Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 17:08:53 -0600
From: Mark Stoll <marks@admin.stedwards.edu>
Subject: Las Casas
I think Dennis makes some valid points, but there some things we ought to keep in mind when discussing the English/Spanish differences and similarities.
First, the English settling Jamestown assumed the local Indians would be similar to Aztecs. That they were not, and thus not as easily conquerable as cities or civilizations would have been, set them off on a different track. We should compare the record of the English with the Spanish record in Texas, Florida, and California, and I think we will find that Indians may well have been better off in a Massachusetts "praying town" than one of Father Junipero Serra's missions. And certainly the Spanish had no better luck with the Apaches and Comanches than did the Mexicans, Texas, or Americans.
Mark Stoll
Co-Editor, H-ASEH
St.Edward's University
Austin, Texas 78704
marks@admin.stedwards.edu
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 17:08:52 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: "Dennis Williams, Southern Nazarene U." <DWILLIAM@SNU.EDU>
I believe that precisely because Las Casas recognized that their was an immoral brutality being perpetrated on indigenous peoples is the extraordinary part. The English are much less concerned about indigenous peoples in North America--nearly the only Englishmen concerned about the souls, if they believed them to exist in natives, were Quakers, who the colonial elites held to be heretical and worthy of death themselves. The Quakers became leaders then in the nineteenth century along with "new light" evangelicals who saw such actions as the whiskey trade as immoral enough to legislate against for the moral and physical good of native peoples (rather than just as a measure to not reap what you sow in raids by drunken warriors).
In terms of the extension of rights, Spanish monarchs very quickly accepted the notion that indigenous peoples a vassals and therefore possessors of certain rights of priveledges that needed to be protected by the crown in order for the crown to reap the benefits of indigenous labor. Certainly though, to concede Richard's point, practice and jurisprudence are not the same thing in Colonial Latin America.
Further, the extension of rights to indigenous peoples was selfserving for the Spanish monarchs, but it did recognized a native place within the poltical and social structure of the empire. In my understanding, the English had no such place for indigenous peoples in America--they occupied the position of the "other" and thus had no rights until relations were established by treaty. That may be a misunderstanding based on too little reading. However, the lack of a systematic formula of brutality may be in part the result of a world view that attempted to ignore the indigenous person by keeping them outside the community and thus reinforcing a European vision of "virgin" land, which by English legal doctrine gave Englishmen rights to claim the land (I think Gary Nash's textbook _Red, White and Black_ explains that unoccupied land and English land claims pretty well).
Don't construe this as the advocation of a white legend for Spanish/Indian relations though. The Spanish were indeed brutal in their treatment of indigenous peoples. I wonder though how much differently they treated the Moors prior to 1492 (or even after) or rebellious Protestant subjects in the Netherlands?
A good treatment of the historiography of the Black Legend is Benjamin Keen's "The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities" Hispanic American Historical Review (Nov. 1969) p. 703- 719. It argued for the full humanization of both Spanish and indigenous players rather than the propogation of Black or White legends.
Out of fairness, Anglo-Indian relations deserve the same humanization--which I suspect I was guilty, in my most recent post, of not giving.
Dennis Williams
Southern Nazarene University
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 08:44:18 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: Sandra Mathews-Lamb <skmlamb@unm.edu>
I'm just curious--why would the English settling Jamestown have assumed that the local Indians would be similar to the Aztecs? I agree that a comparison between Spanish conquest and English conquest is LONG overdue--a monograph of a large scale. Perhaps a collaborative effort between Spanish Borderlands scholars and Colonial US scholars?
Sam
Sandra Mathews-Lamb
Co-Moderator: H-West/H-Rural
Co-Owner: SpanBord
Dept of History
U of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
(505) 277-2451
(505) 277-6023 FAX
skmlamb@unm.edu
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 08:44:20 -0600
Subject: Las Casas: Comparative indentiture
From: Austin Meredith <rchow@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu>
As part of our work in constructing this elaborate hypertextspace for dealing with the Concord MA context of Henry David Thoreau, we have needed to compare and contrast the treatment accorded to the "Praying Indians" in the vicinity of Walden Pond, long term, with the treatment accorded to the native acolytes at Mission San Juan Capistrano for the duration of its active existence. (That particular mission was selected merely because a person known to Thoreau, his sailor-boy classmate Dick Dana, had reported on a visit there.)
