"Indians and Europeans on the Northwest Coast: ..." Topic

… Historical Context

"The history of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the Pacific Northwest is in many ways a story of convergence. It is the story of two groups of people—one European and one Indian—converging on the land that we now call home. Each group possessed its own social and political structures, economies, and ways of interacting with the natural environment. In addition, each group had its own ways of thinking about and representing the events that took place. The convergence of different groups, and of different ways of doing and thinking about things, created a diverse community of people who found ways to live together in a new and altered world. This story of convergence took place over many decades, and it continues into the present.

This packet of materials, however, focuses on the period between 1774 and 1812, the first years of contact between Native and European peoples. The year 1774 marked the beginning of documented contact between Europeans and Indians on the Northwest Coast, and the year 1812 marked the beginning of a new phase of development, when overland fur traders took center stage. It was during this brief but pivotal period that Indians and Europeans met and developed a trading relationship that laid the groundwork for future social, political, and economic interactions. This was the era when ships from Spain, England, America, France, Russia and Portugal visited the Northwest Coast and first met the Nuu-chah-nulth, Makah, Salish, Kwakwaka'wakw, and Haida peoples.

This introductory essay is divided into three parts: Imagining, Meeting, and Living Together. The Imagining section provides a glimpse of the ways in which some Europeans and Indians imagined each other before they actually met. The Meeting portion describes some of the cultural baggage that each group brought to their encounters. Essentially, this section explains why Europeans came to the Pacific Northwest in the first place, and why Indians chose to trade and socialize with Europeans. Because the meeting of these cultures was both enabled and limited by geography, this section also describes some of the different ways in which each group responded to the natural environment. Finally, the Living Together segment gives examples of the ways in which each culture learned about the other. It focuses on economic and political aspects of the process of learning to live together. Sometimes this learning took the form of peaceful accommodation, and sometimes it took more violent forms. Yet by the start of the 19th century, each group had a much more realistic sense of the other than they had possessed a mere 30 years before…"

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Cherokee Power: Imperial and Indigenous Geopolitics in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1670–1774 (New Directions in Native American Studies Series Book 22) Kindle Edition

"In 1754 South Carolina governor James Glen observed that the Tennessee River "has its rise in the Cherokee Nation and runs a great way through it." While noting the "prodigious" extent of the corridor connecting the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys—and the Cherokees' "undoubted" ownership of this watershed—Glen and other European observers were much less clear about the ambitions and claims of European empires and other Indigenous polities regarding the North American interior. In Cherokee Power, Kristofer Ray brings long-overdue clarity to this question by highlighting the role of the Overhill Cherokees in shaping imperial and Indigenous geopolitics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America…"

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For Northwest Native Americans & Lewis and Clark Dr Stephen Dow Beckham is the authority you want to read.

The American Conquest of Florida

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