European Missionaries and Early Native American Contact

(This article was originally published to my now closed ‘Hubpages’ account, in August of 2019. It has since been copied and pasted on several strange sites, but my multiple DMCA petitions have been overlooked. If there is any concern about this, feel free to contact me at any time. I assure you that this was written by me, based on my own research while taking a course in University.)

Contact between Europeans and Native American peoples manifested in very different ways depending on the specific groups and regions in which contact was made. In some regions, the European settlers had more cooperative relationships with the Natives, and in other places the primary focus was on converting and conquering the indigenous tribes. Ultimately, these interactions shared the trait that they were all done with self interest in mind. [1] As Thomas Benjamin mentions in the text, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History, 1400–1900, “More than anything else, Christian evangelization was the justification for empire and colonization in the Americas.” [2] This means that missionary practices and the pursuit of spreading Christianity to the natives was one of the greatest motivations for the colonists on the American continents. Due to this motivation and practice, one of the most significant cross-cultural relationships that was established involved religious conversion, native resistance or acceptance of this, the way that the missionaries interacted with and came to understand the native people…