How were the Native Americans in the Powhatan Confederacy different from those confronted by the Spanish?

The Powhatan Indians were located in Virginia. They get
their name from an important chief, Powhatan, who was the father of Pocahontas. These
tribes had established a complicated chiefdom in which many sub-tribes were ruled over
by the major tribe, controlled by Powhatan. These Indians built houses out of trees.
They grew crops, mostly maize (corn), and they fished and hunted for meat. The men were
tall, thin and handsome. The women were shorter, but strong because they worked hard
growing crops and making bread out of the corn flour that they had to pound for hours.
Both sexes had their different roles, but they all worked hard. They tended to stay
where they were until the land could no longer produce enough to support them, and then
they would move to another location.

The English needed to
get along with these Indians to ensure their survival, but they made many mistakes. They
tried to buy Powhatan’s favor by giving him a lot of worthless trinkets and making him a
vassal of the English king, but in order to do this, he had to kneel before the English
in submission, and this he naturally refused to do. He was already a king in his own
nation. There was a lot of fighting between the Indians and the colonists. There was a
brief period of peace when tobacco farmer John Rolfe married Powhatan’s daughter,
Pocahontas, but when they both died, the wars continued as the English continued to
encroach on the Indian land. 

Spanish explorers such as
Coronado and DeSoto had even worse luck with the Native Americans. They encountered
hostile natives almost everywhere, which caused them to change direction often. Since
most of the Spanish conquests were in South America and Mexico, when they encountered
resistance in Florida and in the Southern U.S., they gave up and turned around. They did
not find any gold, so they were not interested in settling down and farming like the
English were. They had different goals in mind than the English
settlers.

None of the Native Americans were very pleased
about the arrival of the Europeans, but Native Americans believed that no one could own
the land and if the Europeans were willing to co-exist, that was fine. The problem was,
the Europeans had a different culture and different views about the land. They believed
that God meant man to subdue the land and use it for himself. The Native Americans
believed that the people and the land were one so when they were forced to leave their
land by the Europeans, they fought back.