The Indian's New World

The fate of the Powhatans foreshadowed the destinies of indigenous peoples throughout the continent as the process of European settlement went forward. Native Americans, of course, had a history well before Columbus's arrival.

They were no strangers to change, adaptation, and even catastrophe, as the rise and decline of civilizations such as the Mississippians and the Anasazis demonstrated.

But the shock of large-scale Euro pean colonization disrupted Native American life on a vast scale, inducing unprecedented demographic and cultural transformations.

Some changes were fairly benign. Horses-stolen, strayed, or purchased from Spanish invaders catalyzed a substantial Indian migration onto the Great Plains in the 18th century. Peoples such as the Lakotas (Sioux), who had previously been sedentary forest dwellers, now moved onto the wide-open plains.

There they thrived impressively, adopting an entirely new way of life as mounted nomadic hunters.

But the effects of contact with Europeans proved less salutary for most other native peoples.

Disease was by far the biggest disrupter, as Old World pathogens licked lethally through biologically defenseless Indian populations. Disease took more than human life; it extinguished entire cultures and occasionally helped shape new ones. Epidemics often robbed native peoples of the elders who preserved the oral traditions that held clans together.

Devastated Indian bands then faced the daunting task of literally reinventing themselves without benefit of accumulated wisdom or kin networks.

The decimation and forced migration of native peoples sometimes scrambled them together in wholly new ways.

The Catawba nation of the southern Piedmont region, for example, was formed from splintered remnants of several different groups uprooted by the shock of the Europeans' arrival.

Trade also transformed Indian life, as traditional barter and exchange networks gave way to the temptations of Euro pean commerce. Firearms, for Signe of the B-B 1609 Advertisement for a Voyage te 1609 example, conferred enormous advantages on those who could purchase them from Europeans.

The desire for firearms thus intensified competition among the tribes for access to prime hunting grounds that could supply the skins and pelts that the European arms traders wanted.

The result was an escalating cycle of Indian-on-Indian violence, fueled by the lure and demands of European trade goods.

Native Americans were swept up in the expandlessling Atlantic economy, but they usually struggled in vain to control their own place in it. One desperated band of Virginia Indians, resentful at the prices offered by British traders for their deerskins, loaded a fleet of canoes with hides and tried to paddle to putti England to sell their goods directly.

Not far from the Virginia shore, a storm swamped their frail craft. Their cargo lost, the few survivors were picked up succe by an English ship and sold into slavery in the West Indies.

Indians along the Atlantic seaboard felt the most ferocious effects of European contact. Farther inland, native peoples had the advantages of time, space, and numbers as they sought to adapt to the European incursion.

The Algonquins in the Great Lakes area, for instance, became a substantal regional power.

They bolstered their population by absorbing various surrounding bands and dealt from a position of strength with the few Europeans who managed to penetrate the interior.

As a result, a British or French trader wanting to do business with the inland tribes had little choice but to con form to Indian ways, often taking an Indian wife.

Thus was created a middle ground, a zone where both European and Native Americans were compelled to accommodate to one another-at least until the Europeans began to arrive in large numbers.