The conquest of the New World
\nPrologue (from the book)
\nBy
\nDr. David E. Stannard<\/p>\n
In the darkness of an early July morning in 1945, on a desolate spot in the New Mexico desert
\nnamed after a John Donne sonnet celebrating the Holy Trinity, the first atomic bomb was
\nexploded. J. Robert Oppenheimer later remembered that the immense flash of light, followed by
\nthe thunderous roar, caused a few observers to laugh and others to cry. But most, he said, were
\nsilent. Oppenheimer himself recalled at that instant a line from the Bhagavad-Gita:<\/p>\n
I am become death,
\nThe shatterer of worlds.<\/p>\n
There is no reason to think that anyone on board the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria, on an
\nequally dark early morning four and a half centuries earlier, thought of those ominous lines from
\nthe ancient Sanskrit poem when the crews of the Spanish ships spied a flicker of light on the
\nwindward side of the island they would name after the Holy Saviour. But the intuition, had it
\noccurred, would have been as appropriate then as it was when that first nuclear blast rocked the
\nNew Mexico desert sands.<\/p>\n
In both instances–at the Trinity test site in 1945 and at San Salvador in 1492–those moments of
\nachievement crowned years of intense personal struggle and adventure for their protagonists and
\nwere culminating points of ingenious technological achievement for their countries. But both
\ninstances also were prelude to orgies of human destructiveness that, each in its own way,
\nattained a scale of devastation not previously witnessed in the entire history of the world.
\nJust twenty-one days after the first atomic test in the desert, the Japanese industrial city of
\nHiroshima was leveled by nuclear blast; never before had so many people–at least 130,000,
\nprobably many more–died from a single explosion. Just twenty-one years after Columbus\u2019s first
\nlanding in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had re-named Hispaniola
\nwas effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people–those Columbus chose to call Indians–had
\nbeen killed by violence, disease, and despair. It took a little longer, about the span of a single
\nhuman generation, but what happened on Hispaniola was the equivalent of more than fifty
\nHiroshimas. And Hispaniola was only the beginning.
\nWithin no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the
\nvast majority of the Western Hemisphere\u2019s native peoples had been exterminated. The pace and
\nmagnitude of their obliteration varied form place to place and from time to time, but for years
\nnow historical demographers have been uncovering, in region upon region, post-Columbian
\ndepopulation rates of between 90 and 98 percent with such regularity that an overall decline of
\n95 percent has become a working rule of thumb. What this means is that, on average, for every
\ntwenty natives alive at the moment of European contact–when the lands of the Americas teemed
\nwith numerous tens of millions of people–only one stood in their place when the bloodbath was
\nover.
\nTo put this in a contemporary context, the ratio of native survivorship in the Americas following
\nEuropean contact was less than half of what the human survivorship ratio would be in the United
\nStates toda;y if every single white person and every single black person died. The destruction of
\nthe Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of
\nthe world. That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry
\nthat customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most
\ncongruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls.
\nScholarly estimates of the size of the post-Columbian holocaust have climbed sharply in recent
\ndecades. Too often, however, academic discussions of this ghastly event have reduced the
\ndevastated indigenous peoples and their cultures to statistical calculations in recondite
\ndemographic analyses. It is easy for this to happen. From the very beginning, merely taking the
\naccount of so mammoth a cataclysm seemed an impossible task. Wrote one Spanish
\nadventurer–who arrived in the New World only two decades after Columbus\u2019s first landing, and
\nwho himself openly reveled in the torrent of native blood–there was neither \u201cpaper nor time
\nenough to tell all that the (conquistadors) did to ruin the Indians and rob them and destroy the
\nland.\u201d As a result, the very effort to describe the disaster\u2019s overwhelming magnitude has tended
\nto obliterate both the writer\u2019s and the reader\u2019s sense of its truly horrific human element.
