Impact of Europeans on Aboriginals in the Sixteenth Century

Impact of Europeans on Aboriginals in the Sixteenth Century

By: Meaghan O'Connell

        During the sixteenth and seventeenth century the Europeans travelled to North America. The settlement did not destroy the Aboriginal nations’ cultures and identities. The impact of European settlement, however, was felt directly some Aboriginal people, and the influence of European contact was felt indirectly by others. The Europeans brought warfare, diseases, and lifestyle changes. The impact that it had on the Aboriginal peoples was both good and bad.

        For some Aboriginal peoples with first-hand or trade with the Europeans this meant the advantage of their imports. The Europeans imported things like firearms, metal tools, and utensils. Aboriginal tribes already had their own type of tools, although their tools were hand-made out of either animal bone or wood. Each type of tool was made for killing a different animal. When the Aboriginal peoples saw what the Europeans metal tools could do, they wanted them. Along with this came the trade. Aboriginals would teach the Europeans how to survive in North America in trade for imports. Firearms were something new to the Aboriginals. They made both subsistence and commercial hunting more effective, and the metal tools made it easier for a whole range of work. For example, farming to wood chopping and also canoe making. Copper, brass kettles, and pots revolutionized domestic work (Hundey et al.). Cooking containers that had used to be made of bark were kept from the open flame so food was heated up using hot stones. The Aboriginals found out that using the metal pots for the preparation of their food was much easier and portable. They also realized that the metal pots and containers were much more durable for when they travelled. Although they provided advantages to their daily life, these changes were also symbols of Europeans influences that would upset traditional balances of nature, disturb the seasonal cycles and alter relations between Aboriginal nations.

                 The Aboriginal people were very healthy because they were on strick diets in order to survive North American weather. When the Europeans travelled over, they were not aware of how to survive. Their bodies did not have the proper antibodies to fight off diseases. This causing them to share diseases with the Aboriginals. The diseases brought to this continent by the Europeans included bubonic plague, chicken pox, pneumonic plague, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhus, tuberculosis, and whooping cough ("American Indians And European Diseases | Native American Netroots"). The diseases introduced in the Americas by the Europeans were crowd diseases. That means individuals who have once contracted the disease and survived become immune to the disease. In a small population, the disease will become extinct. Measles, for instance, requires a population of about 300,000 to survive. If the population size drops below this threshold, the virus can cause illness and death, but after one epidemic, the virus itself dies out. Another important factor in the diseases was the presence of domesticated animals. Overall, hundreds of thousands of Aboriginals died of European diseases during the first two centuries following the first contact. Smallpox killed the greatest number of Aboriginals, followed by influenza which is known today as the flu.