e of economic benefits, of Spain. Religious conviction in the context of what came to be called the age of discovery had the effect of encouraging the explorers who followed Columbus and Spain to the New World to feel a sense of entitlement to whatever benefits there that they were clever or strong enough to exploit and a sense of mission toward the peoples they came upon. The effect of that is difficult to describe as other than one of systematic extermination, dispossession, and subjugation on the part of European-Americans.
But encounters cannot be judged solely by their effects; process, too, is part of the experience. In that regard, Calloway makes the point that Native American history "is also part of a shared past" and that the indigenous peoples of the New World responded to the Europeans "in a variety of ways and coexisted with the newcomers as often as they fought against them." In part, that can be attributed to the fact of intermarriage, in some cases initiated by abduction of white persons by Indians. In part it can be attributed to the growth of commercial relationships between Indians and Europeans, and many of today's key commercial urban centers began as fur/skin trading posts. However, it is important to recognize that the Europeans did not necessarily introduce the concept of trade to North America. As Salisbury points out, the various peoples of North America before the time of contact with Europeans had developed interregional trade protocols and had otherwise developed complexity--including the complications of war between different peoples--in their social systems. Salisbury cites in particular the Cahokia people who thrived in the part of the upper Mississippi valley known as American Bottoms and the Anasazi in the Chaco Canyon region of New Mexico, noting that the Cahokia appear to have abandoned their settlements because of was and the Anasazi because of drought's effects on agriculture. All of that too...