Despite my interest in history, I’ve never learned all that much about the European conquest of the American continents between the 16th and 19th centuries. Pretty much all that I know came from suburban grammar school in the early 1960s. The flavor of it all was pretty much that there were some people occupying the region stretching from the Bering Strait and Newfoundland down to Cape Horn, and they had some interesting if rudimentary civilizations going for them. But the Spanish first arrived, followed later by English, Dutch, French and others, who brought forth better, more advanced arrangements than the natives could ever dream of. So, even though some of the tactics used by the Euro invaders weren’t very kind, the “Indians” weren’t making all that much out of the rich natural resources surrounding them. It was for the Europeans to come in and set the Americans on the path of progress, to set up some real civilizations that could make the most out of the mostly-untouched natural bounty available in the “New World”. The various Indian nations put up some resistance, in some cases tough and noble resistance, but in the end, the inevitable march of human progress could not be denied.

Of course, that point of view itself could not survive the “march of progress”. The Euro conquest of the American continents is now seen more honestly, basically as an invasion by one people eager to take away the riches that another people enjoyed. One reason why the Spanish and then French and English (and eventually the young American nation) were so successful against the natives was supposedly because the “Indians” were mostly backward. They were small, unorganized groups living in a fashion similar to what the Europeans experienced during the Dark Ages, a millennium before.

Or were they? Before the Europeans started arriving in mass after 1500, modern research shows that the native populations in both North and South American were much larger than  »  continue reading …