Suffice it to say that the consideration we have given this has been very extensive, but I personally look up from such ongoing consideration with _no clear sense_ that I would have been better off in a racial subject status in the Concord MA area than in a racial subject status on the California coast, or vice versa. It was pretty brutal in both venues.
You likely aren't aware, for instance, that at one point there was a racial atrocity committed by the Concord militia on the watershed of Walden, in atonement for which several citizens of Concord needed to hang by the neck on Boston Common until they be dead. Even Thoreau wasn't able to become aware of that history, despite the existence of legal records -- the atrocity has been hidden, by its perpetrators, so to speak, in plain sight, in part because of the fact that Concord's most prominent family, the Hoars, had been among those involved in this misconduct.
It seems to me that an important point which needs to be made is that although we tend to requite ourselves with tales of the atrocities of others, we seldom make much of an issue out of our own atrocities. Thus it would be expectable that, in a USA dominated by Northern European culture, we would be hearing more about Southern European misconduct than about Northern European misconduct. My recommendation would be that we should be careful not to comparatively weigh the evidence until we have overcome, by a more objective search procedure, such an obvious source of selection error.
\s\ Austin Meredith <r2chow@uci.edu>, "Stack of the Artist of Kouroo" Project
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 12:00:30 -0600
From: Mark Stoll <marks@admin.stedwards.edu>
Subject: Re: Las Casas
Response to Sandra Mathews-Lamb:
I believe the source of English ideas about American Indians came from reading Hakluyt, who apparently was not too sensitive to cultural differences in the Americas.
Response to Austin Meredith:
Yes, it is true that some praying town Indians were attacked, and that Jonathan Edwards (a la Las Casas, perhaps?) had to defend his Indian mission at Stockbridge from avaricious fellow Yankees, and that even in Quaker Pennsylvania there were the unfortunate "walking deed" and "Paxton Boys" incidents. But isn't it remarkable that whites were hung in Boston Common for killing Indians? How do we explain the fact that, as far as I am aware, there are today more extant Indian tribes in New England than along the hundreds of miles of El Camino Real that linked the missions of California?
Mark Stoll
St. Edward's University
Austin, Texas 78704
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 14:48:56 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: "Dennis Williams, Southern Nazarene U." <DWILLIAM@SNU.EDU>
With regard to Mark Stoll's statements regarding more Indians in New England than the mission trail of Califorinia. Did the demographic collapse of those tribes occur during or as a result of Spanish policies and treatment or did it occur later, under the American watch? Did the demographic collapse result from mistreatment in Indian missions, native contact with disease spread by contact with Europeans outside the mission, or as a result of being driven by European population influxes outside an environment that the indigenous cultures had learned to work to their advantage?
It seems that I recall that during the Spanish watch along the Texas side of the border, Indian policy had little affect on Comanche populations, perhaps not on Apache ones either. Yet, the Anglo-Texan policy consisted of getting rid of all Indians in Texas, so that to my knowledge no organized tribe possesses land in that state.
I don't know much about California borderlands history and wonder how it compares to the occidental frontier?
Dennis Williams
Southern Nazarene University
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 15:03:37 -0600
From: Mark Stoll <marks@admin.stedwards.edu>
Subject: Re: Las Casas
In response to Dennis Williams further queries: I don't have the exact statistics at hand, but there was a dramatic drop in the number of Californian Indians due to the missionization by the Franciscans. A few years ago the Vatican moved to canonize Father Junipero Serra, which prompted a major protest by California Indians.
As far as the Apaches and Comanches are concerned, according the Webb's book The Great Plains, Anglos had no more success in dealing with their raids than the Mexicans and Spanish had, until a technological advance (adoption of the Colt revolver) finally gave whites military superiority over Plains Indian tribes. The revolver I think arrived in Texas during its years of independence.
