Afterword

Abstract

Five hundred years after Columbus’s voyage, we write in a politically charged atmosphere. The complex issues of the massive cultural interaction that has taken place in the past centuries has sometimes been reduced to contest over the use of semantically loaded terms (“discovery,” “encounter,” “contact,” “conquest”), and every word used is examined as a possible euphemism for the destruction of native peoples that followed 1492. Nevertheless, what we seek to understand in these chapters are the profound changes in cultures that have taken place in the last five centuries and the historical processes that produced them. Genocide and deculturation are part of the story but so are adaptation, negotiation, and significant cultural transformation—for both Native Americans and Europeans.