Impact of technology on American Indians
The impact of technology on American Indians is a complex narrative marked by both innovation and adaptation. Prior to European contact, American Indians developed a range of tools from natural materials that facilitated their daily life, including efficient hunting and food preparation methods. However, post-contact, the arrival of Europeans introduced rapid technological change, often compelling Native communities to adopt foreign practices and tools that were significantly more advanced. This shift was driven by the desire for metal tools, firearms, and new transportation methods like railroads, which transformed traditional lifestyles and increased interaction with European settlers.
As trade expanded, American Indians began to integrate European technologies, though often they faced pressures that disrupted their own developmental processes. Over time, as American Indians encountered the exploitation of their natural resources through advanced technologies like dams and oil drilling, many began to assert their rights to these lands through legal and political avenues. Today, there is a growing movement among Native communities to reclaim control over the resources on their territories, reflecting a blend of traditional knowledge and modern advocacy practices. This ongoing dialogue between technology and indigenous rights continues to shape the experiences and futures of American Indians.
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Impact of technology on American Indians
Technology has always been an agent of change. Typically, “technology” refers to the application of an idea to a particular problem. For precontact American Indians, tools were often as simple as specially shaped stones, bones, and wood. With these materials, hand axes, scrapers, hammers, chisels, files, grinders, and knives were made. As the tools were improved, so were the crafts that they helped make. By the 1500s, American Indians were using their tools to design and build complex equipment that helped to make their lives easier. They were perfecting stone arrow and spear points and shafts for maximum penetration; they were experimenting with improved nets and weirs, and were developing highly efficient traps and snares; they were inventing new ways to prepare foods, including stone ovens and nonmetallic containers that could contain and store hot liquids; they were developing airtight and waterproof baskets; and they were becoming increasingly aware of how best to protect themselves from the elements using a combination of natural fibers and leather.
After 1500, American Indian technology changed rapidly. The primary catalysts for these changes were the Europeans, who, having discovered the “new world,” were now enduring danger and hardship to explore it and claim it as their own. As they encountered American Indians, they sought to “civilize” them by encouraging them in more or less hostile ways to abandon their natural developmental process and to adopt a way of living, technologically speaking, that was hundreds of years in the American Indian’s future. After contact with Europeans, American Indian technological changes were not so much developmental as they were adoptive.
As trade began between the Europeans and the natives, stone knives and axes gave way to the metal knives and axes that were more easily handled and that could hold a sharper edge better. Iron and steel tools, such as chisels and plows, became highly desirable among the tribes, especially among those that were quickly adopting European ways of life.
While early European guns were inferior to bows and arrows for both hunting and warfare, their foreignness, complexity, and loudness impressed American Indians. Oral and written accounts of how natives used guns suggest that, prior to the development of a reliable repeating rifle, natives used guns as symbols of their wealth, rather than as weapons; it required many supplies to trade for a single firearm, and more still to get the lead and black powder to fire it. Frontier journals indicate that a skilled archer could powerfully and accurately shoot at least ten arrows in the time it took an early rifler to shoot once, reload, and fire again.
The development of railroads and commercial waterways also changed the ways of American Indians, especially since both of these transportational technologies helped bring in more invaders. Eventually, American Indians learned to distrust the European Americans, who with increasing frequency broke treaties and invaded their lands with large machines.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the technologies that govern natural resources became particularly important for American Indians. For more than a century, American Indians have fought for the right to exploit the natural resources that exist on their lands but that are being appropriated by European American technologies such as dams, artificially made canals, oil drilling, strip mining, and timbering. Using legal and political power, contemporary American Indians are slowly regaining some of the rights over the oil under their land, the ores in their mountains, and the waters that flow through their land.
Bibliography
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