\nIn an apparent effort to counteract this tendency, one writer, Tzvetan Todorov, begins his study
\nof the events of 1492 and immediately thereafter with an epigraph from Diego de Landa\u2019s
\nRelacion de las cosas de Yucatan:<\/p>\n
The captin Alonso Lopez de Avila, brother-in-law of the adelantado Montejo, captured, during
\nthe war in Bacalan, a young Indian woman of lovely and gracious appearance. She had promised
\nher husband, fearful lest they should kill him in the war, not to have relations with any other man
\nbut him, and so no persuasion was sufficient to prevent her from taking her own life to avoid
\nbeing defiled by another man; and because of this they had her thrown to the dogs.<\/p>\n
Todorov then dedicates his book \u201cto the memory of a Mayan woman devoured by dogs.\u201d
\nIt is important to try to hold in mind and image of that woman, and her brothers and sisters and
\nthe innumerable others who suffered similar fates, as one reads Todorov\u2019s book, or his one, or
\nany other work on this subject-just as it is essential, as one reads about the Jewish Holocaust or
\nthe horrors of the African slave trade, to keep in mind the treasure of a single life in order to
\navoid becoming emotionally anesthetized by the sheer force of such overwhelming human evil
\nand destruction. There is, for example, the case of a small Indian boy whose name no one knows
\ntoday, and whose unmarked skeletal remains are hopelessly intermingled with those of hundreds
\nof anonymous others in a mass grave on the American plans, but a boy who once played on the
\nbanks of a quiet creek in eastern Colorado-until the morning in 1864, when the American
\nsoldiers came. Then, as one of the cavalrymen later told it, while his compatriots were
\nslaughtering and mutilating the bodies of all the women and all the children they could catch, he
\nspotted the boy trying to flee:<\/p>\n
There was one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand.
\nThe Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind following after them. The little fellow
\nwas perfectly naked, traveling on the sand. I saw one man get off his horse, at a distance of
\nabout seventy-five yards, and draw up his rifle and fire-he missed the child. Another man came
\nup and said, \u201cLet me try the son of a bitch; I can hit him.\u201d He got down off his horse, kneeled
\ndown and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up and made a similar
\nremark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.<\/p>\n
We must do what we can to recapture and to try to understand, in human terms, what it was that
\nwas crushed, and it was that was butchered. It is not enough merely to acknowledge that much
\nwas lost. So close to total was the human incineration and carnage in the post-Columbian
\nAmericas, however, that of the tens of millions who were killed, few individual lives left sufficient
\ntraces for subsequent biographical representation. The first two chapters to follow are thus
\nnecessarily limited in their concerns to the social and cultural worlds that existed in North and
\nSouth America before Columbus\u2019s fateful voyage in 1492. We shall have to rely on our
\nimaginations to fill in the faces and the lives.<\/p>\n
The extraordinary outpouring of recent scholarships that has analyzed the deadly impact of the
\nOld World on the New has employed a novel array of research techniques to identify introduced
\ndisease as the primary cause of the Indians\u2019 great population decline. As one of the pioneers in
\nthis research put it twenty years ago, the natives\u2019 \u201cmost hideous\u201d enemies were men brought in
\ntheir blood and breath.\u201d It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the
\nbarrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans among the so-called \u201cvirgin soil\u201d populations of
\nthe Americas caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by
\nfocusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killings onto an army
\nof invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the
\neradications of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent-a sad, but both inevitable and
\n\u201cunintended consequence\u201d of human migration and progress. This is a modern version of what
\nAlexander Saxton recently has described as the \u201csoft-side of anti-Indian racism\u201d that emerged in
\nAmerica in the nineteenth century and that incorporated \u201cexpressions of regret over the fate of
\nIndians into narratives that traced the inevitability of their extinction. Ideologically,\u201d Saxton adds,
\n\u201cthe effect was to exonerate individuals, parties, nations, of any moral blame for what history had
\ndecreed.\u201d In fact, however, the near total destruction of the Western Hemisphere\u2019s native people
\nwas neither inadvertent nor inevitable.<\/p>\n
From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of
\nmicrobial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives. Although
\nat times operating independently, for most of the long centuries of devastation that followed
\n1492, disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically–whipsawing their
\nvictims between plague and violence, each on feeding upon the other, and together driving
\ncountless numbers of entire ancient societies to the brink–and often over the brink–of total
\nextermination. In the pages that lie ahead we will examine the causes and the consequences of
\nboth these grisly phenomena. But since the genocidal component has so often been neglected in
\nrecent scholarly analyses of the great American Indian holocaust, it is the central purpose of this
\nbook to survey some of the more virulent examples of this deliberate racist purge, from fifteenth-
\ncentury California, and then to locate and examine the belief systems and the cultural attitudes
\nthat underlay such monstrous behavior.
