For all the importance of the internal structure of New England, the relationship with the indigenous people was a guarantee of the survival and development of the settlement. Despite the fact that the pilgrims sailed to the shores of New England after the devastating epidemic of 1617, the Indians still outnumbered the colonists in terms of numbers, material resources, and knowledge. Moreover, the lonely settlement was opposed by a complex tribal community with different centers of influence and opinions regarding the English. The Pilgrims had to develop a flexible policy towards the Indians, which could not be reduced to conquest or cultural colonization. It was a gradual and reciprocal process of cultural and economic contact that was an important part of the Pilgrim colonial enterprise model (Banner 12). At the same time, these contacts were extremely painfully perceived by the pilgrims themselves, which was reflected in the conflicting assessments presented in the sources.
The Indians did not have a state that could be conquered in order to take the place of the elite, as happened with the civilizations of Central America, but the British did not even have hundreds of battle-hardened conquistadors. The Indians had valuable goods, but the English merchants had nothing to offer them in return, and the guns could not force them to trade, the natives simply left or, temporarily resigned, staged uprisings against persistent but weak newcomers (Cronon 57). All contacts between the two civilizations were unsystematic and constantly teetered on the brink of disaster.
Therefore, the inhabitants of North America in the minds of the theorists of colonization began to be regarded as an unfortunate obstacle on the way to the riches and territories of the New World. In this context, the Indians were indeed like wild beasts or a natural disaster with which it is impossible to negotiate (Fields 161). In other words, since the Indians did not fit into the colonial theory, they were simply excluded from it. But this does not mean that they were excluded from colonial practice.
The willingness of the pilgrims to play by the rules of inter-tribal diplomacy, which included regular visits, smoking tobacco, exchanging gifts, led to the fact that the British were perceived not as representatives of an alien civilization with a different system of values ​​and social relations, but as a new tribe, one of many in New England. This tribe was strong, incomprehensible, most often hostile, but with whom you can deal and use it as one of the agents of intertribal diplomacy. The sachem of the Wampanoag Massasoit was the first to make peace with the English and was soon joined by other chiefs in the vicinity, whose people suffered greatly from the disease. As it turned out, this peacefulness had a political connotation (Banner 15). The neighboring tribal union intended to seize power over other tribes, and Massasoit already began to lean towards voluntary submission, but the appearance of the British changed the balance of power.
In turn, in the American Southeast, one of the main principles was the reorientation from the management of the natives to the control and training of the colonists. The colonists themselves became the object of colonial influence, as they were recruited from the lower strata of the population, affected by the price and enclosure revolution. Their motivation was a vague desire for a better life, and youth and isolation from their familiar environment turned into poor discipline and low morale. However, given the weakness of colonial institutions, successful colonization required other colonists who could exist autonomously, not depend on councils and charters, have a clear motivation and an internal system of discipline (Banner 180). It was here that the interests of religious dissidents intersected with the tasks of mastering the New World.
Thanks to the activities of the campaigns, by 1620, when the pilgrims arrived in the region, they knew quite a lot about these territories and the indigenous people living there, which for a long time were the main obstacle to colonization. An epidemic in 1617 devastated the Indian villages along the coast, a tragedy that played into the hands of the Pilgrims and the subsequent wave of Puritan settlers (Banner 153). However, the pilgrims would not have achieved anything without fundamentally new methods of organizing the settlement. These methods arose from a combination of the idea of ​​a divine covenant, an agreement of the whole community before God, and the increased attention to charters and treaties traditional for English colonization. However, if before that the colonies were arranged on the obligations that the colonists gave to the king and the merchants who remained in the metropolis, then the pilgrims proposed a different form of agreement. The colonists assumed mutual obligations to each other. Thus, the Mayflower Treaty incorporated outsiders and pilgrims into a new system of relationships that gradually came to be dominated by the ecclesiastical discipline of the secessionist congregation.
This system included mutual assistance, but also mutual supervision, dividing the colonists into friends and foes: insiders received even greater support from the community, and outsiders, if they did not want to obey separatist dogmas, were gradually pushed to the periphery of economic and social life, and often expelled. The Pilgrim policy towards the natives was also a colonial innovation. The Pilgrims needed the help of the Indians for the extraction of beaver skins, the cultivation of maize, communication, and exploration. Using information from colonial literature, the Pilgrims integrated into the system of intertribal diplomacy, achieved the conclusion of peace treaties with the leaders and maintained mutually beneficial cooperation.
At the same time, in order to keep the Indians at a distance and prevent assimilation, the Pilgrims constantly distanced themselves from them, using violence in case of conflicts and creating the image of the Indians as exotic, semi-human beings, New England anomalies. Coexistence was explained as a temporary measure, which the pilgrims were going to abandon (Fields 168). The ideology of the congregation implied coexistence with outsiders, but never their acceptance.
The exploration of land hunger in the two mentioned regions allows assuming the following. In relations with the Indians, whom the pilgrims in no way considered equal to themselves and did not even think about their Christianization, the separatists saw only a means for the survival and development of the colony. All reservations about the courage or nobility of this or that local resident were leveled by constant reminders of the cunning, unreliability, and low moral qualities of people who in the future were destined to become victims of European migration to the New World.
Thus, through derogation, exotic or rhetorical descriptions that turned the Indians into literary characters, and targeted systematic violence, the Pilgrims asserted their cultural hegemony in the regions. This happened in those conditions when the mentioned regions were completely dependent on trade and on the knowledge of the indigenous people. The leaders of the settlements used the services of translators who knew English, but almost none of the colonists knew it and did not seek to learn it. However, having defeated the Indians in their texts, the British gradually achieved real hegemony, pushing the indigenous people to the periphery of the economic, political, and cultural life of the British.
Works Cited
Banner, Stuart. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. Hill & Wang, 2003.
Fields, Gary. Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror. University of California Press, 2017.