On two 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 and enslaved a ton of Native
Americans in the process (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 Columbus 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 21
st
century 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.
My other favorite early European arrival
is Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de
Vaca, a Spanish naval officer who was shipwrecked on the 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, 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
inclusive figures tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other inspiring figures you’d highlight?