\nHistory for its own sake is not an idle task, but studies of this sort are conducted not only for the
\nmaintenance of collective memory. In the Foreword to a book of oral history accounts depicting
\nlife in Germany during the Jewish Holocaust, Elie Wiesel says something that befits the present
\ncontext as well: \u201cThe danger lies in forgetting. Forgetting, however, will not effect only the dead.
\nShould it triumph, the ashes of yesterday will cover our hopes for tomorrow.\u201d
\nTo begin, then, we must try to remember. For at a time when quincentennial festivities are in
\nfull flower to honor the famed Admiral of the Ocean Sea–when hot disputes are raging, because
\nof the quest for tourist dollars, over whether he first actually landed at Grand Turk Island,
\nSamana Cay, or Watlings Island–the ashes of yesterday, and their implications for all the world\u2019
\ns hopes for tomorrow, are too often ignored in the unseemly roar of self-congratulation.
\nMoreover, the important question for the future in this case is not \u201ccan it happen again?\u201d
\nRather,
\nit is \u201ccan it be stopped?\u201d For the genocide in the Americas, and in other places where the
\nworld\u2019s indigenous peoples survive, has never really ceased. As recently as 1986, the
\nCommission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States observed that 40,000
\npeople had simply \u201cdisappeared\u201d in Guatemala during the preceding fifteen years. Another
\n100,000 had been openly murdered. That is the equivalent, in the United States, of more than
\n4,000,000 people slaughtered or removed under official government decree–a figure that is
\nalmost six times the number of American battle deaths in the Civil War, World War One, World
\nWar Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.
\nAlmost all those dead and disappeared were Indians, direct descendants–as was that woman
\nwho was devoured by dogs–of the Mayas, creators of one of the most splendid civilizations that
\nthis earth has ever seen. Today, as five centuries ago, these people are being tortured and
\nslaughtered, their homes and villages bombed and razed–while more than two-thirds of their rain
\nforest homelands have now been intentionally burned and scraped into ruin. The murder and
\ndestruction continue, with the aid and assistance of the United States, even as these words are
\nbeing written and read. And many of the detailed accounts from contemporary observers read
\nmuch like those recorded by the conquistadors\u2019 chroniclers nearly 500 years earlier.
