Cultural interactions between Europeans, Native Americans and Africans

Differing values, diverging perspectives

Europeans, native Americans, and Africans lived, learned, worked and worshiped in vastly different ways and they all brought their essential knowledge and beliefs with them. Diverging perspectives about religion and spirituality, human beings and their relationships to the land and animal and plant species they encountered, hunted, and raised, and vastly different concepts of maintenance and/or ownership of land and property led to frequent confrontations and misunderstandings, even in the relatively few instances when these disparate peoples could communicate intelligibly with each other.

The starting points for these interactions are also critical to keep in mind. Native Americans already inhabited lands throughout the western hemisphere, and while different native societies engaged in armed conflict and even warfare with each other, these confrontations were primarily localized, whereas once European explorers, soldiers, and missionaries arrived in the Americas, these new interactions involved trans-Atlantic dimensions. European explorers arrived bearing charters and documents from their respective monarchs and patrons, leaders that native peoples did not know nor recognize as empowered to issue decrees and demand obeisance. With the forced introduction of African slaves into the western hemisphere, wholly new groups of forcibly displaced peoples were violently thrust into what was already becoming a volatile environment.

A frequent refrain during this and later time periods would be the European, and later American, descriptions of the indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans as lazy and unwilling to work unless commanded and coerced. European explorers and settlers, particularly adherents of various forms of Calvinism, strict Protestant denominations, such as the Puritans in Massachusetts, that emphasized hard work, refraining from idleness and sin, criticized native Americans as indolent and idolatrous, and often advocated for taking indigenous land so that it could, in their estimation, be put to better use. Many native Americans in turn emphasized that nature and their societies provided all that they needed, including greater freedom to hunt and fish than the Europeans who they believed were unduly obsessed with acquiring precious metals and other material objects that were neither needed nor wanted in many native societies.

Gender roles, the organization of society, and family structures, including the raising of children, were all areas in which the vastly different views of Europeans, native Americans, and enslaved Africans varied widely. Furthermore, in many instances, native Americans and Africans witnessed their families broken up by European colonizers, particularly when Europeans sold native and African children and other family members as part of the slave trade.

The European drive to convert, often forcibly, native peoples and enslaved Africans to Christianity, primarily Catholicism early on, but later also to various Protestant denominations, resulted in a great many misunderstandings and confrontations. Indigenous and African religious and spiritual traditions encompassed a wide variety of beliefs and practices that were very different from Christianity. Explaining these vastly different belief systems and rituals was made even more challenging by the fact that many words and names do not easily translate between languages.

New beliefs, languages, practices and traditions ultimately surfaced from these ongoing interactions between Europeans, native Americans, and Africans. Food, music and other aspects of people’s lives also reflected this blending of previously disparate cultures and societies. Even when European colonizers required indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans to use European languages, such as English, French, or Spanish, indigenous and African words and names were incorporated into those languages. These linguistic influences can be seen in the names of American states such as Arizona - scholars continue to debate the origins of this name, attributing it both to indigenous cultures of the American southwest as well as the Basque people found in northern Spain. Words such as chocolate and tomato both derive from indigenous words in the Americas and banana is believed to have come from Wolof, a west African language.

With religious beliefs and practices, new **syncretic **religions developed that melded beliefs and practices from two or more existing religions. As more indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans officially became Christians, it was apparent that their conversions to Christianity did not always lead to these new adherents strictly adopting and following the established rituals and practices of the colonizers. The most frequently cited example of a syncretic religion emerging in the Americas is that of voodoo, a blending of Christianity and African animist beliefs and traditions that is prevalent in today’s Haiti.