US History: Indigenous nations and colonial claims

Analyze Indigenous nations, colonial claims, colonial regions, and Atlantic slavery using primary sources (C3 D2.His.1.9-12, D2.His.4.9-12). Indigenous nations had their own governments, economies, and diplomacy; the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy united five nations (six after the Tuscarora joined about 1722) under the Great Law of Peace. Population estimates for North America north of Mexico in 1492 range widely, often from about 2 to 7 million or more. Colonial regions: New England (Puritan towns, fishing, trade), Middle Colonies (diverse, grain, Philadelphia and New York), Chesapeake (tobacco, indentured servants then enslaved labor), and the Lower South (rice and indigo, enslaved majority in South Carolina by about 1708). In 1619 about 20 enslaved Africans arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia; Virginia's 1662 law made slavery inherited through the mother (partus sequitur ventrem); about 388,000 enslaved Africans were brought directly to mainland North America in the transatlantic trade. Primary sources: Olaudah Equiano's account of the Middle Passage (1789); colonial slave codes; Powhatan's reported words to John Smith (recorded by Smith, so source carefully); treaties and wampum records. Resistance: the Pueblo Revolt (1680) drove the Spanish from New Mexico for 12 years; the Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina led to a harsher slave code. Source: Virginia law of 1662. Content: children's status follows the mother. Effect: slavery became hereditary. Context: shift from indentured to enslaved labor in tobacco. Map Indigenous nations and colonial claims around 1700, compare the four colonial regions in a chart, and analyze two documents on slavery (one law and one firsthand account). Usual mistake: Describing colonial America as empty land or leaving enslaved people out of the economic story.