Mark Stoll
St. Edward's University
Austin, Texas
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:20:47 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: HAL ROTHMAN <rothman@nevada.edu>
Its worth pointing out that it was the 1860s before Texans cleared the Comanche away, a 25-year lag from when Mark suggests the Colt arrived. It was a difficult and arduous process that cost a lot of lives on both sides and pitted two very different kinds of cultural assumptions at --each other's throats, we might say. Texas author laureate John Graves describes some of this in a literary manner in his wonderful *Goodbye to a River*. I suppose my point is: let's not clear away Indian Texas without looking a little more carefully at the nature of the conflict and the tools and technologies that supported both sides. My view is the extended "pipeline" of American society, its growing wealth, a range of technologies, its institutional structure, and its seemingly endless number of people willing to try to settle in "Indian Country" made a great deal more difference in the long run than the introduction of the revolver.
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:20:48 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: Brian.Hosmer@MVS.UDEL.EDU
To follow up on the conversation between Mark Stoll and Dennis Williams, I seem to recall that Albert Hurtado's excellent study, _Indian Survival on the California Frontier_ offers a pretty persuasive argument for the position that truly massive population loss followed the Gold Rush, and hence significant Anglo presence. As far as Texas and the Southwest is concerned, you might take a look at Thomas Hall's _Social Change in the Southwest_.
It seems to me (and I am by no means an expert in this area) that while we should not minimize the destructive impact of Franciscan missionization in California and the Southwest, we also need to remember that, unlike Anglo settlers (in California or New England), the Spanish sought to incorporate Indians into their social and economic order. "Praying Towns" notwithstanding, we really can't say the same thing for Puritan New England, the Colonial South, or the California of John Sutter, Fremont, and the Gold Rush.
Anyone disagree? Have at it!!
Brian Hosmer, University of Delaware
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:20:48 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: L F HAMMOND <lhammond@UVic.CA>
In my latin american field Jacques barbier had me look at the Black legend/white legend debate and older work like Carl sauer's Spanish Main. Note though that Las Casas did have something to gain in telling the stories, the removal of Columbus as governor (and his family) and his replacement by the Spanish Crown, which would expand the control of the church over indigenous peoples. The resulting court case over inheritance of Columbus' grant lasted over 100 years. I doubt that Las Casas made up the dogs tearing chiefs limb from limb etc. stories. I believe most of the stories, but very few historians credit the idea that struck me, of a massive refugee outflow (carrying disease to the mainland and other islands?). The population collapse is dramatic violent complex and swift, and serves, as Sauer points out, as a model of contact and change, repeated throughout the Americas to a lesser or greater, faster or slower pattern. Deliberate or unintendedd, they died. That much is clear from the census and reports. The arawaks were gone by about 1520, some 28 years after contact.
Lorne Hammond
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:43:11 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: Austin Meredith <rchow@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu>
"Yes, it is true that some praying town Indians were attacked, and that Jonathan Edwards (a la Las Casas, perhaps?) had to defend his Indian mission at Stockbridge from avaricious fellow Yankees, and that even in Quaker Pennsylvania there were the unfortunate "walking deed" and "Paxton Boys" incidents? How do we explain the fact that, as far as I am aware, there are today more extant Indian tribes in New England than along the hundreds of miles of El Camino Real that linked the missions of California?"
"Attacked"? The other day there was an aerial photograph in the Boston _Globe_ of the sixteen 200-foot-tall eggshaped "sewage digesters" on a little island in Boston Harbor. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority was offering that if someone in the general public would make a donation, these digesters, which reduce the volume of Boston's sewage sludge by some 45% in preparation for converting it into bags of "Bay State Organic" for sale in garden centers, could be painted for this season as a basket of Easter eggs.
I read the _Globe_ article most carefully, as I know that every year a group of people appear on this island to hold a ceremony of memory for their ancestors. There was no mention in the article that Deer Island, where these sewage digesters now stand for renewal, was once Boston's racial concentration camp, where Praying Indian tribespeople were put to pray and starve and die of exposure.
Deer Island was used for this purpose because it belonged to the Boston school system. Renting the island for use as a racial concentration camp, you see, helped lighten the tax burden of paying for the education of Boston's (light) children.
