knowing the perspective of the Native Americans becomes most abundantly clear when discussing wartime in America, more specifically the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War.

In the French and Indian War, the French and the British fought over control of the eastern side of continental North America. Many Native American societies aligned with their closer trading partners, while others decided that neutrality was the best path forward. However, those who fought did so with their own motivations. For example, the Abenakis joined the French due to British encroachment onto their land.

Later in the 1700s, the Revolutionary War broke out between the British and the British colonies in America, now the United States. Once again, Indians were forced to choose a side and hope that they were able to choose the winning side in the end. One of the most interesting decisions that was made during the Revolutionary War was the split between the Six Nations. Four of the tribes, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the Senecas, and the Mohawks joined the British and the other two tribes, the Tuscarora and the Oneida joined the Americans. Many tribes ended up joining the British due to American attacks by colonists who lumped all Indian tribes together and attacked without warning.

6. What is environmental history? What does the study of colonial North American history through an environmental lens change and/or add to our understanding of Natives’ social developments pre-contact, and of European-Native interaction in the colonial era?

Environmental history is the study of the interaction between the affairs of a human population and the nature around them. This is particularly important in studying Native American history because of the Colombian exchange, overgrazing by European animals, and the fur trade.

Possibly the most important change in the Native American environment was during the arrival of the Europeans. There was an exchange of livestock, animals, plants, and diseases more commonly known as the Colombian Exchange. In the late 1400s, Christopher Columbus, on his second voyage to the Hispaniola region of the Caribbean islands, brought with him “more than a thousand settlers, and a cargo that included horses, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, dogs, seeds, cuttings for fruit trees, wheat, and sugarcane,” (Calloway, p. 70). Despite the many of the helpful crops and livestock brought from Europe to the Americas, the Europeans also brought many Old World diseases that harmed the Indians.

Another aspect of environmental history in the Americas that impacted Native American societies is the overgrazing of Indian agricultural areas. Often sheep from European settlers overgrazed on Native American farming areas and caused mass erosion and the land was unable to be used by the I