hey there and welcome back to heimler's history now we've been going through unit two of the ap u.s history curriculum and in this video we're going to talk about the interactions between american indians and europeans and i'm sure it was just a great big interracial hug fest am i right okay i am patently not right well let's get to it okay now the big question we're trying to answer in this video is this how and why did interactions between american indians and various european nations change over time and within those various european nations let's begin with spain now what i'm going to say here is reaching back a little bit into the previous period but it's going to help set the stage for all of this contrast that we're dealing with recall that the spanish fundamentally altered the society of the americas by introducing a caste system which reordered people based on their racial ancestry and due to the spanish perspective that the native americans were really only good for labor and religious conversion the american indians ended up near the bottom of that caste system also recall from the last unit that the spanish established santa fe as the capital of new mexico in 1610 and here's where we start getting into what matters for north american spanish colonization they employed coercive and brutal measures to convert the pueblo indians to christianity which led to the pueblo revolt in which the pueblo sought to purge the spanish from their territory now that purge did work but the spanish returned 12 years later and reconquered santa fe okay so now let's compare the spanish interactions with the indians with the english so recall that when the spanish showed up in the americas they encountered giant empires like the aztec and the incan empire within these empires were concentrated huge numbers of people and once the spanish conquered them said butt loads of people were forced to become enslaved laborers in the spanish encomienda system but when the british showed up in north america they settled in places where there were no large empires and thus no large labor force that they could enslave so this leads us to a few contrasts with the spanish first because many british colonists migrated as family groups especially new england they weren't interested in intermarrying with the natives as were the spanish and the french also at least in the beginning the english colonists in new england coexisted peacefully with the natives in that region and each group borrowed from the other's culture the things that they found useful for example the english provided indians with manufactured goods and iron tools and the american indians schooled the english in farming and hunting techniques but that peaceful coexistence couldn't last forever because you know europeans be european as the new england population grew they of course needed more land and where they going to get that they're gonna get it from the natives and that encroachment on native lands leads us to metacom's war also known as king phillips war in 1675. metacom was the chief of the wampanoag indians but the english called him king philip and he began to see that the more the british settlers encroached on their land the more it would destroy their ancestral way of life and therefore the british must be forced out and so metacom allied with other indian groups and led an attack on the colonists and they burned their fields and killed their men and captured their women and children in retaliation the british called upon their allies the mohawk indians who responded by ambushing and killing metacom and upon his death the resistance to the movement was basically squashed and that's how it went with the english settlers the more land they occupied the more they forced out the scattered indian tribes who lived there and so this is a big difference between spain and england the spanish subjugated american indians they encountered while the english simply forced them out now contrast all of that with the way the french interacted with the american indians the french on the whole were much less invasive in the americas they saw the natives more as like trade partners and military allies and mostly they maintained decent relations with the native groups that they encountered in many cases by marrying into them in order to establish trading rights and unlike the british and the spanish the french didn't settle into colonial societies but mainly they established trading posts in order to facilitate the lucrative fur trade in the regions which they suffered the french even allied with american indian groups like the huron to fight against other groups like the iroquois now despite all of this make no mistake europeans rarely saw the natives of america as equal to themselves and because the natives in north america lived in diverse and sometimes warring groups the europeans rarely had to worry about a unified resistance from them and once it became clear that the europeans were here to stay american indians did their best to figure out how to live with this new reality some of the groups allied themselves with one group of europeans over against another in the hopes that such an alliance would help them survive others simply left their ancestral lands and migrated to the places that the europeans had not yet settled which in the long term is not going to work but we're gonna have to save that for another video all right that's what you need to know about unit two topic five of the ap us history curriculum now if this video helped you then something that may help you even more is my review packet which you can grab right here if you want me to keep making these videos for you then subscribe and i shall oblige heimler out