It was not surprising to me that the European settlers to America termed themselves "civilized Christians" and the Indians as "savages" or heathen natives. It seems that the Europeans didn't realize who was actually on the land first.
Although the Europeans may have "claimed" parts of the land "before" some of these Indian tribes, many of the tribes were migratory throughout the land due to their cultivation of the land. As much of this is already known, the Indians knew how to survive on the land that they lived on. On the other hand, the Europeans were new to the area and didn't know as much about crops and cultivating the land.
I can only imagine that there would have been some type of miscommunication between the Indians and Europeans as they different languages when "discussing" things like land or even religion. Since the Indians were at home, they tried to continue to live their lives as they did normally, while the Europeans were looking for freedom from their country.
You can imagine that the Europeans tried to influence the Indians into their religion and maybe even their own cultural traditions. It seems that throughout history, Indians were able to fight for their culture and traditions to preserve them as much as they could without the influence from their surroundings.
Although the text may refer to this preservation of culture and tradition "individualism", in the end it helped the Indian community stay whole and true to their own identities without loosing them over a period of time.
While the text as a whole includes a lot of important information, i felt that the story of the underlying preservation of the Indian's culture and traditions seemed to be the more important and rewarding information in the text because without those two elements, Indians might not have the same identity as is their past.
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