Native American Wars

5 Key excerpts on "Native American Wars"

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  Understanding and Teaching Native American History

  • Kristofer Ray, Brady DeSanti, Kristofer Ray, Brady DeSanti(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • University of Wisconsin Press

    (Publisher)

  Most of the Indian Wars fall into this category. It is important to note that a few tribes sought to escape either annihilation or attrition by seeking refuge across inter- national borders, such as Chief Joseph’s Nez Perces and Sitting Bull’s Lakotas in Canada, or the Kickapoos in Mexico. Indian Wars in Euro-American History Colonial Warfare When discussing colonial warfare students must understand that con- text is crucial. Europeans honed their modes of combat through cen- turies of Old World experience. Seven hundred years of Reconquista on the Iberian Peninsula, for example, directly shaped Spanish will- ingness to deploy brutal violence for God, Gold, and Glory. Students should view English methods in New England and Virginia against the background of the Irish wars of the late 1500s, while French and Dutch martial codes were shaped by the wars of the Reformation. Europeans and Native people fought each other not only for land and resources, but also for slaves. Sixteenth-century Spanish conquista- dors commonly raided Native polities for labor, but perhaps equally infamous were English efforts to secure Indigenous slaves in New England and Carolina. Adding to this complexity was the fact that as Atlantic World economic imperatives took hold in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, some American Indian polities became active participants in the Native slave trade. In the South, slaving (along with deerskin trading) catalyzed the collapse of Mississippian chiefdoms and the establishment of newer, “coalescent” societies. Recent research shows that slave trading remained a lucrative and important aspect of Indian-White relations until the late 1800s. 5 van de Logt / Teaching the Indian Wars 65 When Europeans and Natives met on the field of battle, different military cultures clashed. Misunderstandings could have dramatic con- sequences.

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  Early Modern Military History, 1450-1815

  • G. Mortimer(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Wars between Native Americans and Europeans were not the only type of colonial warfare. Also prevalent were wars between the various European 158 Early Modern Military History, 1450–1815 powers, which often involved their colonists as well as native peoples. Between 1689 and 1754 the European powers with imperial aspirations in North America fought three major although largely inconclusive wars. The empires fought for dominance in Europe, colonial pre-eminence, and control over trade and natural resources. They carried out their struggle in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and most of the world’s oceans. In North America these wars shaped and often destroyed the lives of colonists and Native Americans as well (Steele, 1994, chs 7–9). By the mid-eighteenth century, colonial pressures and disputes had increased. The population of the British colonies continued to grow, which threatened the Native Americans of the interior. Settlers and land speculators from the British colonies, especially Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, cast covetous eyes on the region to the west of the Appalachian mountains. Relations between and among Native Americans were disrupted by the westward pressure exerted by British North Americans. The French, sensing a threat to their claims to the transmontane region, sought to assert their sovereignty in the Ohio River valley. It was these circumstances which brought Ensign Jumonville, Colonel Washington and Tanaghrisson together in their deadly encounter in May 1754. The death of Jumonville marked the beginning of a deadly and ultimately decisive phase of the contest for imperial control over eastern North America. The British and their colonists were ill-prepared for the war which Washington had helped to ignite.

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  The Military in the Early Modern World

  A Comparative Approach

  • Markus Meumann, Andrea Pühringer, Markus Meumann, Andrea Pühringer(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • V&R Unipress

    (Publisher)

  Conquering an empire was one thing, as Gregory Dowd and David Dixon observed, managing it successfully was entirely different. 91 * * * In sum, more historians today acknowledge that warfare truly stood at the heart of the colonial experience. Military historians no longer have to implore their colleagues to include warfare when teaching and researching Colonial America. The history of war and society, ethno-histories of all kinds, identity studies, and a renewed interest in imperial history have added significantly to our under- standing of the era and its complex web of warfare, cultures, and societies among so many different peoples. Paradoxically, the new interest in warfare and society in early North America actually resulted in a rather “unmilitary” – in the tra- ditional sense – military history of the colonial era. 92 We need additional work on campaigns and actual fighting. Historians know very little about most battles of the era, large and small. To date, only a few good campaign narratives for the all- important Seven Years’ War exist. Matthew Ward, for instance, gave us a detailed look at the Pennsylvania and Virginia fronts and published an excellent book on the British operations against Quebec. 93 Nevertheless, despite all odds, colonial American military history has become a thriving subfield of our discipline. 91 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815, Baltimore 1992; David Dixon, Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac’s Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America, Norman 2005. 92 Grenier, Warfare (cf. note 74), p. 364. 93 Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Penn- sylvania, 1754–1765, Pittsburgh 2003; Matthew C. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, 1759: Britain’s Conquest of Canada, Stroud 2005. Daniel Krebs 302

