ABSTRACT

The cultural geography of North America's Indians is a spatial expression of four centuries of cultural and geographic change set in motion by contact between European explorers and immigrants and the Native American population. The Indian view of land made individual rights subordinate to those of the group or tribe; individuals should be governed by a sense of compatibility with others in the tribe. Encroachment into Indian areas continued, spurred on by increasing immigration and by pressures that an expanding agrarian society placed on the land. Individualism, so foreign to Indian cultures, therefore lay at the foundation of a set of values carried by Euro-Americans into the contest for land with the Indian. To the Euro-Americans some areas of the eastern United States which were relatively uninhabited by Indians at the time the Colonial era began, were lands which they could claim with impunity.