500 Years of Indigenous resistanceThe eUrOP ea N sTrUGG le
FOr h eGem ONY
Although colonial wars had been fought in the past between France,
Spain, the Netherlands, and England, and conflicts had erupted between
their colonies in the Americas, the late 1680s and the following 100 year
period was to be a time of bitter struggle between the Europeans for
domination. This period of European wars was to be played out also in
the Americas, “To a great extent, the battle for colonies and the wealth
they produced was the ultimate battlefield for state power in Europe.”^13
Beginning in 1689 with King William’s War between the French and the
English, which evolved into Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), to King George’s
War (1744–48) and culminating in the so-called ‘French and Indian War’
(1754–63), the battles for colonial possessions in the Americas mirrored those
raging across Europe in the same period, except that in North American and
in the Caribbean, the European struggle for hegemony in the emerging world
trade market would employ heavy concentrations of Native warriors.
While the British emerged victorious from the ‘Great War for Empire’,
and the French defeated ceding Hudson Bay, Acadia, New France and other
territories in a series of treaties, those who were most affected by the Europe-
an struggles were the Native peoples of the Atlantic regions. The fallout from
those wars was the virtual extermination of some Indigenous peoples, includ-
ing the Apalachees in Florida, the establishment of colonial military garrisons
and outposts, a general militarization of the region with heavier armaments
and combat veterans, and the subsequent expansion of colonial settlements,
extending their frontiers and pushing many First Nations further west.
During the period of the colonial wars, Indigenous resistance did
not end, nor was it limited to aiding their respective ‘allies’.
In 1711, the Tuscaroras attacked the English in North Carolina and
fought for two years, until the English counter-insurgency campaign left
hundreds dead and some 400 sold into slavery. The Tuscaroras fled north,
settling among the Haudenosaunee and becoming the Sixth Nation in 1722.
- Ortiz, op. cit.