De Las Casas was there in the Indies. Does that give his observation more weight?
Bartolome de las Casas became a settler priest in 1505 and then went back to participate in the colonization of Cuba and convert people. Once he started seeing what was happening in Spain and Cuba he renounced his encomienda and announced that something was going completely wrong with this organization. He saw that the Spanish were treating the Natives as if they were not human and found the whole thing deplorable. He tried to set up peaceful settling in Guatemala. His entire time in the New World he denounced what he saw and wrote to the Spanish. But no matter how much time de las Casas spent in the New World, it cannot be forgotten that he was still a European and we should not assume that he had no biases.
While de las Casas observations show that he was obviously seeing a reality that few other Europeans cared to fight against or change, his opinion should not necessarily be given more weight. In the chapter “the indians possessed more enlightenment and natural knowledge of god than the greeks and the romans,” de las Casas compliments the Indians knowledge and their passion for Gods, but he shows that he is still a European at heart. He says “all these people are of good reason…they show less duplicity and more simplicity of heart than others.” By calling the Native people simple he is imparting his biases as a European onto the less European educated Natives but this shouldn’t per say make them simple people. I also think that by comparing all the Native culture to the Greeks and the Romans, he is telling their story in European contexts which may be unfair to the Natives culture.
I do appreciate that de las Casas attempted to distigmitize the way that Europeans as barbarians, explaining how the Natives would view us as barbarians as well (p4). However, de las Casas should not be considered completely radical in his treatment of the lower classes because he still supports the use of african slaves as a labor force. He tries to get the Indigenous people out of trouble by replacing them with African slaves.
De las Casas was a good advocate for the Natives however we should not disregard the possible biases he must inherently have as a European.
To revisit this, I definitely agree that we should remember Casas' European biases when reading his texts. I think it's also important to recall that, while the author attempts to relay native perspectives, (e.g. the idea that they would think the Europeans were barbarians, which is probably true) this is not exactly an acceptable stand in for an actual native point of view. It would be interesting if the syllabus included some early Nahuatl works in translation, rather than just the work of a European colonist mediating and interpreting a native perspective.
ReplyDelete