In the excerpt from People’s History of the United States, the author pinpoints a lot about the hostility and innocence of Indians and how the European Discovery ended up sabotaging their lives and forcing slavery upon on them. Columbus is aware of the actions he takes after part-taking in the welcoming of the foreigners, he sees potential to profit from the land. While persuading the
The immediate solution to this problem was the enslavement of the native people through force. Spain devised two forms of forced labor, the encomienda and mita while Portugal had a more generic form of slavery. The natives, along with their cities, near New Spain were captured through conquests by people like Pizaro and Cortes. The natives of Brazil were captured by Portuguese Jesuit expeditions called bandeiras. The main reason for the natives’ enslavement was simply because Spain and Portugal viewed them as inferior and easily dominated them.
Columbus’s exploration of the New World ended lives and heritage of many people. The Discovery of the New world was later on followed by series of minor developments in navigation, geography, astronomy and economy through the Atlantic circuit but in contrast it even these minor devalopments were ”Not..worth price of human lives.”(Sale 188). Additionally Europeans imposed and substituted their institutions, ideas,languages, cultures, technologies and economy for the New World’s original heritage and language. Also” it gave birth to the most infamous and the most atrocious of all traffics, that of slave, the most execrable of crimes against nature (Reynal /190)”. Ships of African slaves crossed the Atlantic to the Americas to work on European sugar and tobacco plantations under the harshest conditions, which led to an end of many slaves’ lives.
But rather than waiting on being attacked, Cortes determined to anticipate them. He had some of the city lords called saying that he wished to speak to them and shut them in the chamber by themselves. After the five hour firing to some houses and towers where natives defended themselves, Cortes and his army with the help of Tascaltecal and Cempoal natives, forced all the people out of the city. 3. After evaluating Cortes letter to the king, I believe that it is subjective towards the Native American civilization.
Chapter 1 Chapter 1, entitled Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress depicts the Europeans’ initial encounter with the Arawak Indians of the West Indies . The Arawaks greeted Columbus and his crew with hospitality, but little did they know they would soon be taken advantage of and have their culture virtually destroyed. Columbus’s journal entries about this first meeting indicate his feelings of superiority to the Arawaks, which led to enslavement, murder, and rape. The Arawaks were forced to work in gold mines and were killed at the will of the Europeans. Millions of natives were killed in slavery, war, and, mining.
Another way by which Douglass illustrates that slavery can be defined as robbery was by how the slaves were treated with regards to the value of their lives, their dignity and their sense of justice. Douglass shows in several examples where the value of a slave’s life was almost worthless. These were examples in which white overseers and slave owners would wantonly murder slaves without any fear of reprisal by the law. To all this, Douglass writes: “It was a common saying, even among little white boys, that it was worth a half-cent to kill a nigger, and a half-cent to bury one.” (Douglass, 27). Another instance in which Frederick Douglass very aptly defines slavery as robbery is how he describes the ships along the Chesapeake Bay as follows: “You are loosed from your moorings,
Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Natives had their own indigenous beliefs and while some of them were easily converted, some resisted. In one such incident, a captured tribal chief who had a led a conquest against the Spanish was given the option of accepting Christianity or being burned alive. While the tribal chief refused to convert and preferred death instead, a lot of Native Americans surely converted when put under the sword. This mission to have the whole land converted to their form of Christianity was the main aim of such cruel behavior towards the Native Americans, according to
Apart from the colonist being harassed with taxes, their trade with all parts of the world except Britain was another reason why the colonists wrote the Declaration of Independence. The illegal imposition of rules over their trade and production, commonly known as the Navigation Acts, which have been pressed on them for over a century and made worse by the Sugar Act and Townshend Acts was controlled once the Declaration of Independence was written and signed. Furthermore, the colonists were being deprived in many cases. The Boston Massacre was when a mob of 50 colonists gathered to protest against the officials. As fists and clubs began flying a soldier dropped dead, this forced the soldiers to fire, killing five civilians and wounding six.
How did so few Spanish manage to conquer such huge territories and the population taking up those lands? And why? The article “Columbus and the War on Indigenous People” written by Michael Stevenson describes the potential arguments that Europeans used to justify their conquest of the Americas. The colonizing process lead to entering and destroying the indigenous people's territories, and developed methods of disciplinary control over their lives, while coming up with various techniques for taking their land. Men and women were willing to leave the Old World and experience the New World, taking a
Explorer Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean islands in 1492, sparking a wave of exploration that would have extreme consequences for the people who lived there at that time. His encounters in the Americas with Native Americans started a repetitive cycle of encounter, conquest, and death throughout the Western Hemisphere. Columbus first had very friendly relationships with the Taino people, but that soon changed. The Tainos offended the Spanish and failed to pay proper respect to Christian symbols and Columbus felt he had authority over them and could decide their fate. The Spanish forced Native Americans to convert to Christianity.