Summary Of The Indian's New World By James Merrell

Native Americans’ first contact with Europeans is generally regarded as an event that foreshadowed the decline and near destruction of the Native peoples of the New World. However, this narrative does not tell the whole story of the Native Americans. James Merrell’s The Indians’ New World discussed how the Catawba Nation of the Carolinas adapted and evolved some of their cultural practices due to the influx of Europeans in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Merrell used his book as a way of disproving the myth that Native Americans were destined to be destroyed and fight with white settlers. In contrast, Merrell wrote about the interesting history of the Catawba people who were trying to forge a new identity after
This trade profoundly changed Native culture with the introduction of journals and standardized weights into Piedmont Indian tribes from Anglo-American traders in the seventeenth century (Merrell, 62). After 1700, English traders started to approach Indians themselves to trade, which caused a great deal of tension among the Piedmont Indians (Merrell, 63, 66). This all accumulated into the Yamasees War of 1715 where Native groups attacked the colony of South Carolina and killed all the white traders in their lands (Merrell, 67). A Colonial militia managed to inflict a defeat on the Piedmont Indians in June 1715 which convinced some of the Indian groups in the area to sue for peace (Merrell, 76-77). After the end of the war, the Piedmont Indians realized that they needed the American colonial governments in order to survive and prosper (Merrell,
For instance, he used John Lawson’s book A New Voyage to Carolina, who was an early eighteenth century English trader, as a way to discuss the relationship between white traders and Indians by the turn of the eighteenth century (Merrell, 32). Likewise, Merrell also used the South Carolina Colonial Journal to illustrate Natives and their cultural practices in the mid-eighteenth century (Merrell, 126). Also, Merrell used Charles Hudson’s Southeastern Indians and Leland Ferguson’s “South Appalachian Mississippian” to show some of the culture of the pre-Columbian Indians living in the Piedmont