Native Histories in Latin America and North America

From Alaska to Argentina, Native people have diverse histories. Spain, Portugal, England and France established different colonial societies; indigenous Latin Americans today have a different historical legacy than Native Americans in the United States. But the experiences of conquest, resistance and adaptation also tell a single overarching story. In colonial times, Native Americans and Europeans struggled over and shared the land. After Independence, however, the new American republics tried to destroy American Indians through war and assimilation. But in the last century Native peoples (both North and South) reasserted their identities within modern states: the "vanishing Indian" refused to vanish.