Struggle and Survival in Colonial America Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Struggle and Survival in Colonial America - Essay ExampleThe harsh indispensable environment in which the native American Indians had lived upon at that time required them to band together for their last survival. This communal basis of society in the native Americans had remained, while the settlers disintegrated. Their concept of a community hinged on common avouchership of their lands and common membership in the sacred natural order (Sweet & Nash 18). On the former(a) hand, the European concepts of private property (or termed as a private enterprise) and the individual exploitation of nature for ones own profits, did not allow for the collective modes of behavior observed in native American Indians. The settlers forced the natives to conform to this lifestyle and forgo community living.The arrival of the first unobjectionable settlers at the tidewaters of Virginia had divided a kinship group of Indians termed collectively as Powhatans. The tribe at Virginia at that time wer e known as the Algonquian Indians the close famous of which is Pocahontas who had been immortalized in history and literature. Her tribe welcomed the new arrivals, as exemplified by her father but this good-will ushered the decline of their tribe, eventually. It weakened the formerly strong and politically stable Indian settlements of the Powhatan tribes such that they were displaced and marginalized to the point of skinny extinction (Fausz 21).Some natives tried to resist the Europeans but were soon defeated by the superiority of the white settlers weaponry. The Algonquians were not unanimous in their acceptance into their midst the new settlers like what Opechancanough did.