Some losses? Population estimates are problematic, but there might only be 50 or so individuals left. That is not to say that the population loss is due to illegal contact, but it wouldn’t be surprising if, over the decades, what little contact there has been has resulted in disease killing off many of the islanders.
I’ve never heard of right wing websites denying the factual matter that the Native Americans taught European settlers to grow corn. It doesn’t surprise me though. But the Wampanoags did this out of fear of the Pilgrims, they had been devastated by disease and though they could work out a mutually beneficial arrangement with the Pilgrims. If they had the means they would have driven them off. Of course as we know that mutual benefit didn’t last long.
Even then, sticks & stones vs. steel and gunpowder and germ warfare (not to go full-on Guns, Germs, and Steel but really, which side would you bet on?).
It actually isn’t that way.
The most common reaction of the Sentinelese has been to retreat into the jungle and hide when outsiders land on the island. When they don’t (or can’t) retreat yes, they are hostile, but their reactions have moderated over time. Sometimes they now fire blunt arrows as a warning first, rather than hunting arrows. They will sometimes brandish weapons at outsiders rather than immediately firing. They will, however, escalate if provoked or even if the outsiders don’t back off fast enough for them.
They seem (because we can’t really know) to regard outsiders as a potential source of loot (various expeditions have left gifts like food and metal implements in an attempt to establish relations) and not an immediate invasion threat, but they clearly have no interest in being friends. In at least one instance of non-native fisherman working in the waters/off their island they have been quite efficient and brutal in killing them, probably (because we can’t really know) regarding them as threats to their own food supply. In other cases, although threatening, shipwreck victims have survived being marooned there without injury until rescued by the Indian government.
North Sentinel Island is just under 24 square miles, and the Sentinelese are (so far as we can tell) strictly hunter-gatherers with no agriculture whatsoever. That island is never going to have a high population with that level of tech. Maybe, at best, it could support a couple hundred people but inter-personal violence, accidents with (as best we know) nothing like what we’d consider medical care, and so forth would result in a significant death rate. Population crashes driving the numbers down into the low double-digits are probably a semi-regular occurrence.
Yes, there has probably been loss from disease, but North Sentinel hasn’t really been completely isolated - people from outside have probably been landing on its shores for thousands of years. They don’t have the immunities of someone living in the middle of Hong Kong but they probably have been exposed, off and on, the various things over the centuries.
Fear of the Narragansett, not of the Pilgrims.
The problem is that we can imagine a reaction from native Americans something like this:
Hey, some strangers have arrived on giant canoes. These people are going to keep coming and coming, they’re going to kill and enslave and infect and displace all of us. So our only hope is unrelenting hostility and violence. If we do that, they’ll give up and go home.
Except this scenario and reaction doesn’t make sense based on what was actually happening at the time.
First of all, the first Europeans to explore the Americas weren’t interested in displacing the native population. If they were ambitious they might have imagined conquering them and enslaving them, but even that would have seemed grandiose. They were looking for trade with the Indies, not new lands to settle.
Second, the native Americans just like the Europeans had no idea how things would work out either. Yes, if they could have known the Europeans would move in and displace them they might have acted differently, but how could they have known that when the Europeans themselves didn’t know that? And of course there was no such thing as a native American identity at that time. Why would a particular tribe or city or nation feel a shared identity with their next door arch-enemies and team up with them against these random traders with their giant canoes?
Note of course that the Europeans didn’t have a pan-European consciousness either, where they always sided with other Europeans against natives. They were happy to ally with various native groups against other European powers. Native American identity only arose much much later when the situation was completely different.
And of course, native Americans fought against invading powers all the time. But take the conquest of Mexico for example. Yeah, the Aztecs fought the Spaniards. But they weren’t just fighting the Spaniards, they were fighting all the neighboring countries at the same time, who had allied with the Spaniards against the Aztecs, because all their neighbors hated and feared the Aztecs. Yes, eventually all of Mexico would end up under Spanish rule. How could the Tlaxcalans and other Spanish allies have foreseen this? Yeah, the Spanish had some advanced weapons, but there were only a few of them, and they seemed the perfect weapon to use against the Aztecs. And it wasn’t until the massive waves of epidemics had reduced the population of Mexico drastically that the Spanish were able to really take over.
