Myths of the
Spaniards and Puritans regarding Native Americans that persist till today.
I. the Myth of Cannibalism among the Natives
Columbus believed in
and expected to encounter in his travels
representations of the monstrous races, just as he expected to find—
and
never stopped searching for—the fabled terrestrial paradise.
Again, Columbus was far from alone in these assumptions.
As he wrote
in his letter to the king and queen while returning from his first
voyage: "In these islands I have so far
found no human monstrosities,
as many expected," but elsewhere he wrote that within a few weeks of
his first sighting
of land he had been told by some Indians that on
other islands "there were men with one eye, and other with dogs'
heads
who ate men and that in killing one they beheaded him and drank
his blood and cut off his genitals."
[Notes: "Columbus'
Letter to the Sovereigns on His First Voyage, 15
February—4 March 1493," and "Journal of the First Voyage," in Morison
ed.,
Journals and Other Documents, pp.88, 185. In considering the
veracity of Columbus' claim that the natives had told him
this, it is
important to note not only that the Spaniards and the Indians spoke
mutually unintelligible languages but
that the Indians could not have
described creatures as having heads like dogs, because they had never
seen any dogs
and would not see any until Columbus' second voyage. ]
In fact, there was no real evidence of cannibalism (to say nothing
of
dog-headed people) anywhere in the Indies, despite widespread popular
belief to the contrary that continues to exist
today, belief largely
based on the fact the Columbus said that alleged man-eaters were
called Caribs. Through Spanish
and English linguistic corruption
that name evolved into "cannibal" and although both the more level-
headed of Columbus'
contemporaries and the consensus of modern
scholarship have strenuously contradicted the charge, it has stuck as
a truism
in the Western imagination. The important point here,
however, is not the spuriousness of the claim that some of the
natives
ate human flesh, but only that Columbus and those who heard
his report readily believed, indeed, "needed" to believe, that
the
charge was true. If no dog-headed people had yet actually been seen,
or races without heads and with faces in their
chests, or one-legged
folk, or Cyclopes, or other bizarre semi-human beasts, that did not
mean they were not there.
But for the time being rumors of some
cannibals would do. [American Holocaust, pp. 197-198].
___________________________
II.
The myth of No Religion among the natives and
III. The idea of Native Americans being Asiatic: the myth of the
wild
men and the monstrous, beastly Amerindian races: THE MYTH THAT
WE ARE MONGOLIANS!!
… Within hours of landfall
on the first inhabited island he
encountered in the Caribbean, Columbus seized and carried off six
native people who,
he said, "ought to be good servants …. [and] would
easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged
to
NO RELIGION." Bereft of religion though he thought these "very
handsome and … very well proportioned" people to be,
the Admiral was
certain that they possessed gold: "I was attentive and worked hard to
know if there was any gold," he
wrote during the second day of his
visit, "and saw that some of them wore a little piece hanging from a
thing like a
needle case which they have in the nose; and by signs I
could understand that, going to the S, or doubling the Island to
the
S, there was a king there who had great vessels of it and possessed a
lot." This was likely the island of Cipango—or
Japan—Columbus
thought, the fabulous place Marco Polo had written about, and he set
out the next day to find it.
…
Columbus continued to think he was quite close to the Asian
mainland and that the people of "all these islands are at war
with
the Grand Khan" who presumably wanted from them what Columbus wanted:
their precious metals and the wealth of their
forced labor. Hearing
what he wanted to hear in the words of a people whose language he did
not understand, the Admiral
"was the victim of the same psychological
illusions," one writer has observed, "that lead us to hear sweet
melodies
in the chime of church-bells, or to discover in the clouds
familiar features or impressive images of phantastic shapes."
