How did North and South American Native American tribes view themselves and how did individual tribes perceive their relations with other tribes?

Question

How did the establishment of extensive trading networks and warfare among Native American tribes in North and South America affect these self-perceptions, perceptions of other tribes, and their actions when the first European aggressions and encounters occurred in the 1400s?

Answer 1

Answer: An ideal answer will:
1. Discuss how individual North and South American tribes viewed themselves as distinctive tribes or as some other discrete population, at the center of their own created world, and not as American Indians or Native Americans.
2. Discuss how this particularized and individualized mindset of Native American tribes was reinforced by significant language differences, differences between hunting peoples and agricultural peoples over land encroachments, different religious customs, and geographical distance.
3. Discuss the development of extensive, vast trading networks linking, for example, the Aztec Empire across all parts of North America with different American Indian tribes.
4. Assert that despite maintaining extensive trade networks and conducting warfare with other tribes, each native North and South American tribe continued to view themselves as the center of its own world.
5. Assert that power of specific cultural differences and variations in customs among tribes were more influential than the development trading networks and the outbreak of war with other tribes in formulating and reinforcing the Native Americans' parochial and narrow tribal mindset.
6. Analyze how this mindset of Native American tribes prevented any unified resistance to the first European aggressions of the 1400s and 1500s.
7. Analyze how this mindset made Native American tribes willing to build trading networks and warfare alliances with Europeans if they thought these trading network and warfare alliances would result in gaining a strategic advantage over another tribe.
8. Write a concise and effective conclusion.