Before the white man arrived, the Native Americans only had themselves to fight. You should learn about the way the Iroquois drove the Shawnee against the Chickasaw and Cherokee, and the Cherokee against the Creek. The Plains Indians were driven there when the whites brought in horses for them to steal and had to run away from the Eastern Tribes. Killing buffalo without horses was really tough, and the Indians had extinguished the American horse (driving them over cliffs). They were too unskilled to bring Asian horses with them when they crossed the land bridge.
It is easy to idealize and romanticize Native Americans, but what they wanted was trade goods, and the French and British and Spanish competed in monopolizing the trade, and, ultimately, trading them out of their land.
The settled agricultural Indians (such as Cherokee) had clear definitions of ownership of land. It was the Americans who didn't understand Indian concepts of ownership. The Cherokee were willing to sell land to the British and Carolinas, but they preferred to sell other peoples lands to which they had no claim. Most tribes had claims to homelands so strong that they were willing to die for them, because they had no other place to go. When the land base was destroyed the tribe itself quickly followed it. The reservations (frequently multitribal) were simply places for peoples to go to die. |