[American
Holocaust pp . 200-201]
… The Spanish nobleman Guillermo Coma of Aragon dwelt at great
length and in minute
detail on the allegedly "very dark and grim-
visaged" cannibals of the Indies. "They customarily castrate their
infants
captives and boy slaves and fatten them like capons," was but
one of his numerous imaginings. And with equal vividness
and equal
falsity he described the great quantities of gold that awaited the
adventurous, who could gather nuggets almost
like fruit from a
tree. "In that region," he told his readers, there are a "large
number of rivers and more than 24
streams,--a country of such
bountifulness that it is marvelous to describe and unbelievable to
hear about." [American
Holocaust p. 205]
… But as time wore on the dominant European image of the New World's
indigenous peoples
was one that fit well with other very ancient Old
World traditions: Columbus' story of "men with one eye, and others
with
dogs' noses," who ate men after decapitating them, castrating
them, and finally drinking their blood soon became an article
of
faith among many Europeans; moreover, elsewhere in the Caribbean, it
was said, there existed islands inhabited only
by Amazons and others
with people whose skin color was blue and whose heads were square.
And everywhere, whatever their
physical appearance, the sins of the
natives were the same—lust, gluttony, carnality, and all the other
untamed
and un-Christian pleasures of the flesh that long had been
the distinguishing characteristics of wild men and the monstrous,
beastly
races. [American Holocaust pp. 206-207]
______________________________________
IV. On the myth of Indigenous peoples
as Beast of Burden or
miserable non-human servants
Paracelsus' notion of separate and unequal human creations was
an
early version of what in time would become known as "polygenesis,"
one of the staples of 19th century pseudoscientific
racism. Even
before the Swiss writer committed this idea to print, however, there
was in circulation a complementary
suggestion, put forward in 1512 by
Spaniards Bernardo de Mesa (later Bishop of Cuba) and Gil Gregorio,
and in 1519 by
a Scotsman named John Mair (Johannes Major), that the
Indians might be a special race created by God to fulfill a destiny
of
enslavement to Christian Europeans.
… Spain's philosophers and theologians debated among themselves
whether
the Indians were men or monkeys, whether they were mere
brutes or were capable of rational thought, and whether or not
God
intended them to be permanent slaves of their Eurupean overlords.
… Even Las Casas—the most passionate
and humane European advocate
for the Indians of his own time and for many years to come—felt
forced to acknowledge
that the Indians "may be completely barbaric."
… Bernardino de Minaya wrote, a decade and a half before the great
debate
at Valladolid, "the common people" had long "regarded as wise
men" those who were convinced that "the American Indians
were not
true men, but a third species of animal between man and monkey
created by God for the better service of man."
[American Holocaust
pp. 209-211]
_____________________________
V. On the Myth of "Homosexuality" among Indigenous
peoples:
Or, as Oviedo had written, with widespread popular approval:
[The Indians are] naturally lazy and vicious,
melancholic, cowardly,
and in general a lying, shiftless, people. Their marriages are not a
sacrament but a sacrilege.
They are idolatrous, libidinous, and
commit SODOMY. Their chief desire is to eat, drink, worship heathen
idols, and
commit bestial obscenities. What could one expect from a
people whose skulls are so thick and hard that the Spaniards had
to
take care in fighting not to strike on the head lest their swords be
blunted? [American Holocaust p. 211]
Here,
for example, is what the `Pious' Dominican Tomas Ortiz wrote to
the Council of the Indies early in the sixteenth century
regarding
the New World's peoples:
On the mainland they eat human flesh. They are more given to SODOMY
than any
other nation. There is no justice among them. They go
naked. They have no respect either for love or for virginity. They
are
stupid and silly. They have no respect for truth, save when it
is to their advantage. They are unstable. They have no knowledge
of
what foresight means. They are ungrateful and changeable …. They are
brutal. They delight in exaggerating their
defects. There is no
obedience among them, or deference on the part of the young for the
old, nor of the son for the
father. They are incapable of learning.
