America... Regional Biodiversification, or Colonization?.... Eh, Pōtātō, Potætō 🤷🏼♂️.
I suppose it depends on who the newcomers were, and their methods of regional integration.
The Spaniards.
I needed to do so little research to find out that the Spanish were almost primarily invaders, they sold more people out of the Americas into the slave trade than almost any other nation in history. When they landed somewhere they instantly built fortified structures, kidnapped a few natives, and found out the weaknesses to their culture through them. They almost single handedly wiped out the Ais Indians of Eastern Florida, who in the 1500’s were the largest Native American Tribe under a single High Chief. Eventually they even used the Seminole tribe, they armed them with modern weapons to wipe out the rest of the Ais by 1730 AD. The Seminole Indians were then granted a large portion of the conquered land. The Spaniards continued the same tactic all over the Americas, from South America to Mexico and beyond, all the way up the West Coast of what is modern America. The stone forts that they built are a constant reminder of this fact, St. Augustine Florida for example has just such a reminder.
The French.
The French had a tendency to come in smaller village groups, though they did have several wars later on in colonial America, at first they were just very good at moving into a currently unpopulated area, they usually did this in such a non-invasive manner as to not even be noticed. They would set up farms and trading posts, but for them fur trapping and trading was in huge demand for export back to France. They had a good small industry of it for the first hundred years or so. They often even allied with Native peoples against the Spanish, and later English invasions.
The Dutch.
Where to start with the Dutch in Vinland. The biggest question here is how long did they actually live here among the Native peoples of North Eastern America and Modern Canada? We know from multiple sources of archaeological and historical record that they (a few dozen) may have been here as early as 850-900 AD. There are Many modern implications that America was discovered in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Not at all true. The Dutch Frisian people were the first, and honestly probably just landed here while attempting a migration to Iceland. This happened all over Northern, and Western Europe in order to escape the loving embrace of the ever expanding waves of Christianity into areas like Germania, Norway and the Netherlands.
The English.
Honestly their addition to the American conquest was late, and truly quite an embarrassing fumble. They lost several of the first small communities to starvation, and honestly in some cases outright idiocy. The fact that they were the dominating force in the end, was probably circumstantial and only really do to the fact that the only people they had left to fight were the heavily depleted Spanish forces in some areas. The English won battles in a few good strategic areas, and after that, we see how the neighboring French folded like napkins and sold the largest portions of their American land to the English.
We can see from the few examples above here that some of these structures were purely Military in nature. While some of the others are simply small walled cities that were designed to protect the residents from nature, animals, and bands of raiders.
Before the Narrative.
There were a few other reported Pagan English, and Celtic migrations from a point in history well before the 1490’s, and it is highly likely that these peoples just integrated into the tribes wherever they landed, examples can be found from the area of the Choctaw and Chickasaw in Tennessee, Virginia, and the Carolinas, all the way down to the Ais people of Florida. We find these scattered examples of Native tribes like the Ais that had DNA from European sources. Most likely this came from a point in time a few hundred years before colonization in the mixing of their lineage. Many of the first explorers of the 1490’s reported tribes like the Ais having facial hair, metal smithing skills and also being taller and paler than the other neighboring tribes. Many of the tribes of the Americas did not come into the regions that we found them in during colonization until about 200 BC to 1,200 BC and many of them not migrating north from south America as late as 1509 to escape the plagues that the Spanish Conquistadors first brought.
We have this modern idea in our heads of this evil Romanized Expansions movement to colonize the Americas, in reality it was primarily a Spanish conquest that killed “Most” or at least a plurality of the Native peoples.
This is one of the few articles where I will simply not state sources. The reason for that is no matter what source material I use it will be contradicted by an opposing countries historical records. The Spanish, and English for instance have a very differing opinion on who first colonized an area of the Americas, also we find very different journal accounts from the explorers of each country, and it's probably because of how they were each greeted quite differently by the Native peoples. So this is one area of history where it simply is a wall of static, and we occasionally get a burst of something with clarity.
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