifts in exchange for allowing Europeans to use land often understood the deal as a shared-use agreement that had to be renewed with more gifts, while the Europeans understood it as a permanent sale. The English later wrote this view into a legal doctrine: in 1629 John Winthrop argued that land Native people had not "improved" with fences and farms was legally empty and open to Christians.

Misreading each other, then learning from each other

In the first years of contact, each group tried to fit the other into categories it already had, and the guesses were often wrong. Columbus wrote in 1493 that the Taíno were convinced he and his crews had come from heaven, which told Spaniards what they wanted to hear about how easy conversion would be. The famous story that the Aztec ruler Moctezuma believed Hernán Cortés was the returning god Quetzalcoatl is probably a misreading of the same kind. Historian Camilla Townsend ("Burying the White Gods," 2003) and Matthew Restall (Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, 2003) point out that the story appears only in sources written decades after the conquest, mostly by Spaniards and by Native writers trained in Spanish missions; letters from the conquest itself never mention it. The myth explained the Spanish victory as Native superstition and hid the real causes: smallpox and tens of thousands of Native allies.

Trade was misread too. When Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1534 and 1535, the people of Stadacona (near modern Quebec City), led by Donnacona, welcomed him with gifts and expected an alliance against their enemies. Cartier wanted a route to Asia and gold; he seized two of Donnacona's sons in 1534 and Donnacona himself in 1536, and took them to France, where Donnacona died. Native traders prized items Europeans thought cheap, such as glass beads and copper, and Europeans concluded that Native people were naive bargainers. Historians Christopher Miller and George Hamell ("A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact," 1986) offer a different explanation for the Northeast: beads and copper resembled the quartz crystals, shell and native copper that Native peoples there already used in ritual, so they may have been valued as sources of spiritual power rather than as trinkets. Other historians stress practical uses, such as cutting copper kettles into tools, so the bead trade is still a case where you should say whose interpretation you are using.

Over time, misunderstanding gave way to selective borrowing, and both sides took what was useful:

• Europeans adopted maize, beans, squash and potatoes as food; tobacco, which Europe had never known; canoes and snowshoes; Native trails, guides and interpreters, on which most expeditions depended (Hernando de Soto's army moved through the Southeast by seizing people in each town to serve as guides and porters); and Native medicine. In the winter of 1535-1536, when scurvy was killing Cartier's crew, Stadaconans showed them how to brew a tea from the bark and needles of a tree they called annedda (probably white cedar), and the sailors recovered.
• Native Americans adopted iron axes, knives, kettles, needles and cloth, which made work faster; livestock in the Spanish borderlands; and, in time, horses, which transformed Plains societies in the 1600s and 1700s (Topic 2.4). They reworked these goods on their own terms: a copper kettle might be cut into arrowheads and ornaments.
• Religion blended rather than simply replacing. Many Native converts in New Spain added Christian saints to older practices. At Tepeyac, a hill near Mexico City where Nahuas had honored a mother goddess, a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe drew Native and Spanish worshippers by the 1550s, which Spanish friars both encouraged and worried about.

Africans were part of these exchanges from the beginning, often as go-betweens. Juan Garrido, a free African, fought with Cortés in Mexico. Esteban (often called Estevanico), an enslaved man from Morocco, survived the shipwrecked Narváez expedition of 1528 and walked across what is now Texas and northern Mexico with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca for eight years, learning Native languages and acting as an interpreter; he was killed in 1539 at the Zuni town of Hawikuh while leading a Spanish scouting party. Enslaved Africans also carried their own languages, religious practices and farming knowledge, and Africans who escaped slavery built maroon communities (independent settlements of escapees, often hidden in mountains or swamps) that sometimes allied with Native people or with Spain's European enemies (Topic 1.5).

Defending sovereignty by negotiation and by war

As Europeans demanded more land, labor and religious obedience, Native peoples worked to protect their independence, their economies, their beliefs and their ways of organizing family and gender. They chose among diplomacy, alliance and armed resistance, and they often used more than one.

Alliance with Europeans for Native goals. The Tlaxcalans, longtime enemies of the Aztecs, allied with Cortés in 1519 and supplied most of the soldiers who took Tenochtitlan in 1521. They used that alliance afterward to win privileges from the crown, including exemption from some tribute and the right to keep their own government. Choosing a side was a Native strategy, not only a European one.

Military resistance. Armed resistance was constant across the period:

• On Hispaniola and Cuba, the Taíno leader Hatuey fought the Spanish until he was captured and burned in 1512. On Hispaniola, Enriquillo led a revolt from the mountains from 1519 to 1533 that ended with a treaty granting his followers freedom and land, a rare negotiated settlement.
• In the Mixtón War (1540-1542) in western Mexico, Caxcan and other Native peoples rose against the encomienda (a royal grant that let a Spanish settler demand tribute and labor from a Native community; Topic 1.5) and against missionaries; the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado died in the fighting. Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza crushed the revolt with tens of thousands of Native allied soldiers.
• In the Southeast, Hernando de Soto's army fought a pitched battle at Mabila in 1540 against warriors of the chief Tascalusa. In the Southwest, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's men fought the Tiguex War (1540-1541) with Pueblo towns after seizing their food and clothing in winter.
• In New Mexico in 1599, after the people of Acoma Pueblo killed Spanish soldiers demanding supplies, Juan de Oñate's forces destroyed the town, and men over 25 were sentenced to have a foot cut off and to twenty years of servitude.

Diplomacy and the limits of force. On Spain's northern frontier, nomadic peoples the Spanish called Chichimecas raided silver roads for four decades (about 1550-1590). War failed to stop them, so Spanish officials switched to what historians call "peace by purchase": regular gifts of food, cloth and tools, missions, and settlements of Tlaxcalan colonists. The raiding ended. That outcome shows that Native peoples could force Europeans to adopt Native forms of diplomacy, in which gift-giving sustained peace.

Worked examples

Where students lose points