Punishments have no effect on them …. They eat fleas, spiders, and
worms
raw, whenever they find them. They exercise none of the human
arts or industries. When taught the mysteries of our religion,
they
say that these things may suit Castilians but not them, and they do
not wish to change their customs …. I
may therefore affirm that God
has never created a race more full of vice and composed without the
least mixture of kindness
or culture …. The Indians are more stupid
than asses, and refuse to improve in anything. [American Holocaust
p.
217]
If the assertions of Ortiz and others regarding the habits of the
Indians were fabrications, they were not
fabrications without
design. From the Spaniard's enumerations of what they claimed were
the disgusting food customs
of the Indians (including cannibalism,
but also the consumption of insects and other items regarded as unfit
for human
diets) to the Indians' supposed nakedness and absence of
agriculture, their sexual deviance and licentiousness, their brutish
ignorance,
their lack of advanced weaponry and iron, and their
irremediable idolatry, the conquering Europeans were purposefully and
systematically
DEHUMANIZING the people they were EXTERMINATING. For
the specific `categories' of behavior chosen for these accusations
were
openly derived from traditional Christian and earlier Roman and
Greek ideas regarding the characteristics of fundamentally
evil and
non-rational creatures, from Hesiod's Bronze race to the medieval
era's wild men and witches. Thus, time and
again, the enslavement
and terroristic mass slaughter of Indians by the Spanish was
justified by pointing to the natives'
supposed ignorance or their
allegedly despicable and animalistic behavior—as, for example, when
Balboa's troops
murdered hundreds of native people in one locale,
hacking them to death and feeding them to the dogs, because Balboa
claimed
that some of their chiefs were addicted to the "NEFARIOUS AND
DIRTY SIN OF SODOMY." [American Holocaust p. 218]
VI. On the myth of Natives not understanding the concept of Property
From
the start, the English explorers' presuppositions about the
human and moral worth of America's native peoples were little
different
from those of the Spanish, because in large measure they
were based directly on Spanish writings and reports. … they
drew
almost exclusively on the writings of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y
Valdes, Francisco Lopez de Gomora, and other
Spanish adventurers and
writers who, as Loren E. Pennington puts it, "presented a nearly
unrelieved picture of native
savagery." [American Holocaust, p. 225.]
The concept of private property as a positive good and even an
insignia
of civilization took hold among both Catholics and
Protestants during the 16th century. Thus, for example, in Spain,
Juan
Gines de Sepulveda argued that the absence of private property
was one of the characteristics of people lacking "even vestiges
of
humanity," and in Germany at the same time Martin Luther was
contending that "the possession of private property
was an essential
difference between men and beasts." In England, Sir Thomas More was
proclaiming that land justifiably
could be taken from "any people
[who] holdeth a piece ground void and vacant to no good profitable
use," an idea that
also was being independently advanced in other
countries by Calvin, Melanchthon, and others. [American Holocaust,
p.
233]
Locke: "As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates,
and can use the products of, so much is
his property. He by his
labor does, as it were, inclose it from the common." (Two Treatise
of Government, section 32)
Moore:
"whenever the natives have much unoccupied and uncultivated
land," should the natives object to this taking of their property
or
should they "refuse to live according to their [the settlers] laws,"
the settlers are justified in driving the natives
from "the territory
which they carve our for themselves. If they resist, they wage war
against them."
("Utopia")
[American Holocaust, p. 234]
One of the first formal expressions of this justification for
expropriation by a British
colonist was published in London in 1622
as part of a work entitled Mourt's Relation, or a Journal of the
Plantation
of Plymouth. The author of this piece describes "the
lawfulness of removing out of England into parts of America" as
deriving,
first, from the singular fact that "our land is full …
[and] their land is empty." He then continues:
"This
then is a sufficient reason to prove our going thither to live
lawful: their land is spacious and void, and they are few
and do but
run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are
not industrious, neither have they art,
science, skill or faculty to
use either the land or the commodities of it; but all spoils, rots,
and is marred for want
of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc. As the
ancient patriarchs therefore removed from straiter places into more
roomy
[ones], where the land lay idle and wasted and none used it,
though there dwelt inhabitants by them … [so is it lawful
now to take
a land which none useth and make use of it."
