History 1301

Professor Johnson

Exam 1 Essay

Let’s say we time traveled back to when the Europeans begin to colonize the New World. I was

a Native American during that time and age. I was probably living a very good life, hunting,

fishing, and farming etc… Suddenly in the 1500s, Europeans discovered this New World that I’m

living in. Before the 1500s, this continent was an unknown place to them. They saw this land to

discover new animals and plants. Us Indians were very creative. We had found ways to live in

deserts, forest, along the oceans and on the grasslands. Europeans encountered with the

Indians by the coast first and then with more as they expanded westwards.

The arrival of Europeans impacted and changed our lives drastically. As they sailed

across the Atlantic they brought with them diseases. They brought diseases like smallpox,

measles and flus. As an English explorer Thomas Harriot observed and wrote, “Within a few

days after our departure from every such [Indian] town, the people began to die very fast, and

many in short space; in some towns about twenty, in some forty, in some sixty, & in one six

score [6 x 20 = 120], which in truth was very many in respect of their numbers. . . . The disease

was also so strange that they neither knew what it was nor how to cure it.” This was after the

Europeans had visited our tribes and left. Experts believed that 90 percent of us Indians died

after the introduction of European diseases to the New World.

 Before the arrival of the Europeans to the new world we had self-determination. The

Native Americans tribe had their own government. After the Europeans, we had no kind of self-

determination at all. The Europeans needed workers to build houses and clear fields. This was

another big change that came about after the Europeans had arrived, slavery. Europeans

realized that they could trade goods with certain Indian tribes that would bring other Indians

captured in tribe wars. They would be bought and sold as slaves. After that no Indian tribes had

self-determination at all. A lot of tribes had tried to escape the slave trade, which destroyed

some of the tribes completely. Later in time, enslaving of the Native Indians ended.

When the Europeans arrived, we had the option to see what they could provide and

what they had that we did not. We were very interested with the things that they could provide

for us. We even started to trade with them for the new-found items that they had. We even

started to use these new materials and product in our everyday life. They had firearms, powder

and lead shot which lead us to let go of our bows and arrows that we used for hunting. You

could almost say we got along with the Europeans. New trade goods across the Atlantic had

changed our lives forever and brought us more options to do stuff efficiently. Soon we had to

depend on these new European goods for our daily needs.

Citation
“500 Nations - The Story of Native Americans - Part I.” YouTube, YouTube,

www.youtube.com/watch?v. Accessed 19 June 2017.

Davidson James W. US: A Narrative History, Volume 2: Since 1865 7th Edition McGraw Hill.

New York. 2015. Print.

Kincheloe, John W. “American Indians at European Contact.” American Indians at European

Contact | NCpedia, 1 Jan. 2007, www.ncpedia.org/history/early/contact. Accessed 19

June 2017.