On one of the
first truly inspiring American voices.
I get why we focus so many of our exploration-era narratives
on the conquistador types. They were daring warrior-explorers who wore crazy
hats and searched for lost cities of gold and fountains of youth (especial
points of emphasis half a century ago) and killed a ton of Native Americans
(especial points of emphasis these days). And certainly my somewhat in-depth
engagement with the life and writings of their founding father, the Admiral of the Ocean
Sea himself, Columbus, makes clear that they weren’t just one-dimensional
cartoon villains by any stretch. But what a difference it would make to our
national identity and narratives if the first years of European arrivals became
the story first and foremost not of Christopher C. and his fellow
explorer-conquistadors, but of the Spanish Priest (later Bishop) who befriended
Columbus and even edited his journal: Bartolomé
de las Casas (1484-1566).
Toward the end of his life, Las Casas published The Destruction of the Indies
(1552), an incredibly honest and scathing account of the treatment of Native
Americans by Spanish explorers, colonists, politicians, soldiers, and
commercial interests. He would spend his final decade and a half expounding on
that topic at the Spanish Court, pleading for a more just and mutually
beneficial Native policy. But those events were simply the culmination of half a
century of impressive efforts and actions—beginning almost immediately after
his 1502 initial arrival in Hispaniola, Las Casas worked on behalf of the
island’s and region’s natives on a variety of levels: certainly religious,
attempting to convert them to Catholicism (not a particularly appealing thought
from a 2010 perspective, but far more inclusive than most of the early
arrivals’ perspectives); but also social and communal, proposing and working
for a variety of experiments and initiatives intended to better integrate the
European and Native communities and give proof to his steadfast beliefs that
the two cultures could coexist peacefully and successfully.
One of my favorite early arrivals is Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de
Vaca, a Spanish naval officer who was shipwrecked on coast of Florida in
the 1530s, spent nearly a decade wandering across the continent and living with
numerous Native tribes and nations, and developed a complex, hybrid new
perspective and identity as a result; in my
second book I identified de Vaca as one of the first Americans because of
that hybridity and identity. But whereas de Vaca’s shifts were the result of
extraordinary circumstances, Las Casas simply observed what was happening in
the Spanish New World, responded to it as a truly moral and good person should
but so few of his peers did, and then, more impressively still, wrote and acted
on that response, consistently and unceasingly, for the remainder of his life.
His efforts did not, of course, fully counter-balance the horrors of genocide
and enslavement and destruction, and no one person’s could; but they help us to
see that America began not only with those horrors, but also with fundamentally
good people seeking a more perfect union of the diverse cultures present here.
If it’s way too easy to be a jingoistic patriot about
America, it is, in some ways, also too easy to be purely cynical or pessimistic
about what we’ve been and are. Resisting that second perspective partly means
acknowledging and engaging with the complex humanity of even a Columbus. But it
also, and more optimistically, means remembering and reclaiming the legacy of a Las Casas, as evidence that
even the most horrific and destructive moments in our history have contained
their voices of hope as well.
Next nominee tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
What do you think? Someone you’d nominate for the Hall?
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