The most well known and more sophisticated statement of
the matter,
however, came from the pen of the first governor of the Massachssetts
Bay Colony, John Winthrop. While still
in England, on the eve of
joining what became known as the Great Migration to Massachussetts in
the 1630s, Winthrop
compiled a manuscript "justifieinge the
undertakers of the intended Plantation of New England," and answering
specific
questions that might be raised against the enterprise. The
first justification, as with Columbus nearly a century and a
half
earlier, was spiritual: "to carry the Gospell into those parts of the
world, to helpe on the comminge of the fullnesse
of the Gentiles, and
to raise a Bulworke against the kingdom of Ante-Christ," an
understandable reason for a people
who believed the world was likely
to come to an end during their lifetime. Very quickly, however,
Winthrop got to the
possible charge that "we have noe warrant to
enter upon the land which hath soe longe possessed by others." He
answered:
"…
As for the Natives of New England, they inclose noe Land, neither
have any settled habytation, nor any tame cattell to
imrprove the
Land by, and soe have noe other but a Naturall Right to those
countries, soe as if we leave them sufficient
for their use, we may
lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them and
us."
In point of fact,
the Indians had thoroughly "improved" the land—that
is, cultivated it—for centuries. They also possessed carefully
structured
and elaborated concepts of land use and of the limits of
political dominion, and they were, as Roger Williams observed
in
1643, "very exact and puntuall in the bounds of their Land, belonging
to this or that Prince or People." This was,
however, not
private "ownership" as the English defined the term, and it is true
that probably no native people anywhere
in the Western Hemisphere
would have countenanced a land use system that, to return to Tawney's
language, allowed a
private individual to "exploit [the land] with a
single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation
to
postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbors." And
thus, in the view of the English, were the Indians nations
"savage."
(American Holocaust, pp. 235-236)
_____________________________
VII. Myth of Human Sacrifice
For articles regarding this myth please scroll down on this site: there you will
find some articles that deal with this topic.
See for instance, https://descendantofgods.tripod.com/id39.html
__________________________________________
I. the Myth of Cannibalism among the Natives
Columbus
believed in and expected to encounter in his travels
representations of the monstrous races, just as he expected to find—
and
never stopped searching for—the fabled terrestrial paradise.
Again, Columbus was far from alone in these assumptions.
As he wrote
in his letter to the king and queen while returning from his first
voyage: "In these islands I have so far
found no human monstrosities,
as many expected," but elsewhere he wrote that within a few weeks of
his first sighting
of land he had been told by some Indians that on
other islands "there were men with one eye, and other with dogs'
heads
who ate men and that in killing one they beheaded him and drank
his blood and cut off his genitals."
[Notes: "Columbus'
Letter to the Sovereigns on His First Voyage, 15
February—4 March 1493," and "Journal of the First Voyage," in Morison
ed.,
Journals and Other Documents, pp.88, 185. In considering the
veracity of Columbus' claim that the natives had told him
this, it is
important to note not only that the Spaniards and the Indians spoke
mutually unintelligible languages but
that the Indians could not have
described creatures as having heads like dogs, because they had never
seen any dogs
and would not see any until Columbus' second voyage. ]
In fact, there was no real evidence of cannibalism (to say nothing
of
dog-headed people) anywhere in the Indies, despite widespread popular
belief to the contrary that continues to exist
today, belief largely
based on the fact the Columbus said that alleged man-eaters were
called Caribs. Through Spanish
and English linguistic corruption
that name evolved into "cannibal" and although both the more level-
headed of Columbus'
contemporaries and the consensus of modern
scholarship have strenuously contradicted the charge, it has stuck as
a truism
in the Western imagination. The important point here,
however, is not the spuriousness of the claim that some of the
natives
ate human flesh, but only that Columbus and those who heard
his report readily believed, indeed, "needed" to believe, that
the
charge was true. If no dog-headed people had yet actually been seen,
or races without heads and with faces in their
chests, or one-legged
folk, or Cyclopes, or other bizarre semi-human beasts, that did not
mean they were not there.
