Effect of Colonists on Native Americans

Native Americans had lived on the land now called American long before any European sailor came to make the discovery of finding the “West Indies” in 1492. Eventually, their lives were destroyed due to British and French colonization, for when the Europeans arrived and settled, they changed the Native American way of life for the worst. These changes were caused by a number of factors, including disease and loss of land. Ultimately, the British and the French’s cultural and economic impact on the Native Americans caused a drastic decline in the population of the natives.

As the natives lost their land to colonists and were pushed back further west beyond the Appalachian Mountains, they grew to be nothing more than lazy slobs. They became dependent on manufactured goods from Britain, like firearms and metal tools. The Catholic Iroquois of Kahnawake traded with the English and the French; in the Lower South, the Creeks also traded with the English and the French to maintain their way of life. The Fox Indians desired to become the middlemen in the French fur trade to make easy money and blocked the passage between the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi. The French then decimated many tribes, like the Fox Indians, Natchez, and the Chickasaw in 1731 as a result These Indian tribes were once self-sufficient, but once they started to loose land and see the advantage of trading furs and food for manufactured goods, many took the easy way out. Even though both relationships between the French and the Indians and the English and the Indians had started out peaceful, both groups became greedy and their relationships with the soured.

Native Americans never came in contact with diseases that developed in the Old World because they were separated from Asia, Africa, and Europe when ocean levels rose following the end of the last Ice Age. Diseases like smallpox, measles, pneumonia, influenza, and malaria were unknown to the Native Americans until the French and British brought these diseases over. This triggered a very large population decline. Fifty percent (about 6-9 million) of the Native American population