Brandon9000 wrote:In the mid-17th century, the European colonists in America were weak and needed the Native Americans, and so courted them as they would any foreign power that could do them some good. In the 19th century, they were strong, self-sufficient, and not threatended by colonization efforts by European powers, so they didn't need help from the Native Americans, and treated them considerably less well.
This is a naive statement, which is not supported by the historical record. In 1640, Parliament and the King went to war with one another, and the two colonies of the North American mainland--the Massachusetts Bay Company (a private corporate effort of the Puritans) and Virginia--were left to their own devices to defend themselves. The Amerindians were quick to take notice, and both colonies were obliged to buy powder, shot and firearms from the Dutch in the West Indies to defend their settlements.
But the warfare had already begun before the English Civil Wars. The aboriginals in Virginia attacked the Jamestown colonists from the very beginning, and in the 1622 attack on Martin's Hundred (in Virginia) came very close to successfully wiping out the English colonists. The Pequot War in 1637 was a concerted effort at extermination of the Pequot by the English, having enlisted the Narragansett as their allies.
American history has been dominated for a century and a half by a "New England-centric" view point, and this poor starving settlers, saved by the peaceful and generous Indians is just one example of the sort of bullshit which it produces.
Probably the most important influence of the relations of the United States with Amerindians has its origins with the French in Canada. Champlain established the city of Québec in 1608, and in that same year, he joined a band of Algonquians in a prolonged march into what is now upstate New York. There they met and fought a band of Iroquois, killing two tribal leaders. The Iroquois never forgot, and they became implacable enemies of the French. Beginning about 1640, they attempted to exterminate all of the tribes of the Great Lakes basin in the attempt to deny the fur trade to the French and to engross for themselves. They brought furs to the Dutch at Albany (and later the English) to finance their constant warfare with the French. They twice invaded New France--Canada--and on the second occassion, remained there for more than two years in the attempt to exterminate the French.
The French, who actually got along pretty well with most Indians, responded with several measures, one of which was to turn their Indians allies on the English colonists--especially the Mic-Macs of what is now New Brunswick and Maine. Border warfare raged for a century and half, and only ended with the final defeat of France in Canada in 1760. Thanks to the French, who instigated and supported attacks from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, many of the colonists had already adopted the attitude that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. But the most crucial circumstance was that of William Johnson. William Johnson was the agent of the English Crown to the Indians in New York--to the Iroquois Confederation. He has supported them in their wars with the French, and he very effectively enlisted them as allies in the last Anglo-French war in North America, which we know of as the French and Indian War.
When the American Revolution began, Johnson remained loyal to the Crown, and he made allies of the Iroquois once again (they were now known to Americans largely as Mohawks), and helped to turn them agains the American frontier settlements. When the English stumbled through their inept first operation, which foresaw Clinton marching north from New York to meet Burgoyne at Albany (he failed to do so), Burgoyne marched south from Canada with many western Indian tribesmen--ironically, he had no Mohawks, no tribesmen from the Iroquois Confederation with him.
But in that same campaign, Tories (loyalists to the English Crown) fought American militiamen. The Tories were supported by the Iroquois Confederation, and the Americans brought some Oneidas to the party. Initially defeated, the Americans turned on the Tories and Indians when the latter left the battle to scalp and loot the wounded and the dead. It was a bloody and bitterly fought battle, and although a victory for St. Leger and the Tories, the counterattack by the Americans after the battle demoralized the Iroquois. The Oneida were also members of the Confederation, but had fought at the side of the Americans.
What was crucially important, however, was Washington's reaction. The American losses had been devastated--in many of the wilderness settlements of the Mohawk River valley, the entire adult male population had been wiped out. Washington sent General Sullivan to drive the Mohawk (i.e., the Iroquois Confederation) from New York, two years after the battle of Oriskany. Sullivan only fought a single battle, but the Tories and Indians were routed, and Sullivan and Clinton went on to destroy more than 40 Iroquois villages, and in the following winter of 1779-80, the Mohawks starved to death, froze to death, or were obliged to flee to Canada, where they survive to this day.
Others can think what they will, i believe that the relations between the American rebels and William Johnson's Iroquois created the attitude of Americans toward Indians, or cemented the attitudes already formed in the
four French and Indian wars fought in the 17th and 18th centuries. Indians were specifically excluded as citizens in the constitution, they were treated as foreign nations, and our first President had contempt for them, and had fought them in the French and Indian War, and had ordered their extermination in the Revolution.
