These societies would not only live in harmony but thrive and work together for the better of their shared children. Women had a say in how they would help create this new and improved world, they were not pawns. They controlled the land and all the children who continued their lineage. However, Native Americans assumed that European men would feel the same way about these new family ties. They were wrong. Although kinship ties initially seemed to work, Europeans never took them seriously and never severed them when it became convenient or necessary to advance their own agendas. The Indians could not foresee forcing Europeans into marriages they did not want; in a religion they don't understand or support would mean they wouldn't be fully committed to women, children, or the good of the tribe. Because the European men did not take their commitment to the tribe as seriously as the Indians, they were able to outmaneuver them and make them unable to protect them.