Conflict Between Native Americans & the Europeans

The film involves one particular European group, the French, and the indian tribes the French sought to convert to Christianity, but the interactions shown in the film are true tow hat Nash says took place among all the European and Indian groups in North America. Nash finds that one group has dominated our thinking because the history of colonial America has been written primarily in terms of the English. Nash says this has caused us to overlook the intra-European rivalries involving the many different European groups which arrived during the seventeenth century, and it also caused us to ignore how the French, Dutch, and Spanish colonizers related to the Indians. He cites one historian, Francis Parkman, who did address the issue by stating that "Spanish civilization crushed the Indians; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him" (Nash 88).

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they got along better with the Indians, it was in part because they were agriculturalists and not traders. They agreed with the other colonists in that they "gave primary importance to the acquisition o adequate amounts of land" (Nash 96), and they also sought material success. Under Penn's leadership, the Quakers sought to learn about Indian culture rather than merely quash it. Relations remained good so long as Penn was in control, but after that, things deteriorated. One problem was that the tolerance the Quakers had for other religions and ethnic groups attracted other religious settlers to the area, settlers who had a rapacious greed of land that would bring them into conflict with Indian tribes that had no concept of the ownership of land and did not accept the way the Europeans were taking land as their own. These settlers built dams which ruined the Indian fishing downstream. Alcohol was again used as a way of controlling the Indians. The Indians sought to survive, and the new settlers sought to push the Indians out of the region so the settlers could have the land unimpeded (Nash 95-100). French-Indian relations differed in the degree to which the French embraced the Indians even more than had the Quakers while a
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Approximate Word count = 1593
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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