But for the time being rumors of some
cannibals would do. [American Holocaust, pp. 197-198].
___________________________
II.
The myth of No Religion among the natives and
III. The idea of Native Americans being Asiatic: the myth of the
wild
men and the monstrous, beastly Amerindian races: THE MYTH THAT
WE ARE MONGOLIANS!!
… Within hours of landfall
on the first inhabited island he
encountered in the Caribbean, Columbus seized and carried off six
native people who,
he said, "ought to be good servants …. [and] would
easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged
to
NO RELIGION." Bereft of religion though he thought these "very
handsome and … very well proportioned" people to be,
the Admiral was
certain that they possessed gold: "I was attentive and worked hard to
know if there was any gold," he
wrote during the second day of his
visit, "and saw that some of them wore a little piece hanging from a
thing like a
needle case which they have in the nose; and by signs I
could understand that, going to the S, or doubling the Island to
the
S, there was a king there who had great vessels of it and possessed a
lot." This was likely the island of Cipango—or
Japan—Columbus
thought, the fabulous place Marco Polo had written about, and he set
out the next day to find it.
…
Columbus continued to think he was quite close to the Asian
mainland and that the people of "all these islands are at war
with
the Grand Khan" who presumably wanted from them what Columbus wanted:
their precious metals and the wealth of their
forced labor. Hearing
what he wanted to hear in the words of a people whose language he did
not understand, the Admiral
"was the victim of the same psychological
illusions," one writer has observed, "that lead us to hear sweet
melodies
in the chime of church-bells, or to discover in the clouds
familiar features or impressive images of phantastic shapes."
[American
Holocaust pp . 200-201]
… The Spanish nobleman Guillermo Coma of Aragon dwelt at great
length and in minute
detail on the allegedly "very dark and grim-
visaged" cannibals of the Indies. "They customarily castrate their
infants
captives and boy slaves and fatten them like capons," was but
one of his numerous imaginings. And with equal vividness
and equal
falsity he described the great quantities of gold that awaited the
adventurous, who could gather nuggets almost
like fruit from a
tree. "In that region," he told his readers, there are a "large
number of rivers and more than 24
streams,--a country of such
bountifulness that it is marvelous to describe and unbelievable to
hear about." [American
Holocaust p. 205]
… But as time wore on the dominant European image of the New World's
indigenous peoples
was one that fit well with other very ancient Old
World traditions: Columbus' story of "men with one eye, and others
with
dogs' noses," who ate men after decapitating them, castrating
them, and finally drinking their blood soon became an article
of
faith among many Europeans; moreover, elsewhere in the Caribbean, it
was said, there existed islands inhabited only
by Amazons and others
with people whose skin color was blue and whose heads were square.
And everywhere, whatever their
physical appearance, the sins of the
natives were the same—lust, gluttony, carnality, and all the other
untamed
and un-Christian pleasures of the flesh that long had been
the distinguishing characteristics of wild men and the monstrous,
beastly
races. [American Holocaust pp. 206-207]
______________________________________
IV. On the myth of Indigenous peoples
as Beast of Burden or
miserable non-human servants
Paracelsus' notion of separate and unequal human creations was
an
early version of what in time would become known as "polygenesis,"
one of the staples of 19th century pseudoscientific
racism. Even
before the Swiss writer committed this idea to print, however, there
was in circulation a complementary
suggestion, put forward in 1512 by
Spaniards Bernardo de Mesa (later Bishop of Cuba) and Gil Gregorio,
and in 1519 by
a Scotsman named John Mair (Johannes Major), that the
Indians might be a special race created by God to fulfill a destiny
of
enslavement to Christian Europeans.
