Blog 5

Half way there! The weeks of this term have gone by super fast! Hopefully, the next few weeks will be the same. Anyways, this week we focused a majority of our time on Natives fighting for what they rightfully believed to be theirs. The majority of the time that was land but they also were fighting for themselves and their respect to the governments that were controlling them. The prompts for this week discuss how these periods of fighting affected what natives faced both in terms of the fighting itself but also the consequences afterward. For example, as a result of the French and Indian War, the British negotiated to keep settlers away from west of the Appalachians to give Native Americans some space and avoid conflict. This was known as the Proclamation of 1763 and didn’t hold up the way the British hoped it would. Curious explorers, such as Daniel Boone eventually decided they were tired of the rule and went out to explore anyway, creating conflict between natives and his settlement. The indigenous population suffered through this violence and periods of warfare, and along with the casualties from fighting itself, they also continued struggling with diseases that the new settlers exposed them to. The prompt also touches on some of the native’s motivations for joining conflicts that they didn’t start. The main reason the majority of the time was to protect their trading alliances with whatever side they took in these conflicts. Trade was how they got a ton of their supplies and was a super important aspect of how they survived with new people always constantly around them. I was particularly interested in Joseph Brant’s writings that were assigned for Wednesday. Brant was heavily involved in fighting New York during the British campaign to control the Hudson River. I watched Liberty’s Kids a ton as a kid, and there was an episode dedicated to Brant and his people getting massacred by the British, which stuck with the main characters of the story for a while afterward. Brant was a polarizing and powerful figure in this region, wielding his power any way he saw fit. His visit to London really encapsulated how the British felt about him and signified that the relationship between them was super important both ways. Brant was one of many figures we focused on this week but does not get nearly enough attention for his powerful influence over the British and Americans in the Northeast during the Revolution. Onto week six!