What caused the uprising between the Native Americans and the settlers?

Although Spanish colonial expeditions to the Southwest had begun in 1540, settlement efforts north of the Rio Grande did not begin in earnest until 1598. At that time the agricultural Pueblo Indians lived in some 70 compact towns, while the hinterlands were home to the nomadic Apaches, Navajos, and others whose foraging economies were of little interest to the Spanish.

Although nomadic groups raided the Pueblos from time to time, the indigenous peoples of the Southwest had never before experienced occupation by a conquering army. As an occupying force, the Spanish troops were brutal. They continued to exercise the habits they had acquired during the Reconquista, typically camping outside a town from which they then extracted heavy tribute in the form of food, impressed labour, and women, whom they raped or forced into concubinage.

The missionaries who accompanied the troops in this region were often extremely doctrinaire. They were known to beat, dismember, torture, and execute Indians who attempted to maintain traditional religious practices; these punishments were also meted out for civil offenses. Such depredations instigated a number of small rebellions from about 1640 onward and culminated in the Pueblo Rebellion (1680)—a synchronized strike by the united Pueblo peoples against the Spanish missions and garrisons. The Pueblo Rebellion cost the lives of some 400 colonizers, including nearly all the priests, and caused the Spanish to remove to Mexico.

The Spanish retook the region beginning in 1692, killing an estimated 600 native people in the initial battle. During subsequent periods, the Southwest tribes engaged in a variety of nonviolent forms of resistance to Spanish rule. Some Pueblo families fled their homes and joined Apachean foragers, influencing the Navajo and Apache cultures in ways that continue to be visible even in the 21st century. Other Puebloans remained in their towns and maintained their traditional cultural and religious practices by hiding some activities and merging others with Christian rites.

Timucua Indians sowing seeds

Most Southeast Indians experienced their first sustained contact with Europeans through the expedition led by Hernando de Soto (1539–42). At that time most residents were farmers who supplemented their agricultural produce with wild game and plant foods. Native communities ranged in size from hamlets to large towns, and most Southeast societies featured a social hierarchy comprising a priestly elite and commoners.

Warfare was not unknown in the region, but neither was it endemic. The indigenous peoples of present-day Florida treated de Soto and his men warily because the Europeans who had visited the region previously had often, but not consistently, proved violent. As the conquistadors moved inland, tribes at first treated them in the manner accorded to any large group of visitors, providing gifts to the leaders and provisions to the rank and file. However, the Spaniards either misread or ignored the intentions of their hosts and often forced native commoners, who customarily provided temporary labour to visitors as a courtesy gesture, into slavery.

News of such treatment traveled quickly, and the de Soto expedition soon met with military resistance. Indigenous warriors harassed the Spanish almost constantly and engaged the party in many battles. Native leaders made a number of attempts to capture de Soto and the other principals of the party, often by welcoming them into a walled town and closing the gates behind them. Such actions may have been customary among the Southeast Indians at this time—diplomatic customs in many cultures have included holding nobles hostage as a surety against the depredations of their troops. Such arrangements were common in Europe at the time and were something with which the conquistadors were presumably familiar. However, the Spanish troops responded to these situations with violence, typically storming the town and setting upon the fleeing residents until every inhabitant was either dead or captured.

As losses to capture, slaughter, and European diseases progressively decimated the Native American population, the Spanish began to focus on extracting the region’s wealth and converting its inhabitants to Christianity. The Southeast nations had little gold or silver, but they had accumulated a plenitude of pearls to use as decoration and in ritual activities. The slave trade was also extremely lucrative, and many of those who survived the immediate effects of conquest were kidnapped and transported to the Caribbean slave markets. Some indigenous communities relocated to Catholic missions in order to avail themselves of the protection offered by resident priests, while others coalesced into defensible groups or fled to remote areas.

sketch of the Algonquin village of Pomeiock

The Northeast Indians began to interact regularly with Europeans in the first part of the 16th century. Most of the visitors were French or English, and they were initially more interested in cartography and trade than in physical conquest. Like their counterparts in the Southeast, most Northeast Indians relied on a combination of agriculture and foraging, and many lived in large walled settlements. However, the Northeast tribes generally eschewed the social hierarchies common in the Southeast. Oral traditions and archaeological materials suggest that they had been experiencing increasingly fierce intertribal rivalries in the century before colonization; it has been surmised that these ongoing conflicts made the Northeast nations much more prepared for offensive and defensive action than the peoples of the Southwest or the Southeast had been.

Discussions of the early colonial period in this region are typically organized around categories that conjoin native political groupings and European colonial administrations. The discussion below considers two broad divisions: the Algonquian-speaking tribes of the mid-Atlantic region, an area where the English settled, and the Algonquian- and Iroquoian-speaking tribes of New England and New France, where the English and the French competed in establishing colonial outposts.