Numerous characteristics made Native Americans vulnerable to invasion by European adventurers. For starters, the natives were unprepared to deal with the European invaders. In addition, their populations were rapidly dwindling due to forced labor, starvation, epidemics caused by interaction with European illnesses, and inter-tribal conflicts.
The locals were unfamiliar with the Europeans’ political, economic, and military characteristics. They lacked the organizational and political cohesiveness required to repel the conquering armies. As they went about their everyday lives, the indigenous tribes were constantly at odds, contending for land and food. For example, the Aztecs amassed many opponents over time, particularly inside their tribe.
This conflict arose due to rivalry, competition for territorial claims, wealth accumulation, and the practice of employing captive enemies as religious sacrifices. Cortés made use of this feature by making alliances with hostile tribes. The Spanish explorers were a highly unified culture, in contrast to the Aztecs’ lack of unity.
The Native Americans grew to despise the Europeans and their strange beliefs. They frequently saw white people as disgusting and stingy with their possessions. This was a concept that the Indians had never encountered before. Things were freely exchanged in their social system.
The explorers were thought to have an insatiable need for furs and hides. They were particularly offended by the Europeans’ hostility toward their original religious beliefs, eating habits, sexual and marital arrangements, and other parts of their culture. Native Americans were accustomed to being in sync with nature’s spirit, but nature impeded Europeans.
They considered nature’s gifts an infinite source of resources, such as the beaver colony’s abundance of pelts, the forest’s quantity of timber, and the buffalo’s abundance of robes. Even Native Americans were regarded as a resource ripe for religious conversion or as a source of free labor by the explorers.
The Native Americans learned the necessary abilities for working with copper, but they did not learn the necessary skills for smelting iron; thus, they lacked the technology to fight the invaders. Nevertheless, the Innate Americans welcomed the Europeans when they came to the New World.
With their military dress, well-dressed beards, and enormous ships, the Indians admire their guests as magnificent fighters, but more so for the technology they brought.
The native people were astounded by this technology, which included steel blades and swords, a muzzleloader called an arquebus, copper, and brass kettles, cannons, hawk bells, mirrors, and jewelry used as bartering products, and other substances that were foreign to their way of life.
This was comprehensible, given that the inhabitants could not construct the implausible geniuses used by the Europeans. Unfortunately, the European impostors exploited their weapons of war to cause significant damage to the indigenous.