Our Perspective from Early Europeans' Journals

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Columbus and Cabeza de Vaca’s journeys. They both described their difficulties of communication with the natives. Cabeza de Vaca suffered with diseases and starvation but was cared for by the natives even though there was a significant language barrier. He found that body language was a useful tactic of communication. Body language is a large part of language. The majority of the cultures share some kind of body language that have similar meanings.

Symbols serve as an essential role in a culture. For example, Spanish Queen Elizabeth held a truncheon to indicate that the power she masters. Symbols in the Native American culture conveyed secret meanings. The majority of the symbols are based on nature and geometric portrayals such as the sun, moon and starts. Many symbols carried religious beliefs as well. In his journal, Christopher Columbus expressed that the Native Americans were not aware of weapons. They were one of the items that the natives could not produce due to the lack of technology. The Native Americans used wood and stone materials to assist them in hunting. The natives produced herbal medicines that allowed them to treat diseases and abort unborn children.

The Europeans felt a significant culture shock upon arriving to the Americas due to the significant differences between the two cultures. In this time period, there were no sociologists to explain culture shock or how to react to it. Due to this, the Europeans reacted to the culture shock that they experienced ethnocentrically. This means to judge another culture based on the standards of ones own culture. One negative result that ethnocentrism brings is that people often fail to acknowledge their own problem, which was true in the case of the Europeans. For example, the Europeans were surprised that the natives were not interested in land and gold. Thus, they took the gold and occupied the native’s lands. Europeans failed to realize that in the Native Americans culture, gold and land were owned by nature instead of humans. And that was only the start of this “bloody” colonization. Europeans believed that by introducing the natives to Christianity they were saving them from hell; by distrusting property to individuals would allow them to gain personal economic profit. Yet, the Europeans never considered that the distribution of their culture and what they valued could harm the natives. Europeans failed to see their own problems and immediately decided how the natives should live. The result of the Europeans’ actions was assimilation, which is a process where one culture is absorbed into a larger culture, and the result of both cultures change. Although this process sounds beneficial to the natives, the Europeans forced assimilation on them in a harsh and quick manner that did more harm than good. Therefore, it resulted in a genocide.