It is certainly true that in California as of the date of our first census here, there was no Native Californian tribe still in existence in any county in which gold had been discovered, and there was no Native Californian tribe still in existence in any county in which there had been a Franciscan mission. It is certainly likely that the reason why there was no tribe wherever gold had been found, was that all such tribes had been destroyed within a span of a very few years, early in the 1850s, by gold-diggers. Shooting a "Digger" was regarded as target practice. It is certainly likely that the reason why there was no tribe left, wherever there had been a Franciscan mission, was that all such tribes had been gradually decimated during the many generations of contact. It was only their souls, and their labors, which were worth saving. This project's database does contains some particular supporting statistics on acolyte population levels as they declined at San Juan Capistrano over the decades of the 17th and 18th Centuries.
However, many natives of the New England coast were when captured sold into slavery in the Azores and thus disappear from our records, while we know of no comparison practice on the Pacific coast.
I am not seeking to draw comparativist conclusions about the east coast versus the west, or about the Northern Europeans versus the Southern Europeans. The point remains, that we definitely have blinders which we first must remove, by considerably more objective study, before we are going to be in _any position_ to make these comparisons about the relative felicity of living as a member of a racial minority in Alta California versus the Bay Colony.
At present we are at the mercy of sampling error. For instance, how can one tell from reading the newspapers, whether our crime rates in America are going up or down? Our subjective estimates of such matters are influenced more by newspaper practices of sensationalistic reporting, than by any objective evidence of actual trends. Likewise in these historical records as they stand as of this moment, we are still overwhelmed with sampling error.
One of the goals of this project is to redact a historical record which is more complete and representative, and thus less at the mercy of the chauvinist attitudes of the sensationalistic historians of yesteryear. Such redaction was, before the era of computers, quite impossible. It is, by judicious use of these new tools, no longer _quite_ impossible.
\s\ Austin Meredith <r2chow@uci.edu>, "Stack of the Artist of Kouroo" Project
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:43:12 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: Paul Dennis Gower <pgowersr@tenet.edu>
The revolver arrived in Texas during the Mexican War of 1848.Please also note that Sam Houston's abiding love of all Native American tribal groupings was not carried into the political dealings of the government of the Republic by those around him and those succeeding him in office. The Plains(Comanche and Kiowa mainly) tribes were brought under submission more by the destruction of their horses and buffalo than by warfare. They own no land in Texas.
Paul
Paul D. Gower,Sr. " Either this man is dead or my watch
pgowersr@tenet.edu
has stopped."
-Groucho Marx-
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 15:21:57 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: Michael Friedly <mf2@acpub.duke.edu>
I want to follow up on the discussion of native populations in California. Estimates, primarily from Sherburne Cook's Population of California Indians, 1769-1970, and used by Hurtado in his book, are that California native population levels before Europoean contact were at about 300,000. When Mexico became sovereign in 1821, about 200,000 remained, and only about 150,000 natives survived to the gold rush. So we should be careful about saying that the Spanish/Mexican period in California was not devastating to native populations, since population levels plummeted by 50%.
Of course, the American invasion of California eventually reduced populations another 85% to about 22,000 natives, so I'm not trying to excuse the Americans. I just think we have to look at the wide range of European impacts, and how cultural differences between the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the Anglos impacted native communities, rather than try to figure out whether the Spanish were worse than Anglo-Americans. The net result in California, at least in terms of population decline, was largely the same.
Michael Friedly
Duke University
mf2@acpub.duke.edu
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 15:21:50 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: "Dennis Williams, Southern Nazarene U." <DWILLIAM@SNU.EDU>
It seems that there might be other, less direct, kinds of factors that contribute to the exterpation of idigenous peoples. Lorn Hammonds comments about contribution of disease is one. Others might include Indians choosing to leave as population pressure and competition for land increased. I think this relates to Hal Rothman's point. Certainly, the Apache retreated from the Southern Plains as the Commanche horse culture expanded onto it. This might be akin to moving to greener pastures. All of these ideas, may make up a web of contributing factors. I doubt anyone will disagree with that statement of complexity--it says alot while at the same time saying nothing. It could be a way of saying "We give up--the situation is so complex that we can't really know so we can't really study it."
