while gunpowder weapons could be terrifying to Natives who had never seen them before, they were remarkably scarce in the early era of encounters in addition to being inaccurate, slow to load, and unreliable. English colonists at Jamestown, for instance, were told not to demonstrate their firearms in the presence of Natives or they would see how relatively ineffective they were.

thrust Natives into a set of global economic relations that encouraged or forced them to adopt new ways of life

he Americas is not to understate the transformational impact of the indigenous encounter with Europeans

We tend to present the arrival of Europeans as the catalyst of change for indigenous societies in the Americas that had previously been defined by their timelessness. As we have seen though, pre-contact Natives had never been immune to change

s if European societies were free of ritualized violence. Spain and England both practiced large-scale public ceremonies that included torture and execution

emergence of Spanish rule. After all, that rule was accompanied by massacres, epidemic disease, forced labor, and a new social system that placed indigenous people at the bottom of the status hierarchy.

one of the reasons the Spanish were able to successfully bring down the two empires was because of the willingness of subject populations to collaborate with the new invaders against their Aztec or Inca overlords. Both Spanish propagandists at the time and some ideologues even today pointed to the cruelty of these Native states to justify European conquest.

One result of this is that these long-distance networks completely collapsed after Aztec power was destroyed by Spanish invaders after 1521.

the earliest Spaniards to enter Tenochtitlan were awestruck by the richness and diversity of goods found in the city’s markets.

When we accustom ourselves to seeing past human suffering as just the cost of history, as the collateral damage necessary in creating the “world we live in today”, we also make it easier to justify exploitation and violence in the present and future

By 1580, the Aztec empire had been hollowed out to less than 2 million people, from a starting point of 25 million.

One out of every three native people died in just ten years. After another decade the Aztec population was reduced to about 6 million. Three out of four people in the Aztec world disappeared in 20 years.

American native populations had no such safeguards, and disease spread virulently. For example, there were over a million people living on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1492 when Columbus left his 39 sailors in La Navidad. By 1548, there were only 500 natives left alive. 999,500 people had disappeared in a little over 50 years. The populations of other Caribbean islands like Cuba were similarly wiped out. Whole societies disappeared,

diseases on Native Americans was one of human history’s most abrupt and severe population disasters.

they were struck down by the largely accidental transfer of Old World viruses and bacteria to the Americas, which caused the deaths of at least 90% of the indigenous American population.

The Spanish and Portuguese dominated the first century of exploration, conquest, and colonization in the Americas for many reasons. Spain and Portugal had an eight-century long tradition of warfare from fighting the Reconquista against the Moors and were prepared for further battle for glory and religion. The Portuguese also had a maritime tradition, which was how Columbus learned his trade

As a slave, Malintzin was forced into a physical relationship with Cortés. Their son, Martín, was one of the first “mestizos” (persons of mixed indigenous American and European descent) in Spanish America. Malintzin remains a controversial figure in the history of the Atlantic World. Some view her as a traitor because she helped Cortés conquer the Aztecs, while others see her as a victim of European imperialism whose choices were very limited. In either case, she demonstrates one way in which native peoples responded to the arrival of the Spanish. Without her, Cortés would not have been able to communicate, and without the language bridge, he surely would have been less successful in destabilizing the Aztec Empire. By this and other means, native people helped shape the conquest of the Americas.

When Cortés explored central Mexico, he encountered a region simmering with native conflict. Far from being unified and content under Aztec rule, many peoples in Mexico resented the overlords of Tenochtitlán and were ready to rebel. Cortés was also aided by an enslaved Nahua woman, Malintzin (also known as La Malinche or Doña Marina, her Spanish name), whom the natives of Tabasco gave him as a tribute slave. In addition to speaking Nahua and Maya, Malintzin quickly learned Spanish and translated for Cortés in his dealings with Aztec emperor Moctezuma.

Like Columbus, the explorers carried back to Europe not only eyewitness accounts of wealthy civilizations, but samples of native plants, animals, and captive people.

European exploration did not BEGIN with Columbus

During this period, the indigenous populations experienced their own agricultural revolution around the same time as Africans and Eurasians, but instead of domesticating cattle, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens–which were not native to the Americas–they developed certain plants, creating three of the world’s current top five staple crops: corn, potatoes, and cassava, as well as additional plants such as hot peppers, tomatoes, beans, cocoa, and tobacco,

mericas probably had a total population of around 65 millio

The European Views of the American Indigenous