Encounter, Resistance and Misunderstanding

Two incompatible ideas of land

Most Native societies treated land as something a community used: a group held the right to hunt, fish or plant in a territory, and that right could be shared or shifted with the season. Europeans arrived with a legal idea of land as property — a thing one person owns permanently, marks with a fence, and passes to an heir.

This is why so many early land agreements ended in war. When a sachem accepted goods and made a mark on a deed, he often understood himself to be granting shared use. The colonist filing that deed understood himself to have bought the ground outright, forever. Neither side was lying; the two sides were signing different documents.

Justifying conquest: the Requerimiento and the missions

Spain required its conquistadors to read the Requerimiento aloud before attacking — a legal text announcing the authority of the Pope and the Spanish Crown and inviting the listeners to submit. It was frequently read in Spanish, at a distance, sometimes to an empty village. Its purpose was not persuasion. Its purpose was to make the war that followed legal under Spanish law.

The mission system pursued the same end through conversion. Missions gathered Native people into settlements around a church, taught Catholic doctrine, and extracted labour. Many Native communities responded not by rejecting Christianity outright but by absorbing it — keeping older practices alongside the new saints. That blending is itself a form of resistance: it preserved what the mission was designed to erase.

Resistance was constant, not occasional

• Armed resistance — the Taíno on Hispaniola, the Maya of Yucatán for generations, Native forces at Ácoma in 1599.
• Flight — moving beyond the reach of missions and encomiendas, which was often more effective than fighting.
• Alliance — joining one European power against another, or against a rival Native nation. This is a strategy, not passivity.
• Cultural persistence — language, ritual and kinship kept in private while outward conformity satisfied the priest.

Europeans also changed. They adopted maize and beans, Native routes and canoes, Native diplomatic forms, and in Spanish and French territory they married into Native families because few European women crossed the ocean. The Exchange ran in both directions culturally, even where power did not.