The question seems to me, can we identify some factors that have greater contribution to extirpating, or exterminating, cultures or peoples? Did direct contacts--warfare, confinement for either labor or evangelism, raiding for food--have a more powerful effect on native populations than indirect ones--disease spread from by one indigenous group to another (though the disease itself was introduced by Europeans), decline in culturally defined acceptable foods (a la Al Crosby's Ecological Imperialism), or intertribal warfare brought on by tribal migrations that were perhaps accentuated but not necessarily begun by European contact (ie. Comanches and Apaches) which then affected food supply (ie. Dan Flores buffalo article in Journal of American History a couple of years back)?
Dennis Williams
Southern Nazarene University
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 08:41:22 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas
From: Joel Tarr <jt03+@andrew.cmu.edu>
This goes way back, but I remember reading in graduate school that Fred Shannon, in "The Farmer's Last Frontier," argued that it was the repeating rifle rather than the six gun that proved the most effective weapon in the west.
Joel Tarr
I would point out that Webb's book is extremely out of date. Moreover, and he did not have access to the basic documentation on the interactions between Comanches and the various Euroamericans, including the Spaniards and Mexicans. While that interaction did include periodic raiding, it also included positive trade and diplomacy.
The Colt revolver had little initial effect on battles. Remember the Patterson colt had only 5 shots, and although each Ranger carried extra cylinders, there was no reloading lever, so once those shots were fired, the Ranger was effectively disarmed. Moreover, the accuracy of the Paterson was such that it was only at extreme close range ("powder burning" range) that they could be effective. Finally, although the Colt was introducted in the early 1840s, the end of the Comanche wars was not until 1875, thirty years later.
For further details see:
Kavanagh, Thomas
1996 Comanche Political History 1706-1875. U Nebraska Press.
Thomas Kavanagh
Curator of Collections
Wm. Hammond Mathers Museum
Indiana University
Date: Sat, 6 Apr 1996 14:40:02 -0600
Subject: Re: Las Casas (X-Post SpanBord)
From: Sandra Mathews-Lamb <skmlamb@unm.edu>
[We cross-posted some of the conversation you've been having recently--and this is one response that might interest you. SpanBord, by the way, is a listserv dedicated to the Spanish Borderlands, and includes many experts in the area of Spanish/American Indian contact and missionization, etc...Sam Mathews-Lamb, co-owner SpanBord]
And, to add a maravedi or two, I cannot help but wonder if some stereotypy plus national (state) consciousness is appearing here.
Is the overall question under consideration more concerned with treatment of the natives, with validity and perspective on the written sources (and how each national culture verifies La Leyenda), or with the difference between (and among) the policies of the outreaching colonizers ??
It seems to me that time, location and stage of colonial development would all be important factors to take into consideration, along with those other points of where each respective group was coming from at the time.
I am also concerned about generalizing over "the Spanish" or "the French" and others. Regardless of policies, individual actions on a remote frontier would seem to reflect the motivations and behavior of the respective parties --- while our critical reading as historians might get us closer to the various axes the respective chroniclers needed to sharpen.
Anyway --- those are some of the thoughts that have occurred to me from reading the postings on this fascinating enigma. Thank you.
Guy Bensusan, Professor of Humanities, NAU, Interactive Instructional Television.
A brief comment from the eastern side of the Borderlands...within and adjacent to Spanish Florida, demographic collapse began very soon after Franciscan missions were established (indeed, probably even earlier). Though it is indeed very accurate to say that the Spanish colonial approach emphasized the incorporation of aboriginal groups into the developing colonial system, it is possible to document population loss exceeding 80-90% between about 1600 and the 1680s in essentially all Florida mission provinces under direct Spanish influence. The vast majority of this seems to have been related to epidemic diseases, and consequent declines in community health and overall birth rates, although at least some depopulation was a result of intentional out-migration in response to Spanish labor policies. Spanish attempts to congregate and contract surviving populations for mutual support unwittingly exaggerated the effect of such diseases.
On the other hand, when aboriginal slave-raiders armed by Virginia and Carolina colonists began to predate on the Georgia and Florida missions between about 1660 and 1710, local populations dropped yet another 80-90% as a result of violent death, enslavement, or flight. In the end, it's hard to judge which colonial system had a more detrimental effect--that of the Spanish or the English. Though on an individual level the friars were for the most part genuinely interested in facilitating the process of cultural assimilation into the European-centered world, they and their converts alike died at a phenomenal rate during the 17th century. The English slave-raiders just put the final nail in the coffin.
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