Note of course that European conquerors and traders visited lots of places all over the world, and most of those places didn’t see anything like what happened in the Americas. India and China and Africa and the Middle East didn’t see massive displacement and replacement of the native population. Sure, in some places you saw conquest, and by 1890 most of the world was part of some European empire or another. But that was way in the future. And the answer of course is that other parts of the world didn’t have massive epidemics that depopulated the country leaving it open for settlers from other places to move in.
Instead you had conquest, but that meant just that a small strata of Europeans formed the ruling class, with a larger group of native collaborators, and a much larger group of native subjugated people. The British eventually conquered India, but they never killed off the native Indians and replaced them with Europeans settlers. And that wasn’t because the British were kinder in India than they were in North America, or because the Indians resisted more fiercely than the Native Americans.
And of course in many places in the Americas the native people weren’t replaced. In the United States native Americans are a very small minority and European descended people are the majority. In Mexico and Central America they are a large minority, and mestizo people are a majority and pure Europeans are a minority.
They didn’t like the Pilgrims either as I understand. It was already a complex political situation between the Narragansetts, the Wampanogs, and the Pequots as well when the Pilgrims arrived.
And Samoset just wanted some beer. 
But would the Native Americans stay using stone-age weapons? Native Americans were just as ready as others worldwide to adopt the musket.
During the Beaver Wars, the Iroquouis confederacy defeated the Huron basically because of better access to European weapons.
Of course, they had to buy them - from other Europeans - but it is entirely possible that they could have developed indigenous production, given time.
A similar trajectory is found in New Zealand, whose (initially) stone-age people had no difficulty switching to muskets and shotguns very quickly:
Could such primitive people make guns? Probably … given time. Humans are amazingly resourceful that way.
However, given that Europeans were in no way united during the formative colonial period - they probably wouldn’t have to do so alone: they could hire European experts to help them (like Turkey did), or set up an exclusive trading regime to import them (like the Dutch-Japanese relationship during the Tokugawa period).
Certainly, the Iroquois and the Maori managed to simply buy weapons.
Which isn’t to say that the Europeans would not enjoy somewhat more advanced military hardware - just that the advantage need not be complete and permanent.
The success in colonization of America probably has just as much or more to do with the unintentional introduction of new diseases to a population without an establish immunity than it has to do with anything related to European post facto perceived superiority.
The Pilgrims are a perfect example of this, as they took over land that was only emptied due to epidemics that had killed off the population that occupied the land they chose to settle on.
Of course the real absurdity is the fact that we ignore other British colonies that pre-dated them, and which were more successful.
But the Wampanoag-Pilgrim Treaty was a desperate act to protect against neighbors as the Wampanog populations had been destroyed by yellow fever.
The Pilgrims were ill prepared, unqualified and would have been destroyed had the Wampanog not been forced into the treaty as a defensive act due to their population losses due to yellow fever.
Had they not lost two-thirds of their people they would have had far less of a need or a desire to enter into a treaty out of a desperate desire to defend their territory from incursions.
Obviously due to happenstance the Europeans had several technological advantages but those were not going to be leveraged to any useful effect by a ragtag collection of ill prepared religious extremists.
Consider the scale of the devastation from smallpox, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, scarlet fever, chicken pox, yellow fever, and whooping cough.
It was not the musket that won, but what at that time was unknowable by the people spreading it. From 1620 to 1680 the current estimates are that are that about 87 percent of the Native population died due to the introduction of foreign disease. This is a HUGE scale, and large enough that is is commonly believed that global cooling can be attributed to this dramatic decrease in the world wide human population. Just imagine 9 in 10 of your neighbors being dead, and what that would do the the economy and social structure.
