Author Introduction

Transcript

American schoolchildren still grow up hearing that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. But of course for the Native Americans, the indigenous peoples already living in the New World, it was not new at all. They had been living there for thousands of years. And over those years they had developed sophisticated civilizations and very diverse cultures and societies throughout North, Central, and South America.

As the Spanish and, eventually, the Portuguese, French, British and Dutch began to stream into the New World, they developed, of course, a new culture. Often we assume that the Native Americans had nothing to do with that. That is, the Native Americans were pushed aside, victims of terrible epidemics brought by the European invaders. While that all is certainly true, the story is more complicated than that. The encounter of the European world with the western hemisphere was one in which a mosaic of cultures developed. Many varieties of ways of life, of organizing society, intermingled between old and new, invader and dispossessed. The result was a fascinating encounter whereby Native Americans were displaced, killed, and dispossessed, but many of them also found ways to adapt to the new realities of their situation.

Part of the wonderful history of this period and these activities is this complex interrelationship between Europeans and indigenous peoples that ultimately forged the American culture we enjoy today.