… Spain's philosophers and theologians debated among themselves
whether
the Indians were men or monkeys, whether they were mere
brutes or were capable of rational thought, and whether or not
God
intended them to be permanent slaves of their Eurupean overlords.
… Even Las Casas—the most passionate
and humane European advocate
for the Indians of his own time and for many years to come—felt
forced to acknowledge
that the Indians "may be completely barbaric."
… Bernardino de Minaya wrote, a decade and a half before the great
debate
at Valladolid, "the common people" had long "regarded as wise
men" those who were convinced that "the American Indians
were not
true men, but a third species of animal between man and monkey
created by God for the better service of man."
[American Holocaust
pp. 209-211]
_____________________________
V. On the Myth of "Homosexuality" among Indigenous
peoples:
Or, as Oviedo had written, with widespread popular approval:
[The Indians are] naturally lazy and vicious,
melancholic, cowardly,
and in general a lying, shiftless, people. Their marriages are not a
sacrament but a sacrilege.
They are idolatrous, libidinous, and
commit SODOMY. Their chief desire is to eat, drink, worship heathen
idols, and
commit bestial obscenities. What could one expect from a
people whose skulls are so thick and hard that the Spaniards had
to
take care in fighting not to strike on the head lest their swords be
blunted? [American Holocaust p. 211]
Here,
for example, is what the `Pious' Dominican Tomas Ortiz wrote to
the Council of the Indies early in the sixteenth century
regarding
the New World's peoples:
On the mainland they eat human flesh. They are more given to SODOMY
than any
other nation. There is no justice among them. They go
naked. They have no respect either for love or for virginity. They
are
stupid and silly. They have no respect for truth, save when it
is to their advantage. They are unstable. They have no knowledge
of
what foresight means. They are ungrateful and changeable …. They are
brutal. They delight in exaggerating their
defects. There is no
obedience among them, or deference on the part of the young for the
old, nor of the son for the
father. They are incapable of learning.
Punishments have no effect on them …. They eat fleas, spiders, and
worms
raw, whenever they find them. They exercise none of the human
arts or industries. When taught the mysteries of our religion,
they
say that these things may suit Castilians but not them, and they do
not wish to change their customs …. I
may therefore affirm that God
has never created a race more full of vice and composed without the
least mixture of kindness
or culture …. The Indians are more stupid
than asses, and refuse to improve in anything. [American Holocaust
p.
217]
If the assertions of Ortiz and others regarding the habits of the
Indians were fabrications, they were not
fabrications without
design. From the Spaniard's enumerations of what they claimed were
the disgusting food customs
of the Indians (including cannibalism,
but also the consumption of insects and other items regarded as unfit
for human
diets) to the Indians' supposed nakedness and absence of
agriculture, their sexual deviance and licentiousness, their brutish
ignorance,
their lack of advanced weaponry and iron, and their
irremediable idolatry, the conquering Europeans were purposefully and
systematically
DEHUMANIZING the people they were EXTERMINATING. For
the specific `categories' of behavior chosen for these accusations
were
openly derived from traditional Christian and earlier Roman and
Greek ideas regarding the characteristics of fundamentally
evil and
non-rational creatures, from Hesiod's Bronze race to the medieval
era's wild men and witches. Thus, time and
again, the enslavement
and terroristic mass slaughter of Indians by the Spanish was
justified by pointing to the natives'
supposed ignorance or their
allegedly despicable and animalistic behavior—as, for example, when
Balboa's troops
murdered hundreds of native people in one locale,
hacking them to death and feeding them to the dogs, because Balboa
claimed
that some of their chiefs were addicted to the "NEFARIOUS AND
DIRTY SIN OF SODOMY." [American Holocaust p. 218]
For
further info. regarding the book:
