GO rD hIll 500 Years of Indigenous resistance
Indians, intersocietal commerce triumphed by subordinating and
eliminating all crafts except those directly related to the Europe-
an-Indian trade, while intertribal trading relations survived only
insofar as they served the purposes of intersocietal trade.^10
Thus, trade with European industry developed a relationship of growing
dependence on the European colonists. The items traded to Natives—
metal pots, knives, and occasionally rifles—were of European manufac-
ture and supply. The trade also disrupted and changed traditional Native
methods in other ways, with the introduction of alcohol and extermina-
tionist forms of warfare—including torture—under the direction of the
colonialists, as well as an overall escalation in warfare in the competition-
driven fur trade and introduction of European rifles.
While disease epidemics began to spread throughout the Atlantic
coastal area, the colonialists also relied to a large extent on exploiting
and exaggerating already existing hostilities between First Nations, as the
Spanish and Portuguese had also done in their campaigns,
The grim epics of Cortes and Pizarro, not to speak of Colum-
bus himself, testify to the military abilities of Spanish soldiery,
but these need to be compared as well with the great failures of
Narvaez, Coronado and de Soto... (The conquistadors) did not
conquer Mexico and Peru unaided. Native allies were indispens-
able... North of New Spain, invasion started later, so Frenchmen,
Dutchmen, and Englishmen found native communities...already
reduced by epidemic from base populations that never ap-
proached the size of Mexico.^11
It was at this time that the concept of treaty making began to take hold.
In keeping with the English colonists early plans of keeping some level of
peace with the Natives, as in 1606 when,
the Virginia Company of London instructed its colonists to buy
a stock of corn from the ‘naturals’ before the English intention to
settle permanently should become evident. The Company’s chiefs
were sure that ‘you cannot carry yourselves so towards them but
they will grow discontented with your habitation’.^12- Ibid, pg. 85.
- Ibid, pg. 33.
- Ibid, pg. 76.