Final answer:
Indigenous assistance was crucial to European colonization in the Americas, offering local knowledge and initial labor force, before many succumbed to diseases and Africans were brought in as a more resistant labor source. Indigenous societies eventually faced widespread disruption and dispossession due to European settlement and conquest.
Step-by-step explanation:
The success of European colonization efforts in the Americas was significantly facilitated by the indigenous peoples. Without Indigenous knowledge and assistance, Europeans would have had greater challenges in navigation and survival upon their arrival.
The Indigenous people had an intimate understanding of the terrain and could navigate through it with more ease than the Europeans, making them less likely to escape once enslaved. Furthermore, many Indigenous people perished due to European diseases like smallpox and influenza, for which they had no immunity, causing a shift in the European strategy to utilize African slaves who had greater resistance to these illnesses.
Indigenous people interacted with Europeans through trade, such as in the case of the Dutch-Iroquois alliances, where the European demand for furs resulted in increased Native American warfare, armed by European weapons. In the long run, however, European colonization led to profound disruption of Indigenous societies, loss of lands, subjugation, and deaths by disease and warfare.
By the 1700s, Indigenous societies were largely dispossessed of their territories, and European goods and technologies had permeated Native cultures, altering traditional lifestyles and power dynamics.
While European colonists certainly had their own resources and motivations—be it for riches, glory, or religious conversion—their dominance in the New World was in many ways made possible by their interaction with, and often exploitation of, Africans and Native peoples.