\n\u201cChildren, two years, four years old, they just grabbed them and tore them in two,\u201d reports one
\nwitness to a military massacre of Indians in Guatemala in 1982. Recalls another victim of an
\neven more recent assault on an Indian encampment:<\/p>\n
With tourniquets they killed the children, of two years, of nine months,
\nOf six months. They killed and burned them all\u2026.What they did (to my
\nFather) was put a machete in here (pointing to his chest) and they cut open his heart, and they
\nleft him all burned up. This is the pain we shall never forget\u2026Better to die here with a bullet and
\nnot die in that way, like my father did.<\/p>\n
Adds still another report, from a list of examples seemingly without end:<\/p>\n
At about 1:00pm., the soldiers began to fire at the women inside the small church. The majority
\ndid not die there, but were separated from their children, taken to their homes in groups, and
\nkilled, the majority apparently with machetes\u2026.Then they returned to kill the children, whom
\nthey had left crying and screaming to themselves, without their mothers. Our informants, who
\nwere locked up in the courthouse, could see this through a hole in the window and through the
\ndoors carelessly left open by a guard. The soldiers cut up the children\u2019s stomachs with knives or
\nthey grabbed the children\u2019s little legs and smashed their heads with heavy sticks\u2026.Then they
\ncontinued with the men. They took them out , tied their hands, threw them on the ground, and
\nshot them. The authorities of the area were killed inside the courthouse\u2026.It was then that the
\nsurvivors were able to escape , protected by the smoke of the fire which had been set to the
\nbuilding. Seven men , three of whom survived , managed to escape. It was 5:30p.m.<\/p>\n
In all , 352 Indians were killed in this massacre , at a time when 440 towns were being entirely
\ndestroyed by government troops, when almost 10,000 unarmed people were being killed or
\nmade to \u201c disappear\u201d annually, and when more then 1,000,000 of Guatemala\u2019s approximately
\n4,000,000 natives were being displaced by the deliberate burning and wasting of their ancestral
\nlands. During such episodes of mass butchery , some children escape; only their parents and
\ngrandparents are killed. That is why it was reported in Guatemala in 1985 that \u201c116,000
\norphans had been tabulated by the judicial branch census throughout the country, the vast
\nmajority of them in the Indian townships of the western and central highlands,\u201d
\nReminders are all around us, if we care to look, that the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
\nextermination of the indigenous people of Hispaniola, brought on by European military assault
\nand the importation of exotic diseases, was in part only an enormous prelude to human
\ncatastrophes that followed on other killing grounds, and continue to occur today–from the
\nforests of Brazil and Paraguay and elsewhere in South and Central America, where direct
\ngovernment violence still slaughters thousands of Indian people year in and year out, to the
\nreservations and urban slums of North America, where more sophisticated indirect government
\nviolence has precisely the same effect–all the while that Westerners engage in exultation over the
\n500th anniversary of the European discovery of America, the time and the place where all the
\nkilling began.
\nOther reminders surround us, as well, however, that there continues among indigenous peoples
\ntoday the echo of their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century opposition to annihilation, when, despite
\nthe wanton killing by the European invaders and the carnage that followed the introduction of
\nexplosive disease epidemics, the natives resisted with an intensity the conquistadors found
\ndifficult to believe. \u201cI do not know how to describe it,\u201d wrote Bernal Diaz del Castillo of the
\ndefiance the Spanish encountered in torture and disease, \u201cfor neither cannon nor muskets nor
\ncrossbows availed, nor hand-to hand fighting, nor killing thirty or forty of them every time we
\ncharged, for they still fought on in as close ranks and with more energy than in the beginning.\u201d
\nFive centuries later that resistance remains, in various forms, throughout North and South and
\nCentral America, as it does among indigenous peoples in other lands that have suffered from the
\nWesterners\u2019 furious wrath. Compared with what they once were, the native peoples in most of
\nthese places are only remnants now. But also in each of those places, and in many more, the
\nstruggle for physical and cultural survival, and for recovery of a deserved pride and autonomy,
\ncontinues unabated.
\nAll the ongoing violence against the world\u2019s indigenous peoples, in whatever form–as well as the
\nnative peoples\u2019 various forms of resistance to that violence–will persist beyond our full
\nunderstanding, however, and beyond our ability to engage and humanely come to grips with it,
\nuntil we are able to comprehend the magnitude and the causes of the human destruction that
\nvirtually consumed the people of the Americas and other people in other subsequently colonized
\nparts of the globe, beginning with Columbus\u2019s early morning sighting of landfall on October
\n12,1492, That was the start of it all. This book is offered as one contribution to our necessary
\ncomprehension.<\/p>\n
He\u2019eia, O\u2019ahu Dr. David E. Stannard
\nJanuary 1992<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1310,"parent":0,"menu_order":30,"template":"","yoast_head":"\n