As Europe was still stuck in pre-germ theory beliefs like miasma theory, there is no “credit” to be taken for this effect, but it was critical for colonization.
People over estimate the value of muskets compared to bows, but this is purely revisionist history. Muskets were not rifled, and were far from accurate compared to a skilled person with a bow.
The rate of fire and accuracy of a bow is much higher than a musket, but it also requires high degree of skill to use proficiently. While modern firearms are superior to a bow, in this era it was a crutch to make up for a poorly trained force.
Concur. Before Columbus’ pox-ridden voyage, Cahokia was 2 to 10 times larger than London, to say nothing of Tenochtitlan. By the time whitey got to settling, the numbers were very much rigged in his favour however.
The OP is kind of biased anyway - for the most part the natives weren’t “nice” so much as viewing the early European parties (be it Cortez in the south or Champlain in the north) as bizarre but useful, deadly warriors to fuck up their own traditional enemies with ; as well as sources of new and useful loot from metal knives and pots to horses and guns - and what they wouldn’t trade could easily be stolen from them. Or their dead bodies, come to that.
Well if the OP was biased, so was that paragraph.
The native americans were not angels but it’s clear from the early accounts they had a lot of catching up to do with europe in terms of barbarism. Also note that many early settlers chose to join the tribes; it doesn’t make much sense for the tribes to let them do that if they just saw the white man as a means to an end.
I would appreciate some cites. Not because I disagree with this, but because I agree with it, and want to read more on the subject.
It doesn’t make sense to let members of your technologically advanced neighbors join you if you just see them as means to an end? Was that the same sort of altruism that led the US to launch Operation Paperclip?
Didn’t mean to imply they were horrid. Just, you know, human. Not angels, not devils. Just folks, with land claims and contested hunting grounds and old beefs with the neighbours, same as anywhere.
Well, some of the tribes had a tradition of integrating outsiders into the tribe provided they could pull their weight. Even prisoners of war. Makes double sense to take on anybody when 95% of your people has died and you feel threatened by the next tribe over. That doesn’t mean altruism or concern for one’s fellow man’s well being need come into the decision, does it ?
Historically, Native Americans put a lot of effort into obtaining muskets, and the introduction of muskets intensified warfare among them considerably (see the so-called “Beaver Wars”).
For whatever reason, the Native Americans themselves thought such weapons conferred a huge advantage, or why would they seek them out and pay huge sums for them? Allegedly, it cost the Iroquois six to eight thousand beaver pelts to buy a single musket in the 1640s:
Allegedly, one Native could trap 40-80 beaver in a season, meaning it would take on average over a hundred seasons of individual work to pay for one!
Despite this, the Iroquois fielded an army of three to four hundred musket-armed warriors by 1648.
Why would they bother, if bows (that they could make themselves, presumably at a lot less effort) were just as good or better?
Seems to me the willingness of the Iroquois to make such an extraordinary effort to acquire muskets is the best possible proof that they were better weapons for warfare than what they could make for themselves.
The advantages of bows over muskets are generally two fold, they are more accurate and the rate of fire is higher. However in the Northeast most of the fighting is done in wooded or hilly areas. These means that most shots are going to be fired within musket range. The rate of fire can be replicated by having musketeers in groups that alternate firing and reloading. Muskets are much easier to use and much less tiring to fire. The ammunition is much easier to carry and manufacture so each warrior can carry much more. They are also can be used as a club in close range fighting.
On the other hand - powder was expensive and non-reusable.
However, I suspect a significant (perhaps the most significant) virtue of the musket as a weapon for inter-tribal war was psychological: the blast, smoke and flame of musket shooting must have been terrifying to be on the receiving end of - even if they didn’t hit anything. It may have been more likely to make the enemy panic and run than bowshots.
The massive expense and effort the Iroquois put into obtaining muskets is only explicable if they were a lot better than the bows they could make for themselves.