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  Native Americans of New England

  • Christoph Strobel(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Between King Philip’s War and the American Revolution, the Native Americans of New England were tied into four major wars that the colonists referred to as King William’s War (1688–1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), King George’s War (1744–1748), and the French and Indian War (1754–1763). These conflicts were actually North American tangents of broader European, Atlantic world, and sometimes global wars. European and world historians thus refer to King William’s War as the War of the League of Augsburg (or the War of the Grand Alliance), Queen Anne’s War as the War of Spanish Succession, King George’s War as the War of Austrian Succession, and the French and Indian War as the Seven Years’ War (as it lasted in the European theaters from 1756 to 1763). These series of wars were part of a struggle between Britain and France over who would be the dominant power in Europe. They took place in Europe, but the rivalry also played itself out in a global theater as the two powers competed over and tried to strengthen their colonial holdings around the world. The Atlantic Northeast was at the center of the Anglo-French competition over power, and the Native Americans of New England often found themselves in the middle of this global war. This rivalry also played itself out in smaller regional conflicts such as Dummer’s War (1722–1727), during which the Wabanakis in northern New England attempted to push back English colonization efforts. This proliferation of conflicts meant that many of the indigenous people of Dawnland lived through an almost continuous era of war.

  While these wars featured battles at land and sea, targeted raids against the opponents’ settlements also were a strategic feature of colonial warfare in the Atlantic Northeast. We have already mentioned the New English strategy of attacking Native American settlements and often burning down these towns and villages as well as farm fields and food stocks. This total warfare served one purpose—to leave Native Americans without places to shelter and to starve them into submission. New English writers have, however, generally paid more attention to the so-called Indian raids on New English settlements. During the wars of Anglo-French imperial competition, Native American allies of New France raided New English settlements. English settler colonial accounts tended to describe these attacks as violent assaults on innocent Puritan settlers who were victimized by their indigenous attackers. Moreover, these writers, generally Puritan contemporaries as well as later historians who were sympathetic to the English colonists, maintained that the French had manipulated their indigenous “allies” to participate in the raids. Thus, these writers argued that the indigenous “allies” served as “pawns” in the power game of the French. At the same time, the English colonists engaged in a “just” or “righteous” defensive war. This argument still holds a certain popular appeal to this day.15

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  The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative

  • Rolena Adorno(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter 5 Historians of War and Princely Warriors it seems inescapable that the interpretation of the nature of a war be determined by the characterization that the protagonist makes of the enemy; in turn, the characterization of the enemy is used to justify (or condemn) the war itself. Given the European and particularly Spanish values of Christian militancy, the battlefield and wartime conduct of the Amerindians became the measure of their behavior and the indication of their nature as the Europeans theorized it with regard to their own value system. At one extreme, the manner of the natives’ aggression in war, their behavior in victory or defeat, because di√erent from European con-duct, was devalued and denigrated. For Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda of the Demócrates Segundo, one of the proofs of their inferiority to the Europeans was the behavior of the Amerindians in battle. At the other end of the spectrum, the dignity of the Amerindians was argued, by Las Casas and like-minded individuals, on the basis of their lack of aggression. Thus, whether characterized by ferocious aggression or vigorous self-defense, cowardliness and timorousness or a peaceable character, whether at-tacked for their presumed cultural inferiority or defended for their poten-tial perfectibility, the Amerindian natives’ battlefield conduct was used as evidence in the debates. ∞ The wars of conquest were recast time and time again over the de-cades following the European invasion not only to put forward favored 126 historians of war and princely warriors interpretations of the events of violent war—interpretations that suited the political agendas of their authors or their authors’ sponsors—but also to frame, through those narrated actions, arguments about the way the defeated participants should be governed. Sepúlveda was a key figure among prominent humanists who proposed theories of just war and narrated histories of the conquests.

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