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21A.441 End of Term Study Questions 1. How have ideas about the essential nature of Indians influenced relations between indigenous peoples and Europeans or Euro-Americans? -in the debates between Las Casas and Sepúlveda? -in claims by early Spanish conquerors that Indians were cannibals? -in Puritan ideas about the Indian economy, especially the roles of men and women, how much Indians worked, native land tenure, the relative importance of horticulture and hunting, the nature of Indian farms (partial or complete clearing, fences or not) (in Cronon and Taylor) -in claims by Lewis Cass and others in the 19th century that Indians were wandering hunters (in Wallace) -in enviro-politics and the alliance between Amazonian Indians and NGOs? 2. How did European markets for American commodities affect the Indians and colonial systems? with silver? fur? cotton? rubber? electrical power? Why did those markets sometimes encourage colonizers and settlers to drive Indians away or kill them and sometimes try to hold on to them and keep them under control? Why can't Indians avoid becoming ensnared by the market economy? How is the frontier economy different for the Kayapo than it was for the Huron and others caught up in the fur trade? 3. The interaction between Indians and Whites was meaningful as well as political and economic. Through missionization, war, and captivity, the two sides communicated ideas and values about each other, and they often tried to impose those values on the other. In the struggle over missionization, how did Indians and whites agree or disagree about the nature of the good life and morality, about violence, death, and torture, about relations with the supernatural world, etc.? How did Europeans who wrote about missionization and captivity try to impose their interpretations on these processes? How did such things as Indians who rejected baptism, sympathetic captors, or white captives who didn't want to be redeemed contradict those meanings? 4. How did Indians try to survive or resist, as individuals and as peoples, under European colonialism? How did the survival strategies of indigenous communities in the Spanish empire differ from those of the Iroquois or New England Algonkians or the Kuna? What kind of resistance was possible? Why did Indians rebel when they did? Why not when they didn’t? 5. Based on the examples we have studied, consider how events and outcomes in the ongoing conquest of the Americas and the survival and success of different indigenous groups have been shaped by the following factors. How has this worked out in the examples we have considered. -The spread of animals, plants, and diseases-The cultural and historical backgrounds of colonists and the colonial powers, and their goals in the New World -The kinds of wealth sought by colonists, the strategies for gaining it, the economic systems they established, and the markets they fed in Europe. -The social and political organization of the indigenous peoples; their capacity for resistance; and the organizational factors encouraging resistance or acquiescence. -The nature of technologies such as writing modern weapons and writing, their control and spread. -The geographic location of indigenous groups, vis-à-vis such factors as: the centers or starting points for colonial and national rule; trade and travel routes; the presence or absence of multiple colonial powers; and/or the spread of technologies and organisms. -Differences or similarities between different historical eras (colonial, early 20th century, late 20th century) in terms of technology, communications, state power, politics, organization, indigenous identity and images, etc. One way to approach this question is to consider three of the peoples or populations we have considered (Huron, Iroquois, New England Algonkians, Indians of the SE in the era of Jackson, Kuna, Kayapo) in terms of each of these criteria, structuring your comparisons in a table. 6. How can Indian peoples call on outsiders for help? (Examples include: Las Casas speaking for Indians and opposing making encomienda perpetual; Jesuit support of the Huron against the Iroquois; Iroquois and other Indians seeking French support against the British and vice-versa and later British support against the Americans; the Cherokee and other SE Indians appealing to missionaries, the Supreme Court, and public opinion; the Kuna getting help from Marsh and Markham; international campaigns against abuses in the Congo and the Amazon; the Kayapo allying themselves with international environmental organizations) What are the pitfalls in such alliances and support, in terms of the fragility of the alliance or perfidy of the allies? in misunderstandings? in provoking nationalist backlash? 7. What have you learned from the cases we have considered about the difficulties of studying history? What does Cronon show us about the difficulties of finding and interpreting evidence? What don't the Jesuit Relations tell us about the Indians or their encounters? How do the Jesuit Relations give a one-sided or possibly distorted picture of the Huron and their struggles? What don't the Kuna documents in the reader tell us? Why is it so hard to figure out the military impact of guns? Why can't we be sure about the population of the Americas and how much it was reduced by epidemic disease? What other questions are unanswered? Why is it so difficult to decide between rival interpretations? 8. What are the important differences and similarities among missionaries in the cases we have looked at? with the early Spanish reducciones of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits? with the Jesuits in Canada? with the Puritan missions in New England? with the Quaker and Moravian missions to the Cherokee and other SE Indians? with Coopeand Gassó? Do you see significant connections between, e.g. the Jesuits in 17th century Canada and Gassó? How is missionization shaped by oppositions and antagonisms (the Reformation and Counter-Reformation?, Liberalism and anti-clericalism, the Temperance


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MIT 21A 441 - End of Term Study Questions

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