CHAPTER 2 · Removing the “Savages”
How did colonists use deception to acquire land and resources?
A practice question that prepares your thinking for the aim. Study how the model works, then build your own answer to your assigned question.
The model paragraph
English colonists used false descriptions and false promises to weaken Native peoples’ claims to land and their ability to defend it. In New England, Native agriculture, the cultivation of crops for community survival, made clear that the land was already being used. However, the colonists claimed that “the Indians did not deserve the land because they were lazy and did not work as hard as the English did” (YPT 36). This says that English settlers defended taking land by portraying its Native owners as undeserving. It shows how ignoring Native farming turned a false description into a justification for seizure. Deception also worked through promises that disguised immediate violence. William Tucker, an English captain negotiating with the Powhatan, used a treaty to create an appearance of peace. Takaki writes, “After they signed the treaty, he persuaded the Indians to drink a toast—then served them poisoned wine, killing an estimated two hundred” (YPT 33). This says that Tucker followed a peace agreement with a poisoned drink. It shows that the promise of safety made trust itself useful to the attackers. This connects to Key Idea 3: Ideas are weapons. The false image of idle Native people supplied an excuse for taking land, while the false promise of peace concealed an attack on its defenders. Because tobacco farming and settlement increased English demand for land, both forms of deception supported dispossession. The lies mattered through what they enabled: seizure could appear deserved, and violence could arrive disguised as cooperation.
1 POINT TO NAME IT · 1 POINT TO EXPLAIN IT
How this model earns its key idea points
Gist
A story or belief can help people get others to accept unfair treatment—or work together to change it.
Check your understanding
Academic definition
Ideas influence struggles over power by legitimizing domination, defining belonging, or mobilizing resistance. To explain the connection, identify the idea, who uses it, and the action it helps justify or organize.
Check your understanding
Elaboration
- Name the idea
- Key Idea 3: Ideas are weapons
- Point to the evidence
- Takaki contrasts English claims that Native people were lazy with evidence of Native farming (YPT 36); he also describes Tucker’s poisoned peace toast (YPT 33).
- Explain how it works
- The first deception makes seizure appear justified. The second encourages trust that an attacker exploits. Each idea performs a different practical job in the struggle over land.
- Make the connection explicit
- Do more than call a statement a weapon. Identify the statement, explain whose interests it serves, and show the action it makes easier.
Check your understanding: explain how this model’s evidence shows its key idea without looking at the explanation above.
Compare your explanation
The first deception makes seizure appear justified. The second encourages trust that an attacker exploits. Each idea performs a different practical job in the struggle over land.
How the argument builds
Follow what each move adds to the answer. Then map your own paragraph in your notebook.
- Answer the question
False descriptions and false promises made dispossession easier.
- First evidence
Settlers denied the value of Native farming.
- Explain the justification
A false claim of laziness recast land seizure as deserved.
- Second evidence
Tucker used a peace treaty and toast to conceal poisoning.
- Connect the key idea
Ideas can excuse an action or hide its purpose from the people it harms.
- Develop the consequence
Both uses of deception supported growing English control of land and resources.
Build your own sentences · Chapter 2
Choose the relationship your argument needs. These are sentence models to study; your paragraph should use your own reasoning and your assigned four words of the day.
Appositives · rename a noun precisely
A noun phrase between commas renames the noun before it. It adds useful information, not another sentence. You need two.
Check: remove the phrase between the commas. The main sentence should still work.
Queen Elizabeth I, the English monarch who encouraged the colonization of Ireland, sent soldiers into a Catholic country her advisers viewed as a potential threat.
YPT 27–28Sir Humphrey Gilbert, an English soldier involved in the conquest of Ireland, used displays of severed heads to intimidate people approaching his battlefield tent.
YPT 27–29The Powhatan, Native farmers living in the homeland surrounding Jamestown, first helped starving English settlers before demands for food, labor, and land intensified conflict.
YPT 31–33The Pequot, one of New England’s Native farming peoples, suffered mass killing as English settlement and competition for land developed into destructive war.
YPT 35–36Mary Rowlandson, an English woman held captive by the Narragansett, described kindness that complicated the dehumanizing stereotypes she also repeated in her account.
YPT 37–38Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, promised Native peoples security while proposing financial arrangements that would make retaining their land more difficult.
YPT 40–41
The nine connectors · choose a relationship
But
Adds a contrast.
English promoters promised education and Christianity for Native peoples, but colonial demands for land and labor helped turn those promises into campaigns of destruction.
YPT 30–34So
Shows a result.
Tobacco profits encouraged Virginia colonists to expand their farms, so they sought Powhatan fields that Native communities had already cleared and cultivated.
YPT 31 YPT 33Because
Gives a reason.
England’s conquest of Ireland became a model for colonization because it combined unequal laws, land seizure, and a hierarchy that ranked the English above conquered peoples.
YPT 27–30If
Names a condition.
If we compare English actions in Ireland and North America, we can trace how familiar claims of superiority helped justify control over different peoples.
YPT 27–30Unless
Means if not.
We cannot explain the shift toward colonial destruction unless we connect claims about Native inferiority with the settlers’ growing demands for farms, food, and labor.
YPT 30–33 YPT 35–36When
Means if with expectation.
When the English compared Native Americans to the Irish, they transferred an existing judgment of inferiority onto peoples whose societies they barely understood.
YPT 29–30Despite
Takes a noun phrase.
Despite clear evidence of Native farming in New England, English settlers claimed that Native people did not work the land and therefore did not deserve it.
YPT 35–36Although
Takes a subject and a verb.
Although Mary Rowlandson repeated hostile stereotypes of Native people, her descriptions of their kindness also supplied evidence that could challenge English justifications for conquest.
YPT 37–38However
Starts a new sentence.
Jefferson promised to respect Native land rights. However, his plan to expand credit purchases would create debts intended to pressure Native people into surrendering land.
YPT 40–41After despite, use a noun phrase. After although, use a subject and a verb. In your rubric’s pattern, put a period before however and a comma after it. The contrast must make sense in context.