Infographics, Maps, Music and More: Native Americans

Friday, October 23, 2020

Native Americans - New England

Part 3 of an ongoing series on the history of Native American Territory as told through maps. This series is tagged as "Native American Map Series". It is recommended to visit all the Further info links listed below for further study.

Native Americans - New England

The indigenous tribes of the Northeast region of North America were among the first to have extended contact with European colonizers. Though members of numerous and separate tribes, the native people generally fell under the umbrella category of two main groups: Iroquoian and Algonquian.

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Algonquian-speaking tribes lived primarily along the coast in socially and economically stable villages suited to fishing and farming. They were the larger of the two groups. Iroquoian-speaking tribes lived inland in smaller hamlets, near rivers and lakes, and relied on wild food. They tended to be warlike.

Within both groups, a tribe consisted of several villages or hamlets joined in an alliance, called a confederacy. However, the stabilizing influence of these alliances provided no guarantee of peace among the tribes. Tribes within the Iroquois Confederacy would often raid others outside the protection of their alliance.

Native American settlements and trails in southern New England in the early 1600s

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Conflict

The arrival of Europeans and the subsequent spread of their colonies forced changes to the Native American ways of life and intensified the conflict between Iroquoian- and Algonquian-speaking groups.

Perhaps the most troublesome of these was the concept of land ownership. To Europeans, ownership of land equated to wealth, and the New World seemed to offer unlimited possibilities to become land-rich. The native tribes, however, did not believe an individual could own land in this sense. Land could be used but not possessed, just as air might be used but not owned or kept. When Native Americans first shared the land with settlers, they did not understand that the settlers now would consider that land their property, would build fences, and would bar anyone else from using it.

All Texts Sourced From U.S. History/Northeast: 1620–1730