Was violence between American Indians and European settlers inevitable? This question will set the them for our next historical presentation, “Struggles Over the Fate of Native America: An Overview of the Indian Wars” with Dr. Eduardo Pagán. This presentation will provide an overview of the geopolitical world of the Americas before Columbus, and the ways that life changed for American Indians after Europeans colonization. Some of those changes invoked by European colonization involved accommodating to new ways, which had an impact on tradition. Other changes came through forced cultural change and physical removal. And still more changes involved an increased focus on aggressiveness and armed resistance to intrusion. But often those interchanges revolved around an inability to understand one another, and to make allowances for serious differences in worldviews and perspectives. This presentation will take a broad overview in exploring how both Europeans and American Indians understood themselves and their place in the world, and how those differences often violently clashed.
Join us this coming Tuesday, December 12 at 11 a.m. in the Museum’s Learning Center. Free for children 17 and under and free with paid Museum admission. Members always get in for free!
Dr. Eduardo Pagán is Arizona State University’s Bob Stump Endowed Professor of History, and the Desert Caballeros Western Museum’s Adjunct Curator of History. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in U.S. history. In addition to authoring numerous books on the history of the Southwest, he was one of the hosts of “History Detectives” (PBS), a historical consultant with “American Experience” (PBS), and has appeared in national and international documentaries and television shows.
