American Development: The Indians

In every region, English colonists met an indigenous population of American Indians. The collision of these groups was a cultural process of high complexity, which can only be discussed here in a summary way. In brief, the Indian populations of North America were not a cultural monolith. Even within the eastern woodlands, the Indians of New England, the Delaware Valley, the Chesapeake Bay and the Appalachian highlands were at least as diverse in their folk customs as were the British themselves—in many ways, much more so. Moreover, the demography of these various Indian populations also tended to be very different from one to another. Further, Indian cultures were changing through time. Each had its own history, which scholars are only beginning to reconstruct.

The founders of the British colonies were aware of this diversity, and deliberately selected the sites of their own settlements in part because of the special character of the Indians in the vicinity. This was very much the case among New England Puritans and Delaware Quakers. All four major British groups also invented their own distinctive policies toward the Indians. They tended to treat the Indians in profoundly different ways, and were treated differently in their turn.

The results were distinct regional processes of interaction, involving at least four causal variables: Indian culture, Indian demography, white culture and white demography. A result was that relations between Indians and Europeans reinforced regional differences in a complex web of cause and consequence. The larger outlines of this process have never been described comprehensively, though various monographic findings are beginning to come in. The author has been collecting his thoughts and materials on this subject for many years and hopes to find an opportunity to set them forward in more detail than is possible here.