Much like the Europeans, indigenous peoples operated the same way trying to uses European cultural ways to their own convenience. The environmental and immediate economic potential of this affected how colonial settlement were shaped and colonist’s ideologies of the local people. When it is taken under consideration, it becomes clear that indigenous people responded to the arrival of the colonist with ‘cultural flexibility and resilience’. Native tribes responded by incorporating many aspects of western material cultures in their practices while still maintaining aspect of their culture. Instead of completely assimilating to their new ethic identity they reshaped it, even when their lands were being taken over by colonist and there number were diminishing. Indigenous peoples were more than impressionable and malleable when its comes to their response to European colonization. Through this paper I will prove this by demonstrating the impact of European colonization had left on native societies, how cultures assimilated due to European social pressures , and indigenous response left indispensable influences on colonial …show more content…
Other Atlantic Explorers such as Portugal focused there attention on Brazil, while the French and England only travelled to the America in early seventeenth century. Columbus was required to write a journal and letters to the crown of this new land, he emphasizes the level of its appearance, natives who inhabit it, technologies, and potential for settlement. Columbus wrote in his letter describing his first voyage “The sierras and the mountains, the plains, the campaigns… rich for planting and sowing…for breeding cattle of every kind, for building towns and villages.” Explaining everything to the land appearance and the natives who lived there “ saw no great diversity in the appearance of the people or in their manners and language. On the contrary, they all understand on another.” Once Europeans believed this new world was fit to inhabit migration began. Colonist thus settled in America establishing trading posts and plantations and initiated the ruling of the indigenous peoples. Europeans colonized in order to spread the christian faith, collect wealth through trade and exploitation of other countries much like they did in the Americas. Spanish colonist spread throughout New Spain in order to search for gold, to set up mines, sugar mills and plantations. While other settlers used the land for agricultural products and build farms.