The effects of the influx of foreigners to the Native Americans - Essay Example

The effects of the influx of foreigners to the Native Americans Change is inevitable in all aspects of life and the Native American also had to change in various ways in order to accommodate the foreigners who were invading their homeland. The newcomers who flooded into the Americas after its discovery were inevitably going to experience various changing and the Native Americans also had to adapt to having foreigners in their land (Berger 2009). Another instance that shows the change that Native Americans had to go through is the arrival of Spanish explorer, Christopher Columbus, to the Americas, which caused a sharp drop in the population of the Native Americans from 10 million to about 2.

4 million today. This is the first implication that there was a radical change in the Americas with the coming of foreigners settlers forced the Native Americans to change their ways to accommodate the foreigners and those who did not comply ended up being massacred or sold as slaves. This way, the foreigners could take up their vast lands and make them their own. In the sates of Virginia and the Carolinas for example, the trade of Native Americans as slavery was a booming business (Williams 2007).

Some of the other changes that Native Americans went through were that they had to share their land with these newcomers. An example would be the European settlers felt they were best placed to cultivate the vast lands that Native Americans had though done not put to any use as they were more civilized than any of the other foreigners. The native habitats of the Americas also had to undergo proprietary and historic cultural losses thanks to the practices and policies adopted by the United States government over the years.

It was furthermore devilishly hard for the natives to maintain their cultures and their people too with the influx of the foreigners. There was no place for Native-American culture as it existed before colonization since they had to assimilate to the ways of the Euro-American settlers.With their assimilation, the Native Americans found their cultures and practices eroded, and they were bombarded with new cultures; the foreigners culture (Williams 2007)Works citedBerger, Thomas. A Long and Terrible Shadow: White Values, Native Rights in the Americas since1492.

Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2009.Williams, Robert Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest.New York: Oxford University Press.2007.