American Colonies: The Settling of North America

Chapter 5 shifts to the northeast, where the English, Dutch, and French established colonies in what is now Canada and Acadia. While the Spanish dominated the land and trade routes to the south, the north remained open but did not have a good growing season for tropical crops. Furs, on the other hand, could be hunted year-round and were in high demand in Europe (94).

The logistics of the fur trade explain key differences in how natives were treated in the north versus the south. First, it was more profitable to allow Indians to do the hard work of obtaining and processing furs than to enslave them for other purposes (94). This led to a more equitable playing field between Europeans and Indians, and in turn a complex mutual dependency, as “the Canadian French could not afford to bully, dispossess, or enslave the Indians, needing them instead to persist as suppliers of furs” (101). Second, as the European traders preferred to keep their own numbers low for profitability, they depended on the goodwill of their Indian allies to avoid being killed by their enemies (92; 101).

For the Indians, the utility of European goods (metal tools, guns, etc.) led to the abandoning of traditional stone tools and the knowledge needed to create them, meaning the Indians would need to continue trading with the Europeans or face starvation or annihilation by their better-armed enemies (97). The demand for furs caused the Indians to discard the tenets of animism, increasing their hunting and straining the environment. Beaver populations plummeted. Cultural groups began to infringe on each other’s territories in search of more pelts, with a cascading effect of intensifying conflict in the region (98).

The primary conflict was between the Hurons, who functioned as middlemen in the fur trade (aided by Samuel de Champlain and the French settled in the St. Lawrence Valley) and the Five Nation Iroquois (allied with the Dutch and Henry Hudson, an English mariner employed by the Dutch in the Hudson Valley). The Iroquois Five Nations waged relentless wars against each other in the 15th century but had been recently united by a prophet, Deganawida, and his disciple Hiawatha. The Iroquois collective was called the Great League of Peace and Power, which “in effect […] functioned as a pact of mutual non-aggression” (103). While the Huron enjoyed early victories, the tides shifted after 1610 due to the Iroquois’ strength as warriors and their cultural practice of mourning war, which demanded sacrificial victims and domestic captives to replace deceased Iroquois (102-3). As a result of this relentless system of capture and assimilation, by 1650 the Huron and their allies were essentially destroyed or absorbed into Iroquois villages. Though the adoptees were given Iroquois names and, in theory, able to live freely as Iroquois, they often retained their own cultural practices and identities, making this an uneasy system at best.

Though the result of European colonization here was arguably less catastrophic than in the south, native cultures were still cataclysmically changed. The effects of disease and conflict dissolved many cultural groups and forced new, often uncomfortable ones with the survivors (another example of ethnogenesis).