Emily's Post

Gutierrez presents an account of the Pueblo Indian Revolt founded on declarations from both Indians and Spanish leadership, which he concludes with the assessment that if the Spanish had been more tolerant of the Natives culture and religious beliefs and had treated them more humanely then likely the Indians would not have revolted on Santa Fe and the surrounding communities. Can this conclusion justifiably be drawn or is he extrapolating with his evidence? While it is a logical conclusion for us, can his interpretation of the events and interviews being considered the truest history? Or is it equally as likely that the Indians would have revolted against the Spanish if they were not treated harshly and did not have their culture imposed upon? Additionally, is Gutierrez exaggerating the Spaniards ignorance of their treatment of the Indians? While they likely did believe themselves to be the vessels of truth, did the Franciscans really conclude that "the only thing they were guilty of was selfless love for the Indians" (427)? Or did they experience some sort of regret or guilt for their treatment of the Indians? Would this be more obvious if Gutierrez had more sources from the Spaniards at the time beyond that of Otermin?

Violence and Symbolism

In Susan Juster’s article, she remarks on the relationship between violence and iconoclasm: “Colonial Americans seemed (in good Protestant fashion) particularly adept at vicarious forms of violence.  Words and objects, not people, were their main targets.”  While Juster uses this distinction as a way of making a larger exceptionalist claim about why colonial America had less religious violence than might otherwise be expected, I found this distinction between violence and vicarious violence to be interesting but also a bit shaky.  Juster herself suggests that acts of violence against “heathens, infidels, apostates, or devil worshippers, Indians and Africans” held symbolic meaning for colonists.  Furthermore, the excerpt from Gutierrez highlights the overlap between “real” and “symbolic” violence.  Both sides engaged in direct violence as well as iconoclasm.  The Spaniards had gained power by destroying both people and their idols; in a similar fashion, the rebelling Pabloans drove out the Spaniards by killing the priests and desecrating their churches.

With this in mind, I remained unconvinced that it was a focus on “words and objects, not people” that made colonial America “exceptional.”  Perhaps the balance of violence against people and the iconoclasm directed against books and words was different in colonial America than in New Mexico, but all parties mixed violence and symbolism.  In fact, religious discourse seems to have imbued all sorts of violence with symbolism.  Thus, rather than focus on which group engaged in the most violence (for which a number of other factors could be responsible), it seems more interesting to ask how this discourse created a symbolism that justified and encouraged violent acts.  For example, was killing a way of making heathens pay for transgressions (as Bartolome de las Casas’ work suggests)?  Could it be a way of pleasing a god or gods and achieving a material reward, as the Puebloans believed?  By reconstructing these religious value systems, perhaps we can better understand how different groups interpreted the violence they engaged in.

Us Against Them

As Dr. Byrd mentioned in a recent lecture on The History of Religion in America, the concept of pluralism was not present in the time of colonial America. A civilization was inseparable from its religion and therefore its conquests in colonization required conversion.  Juster writes of this fusion:

“The line between Christian and non-Christian was the one fundamental divide that separated people, communities, and kingdoms into hostile camps, and it certainly does not surprise us to see seventeenth-century Christians (not to mention latter-day ones) justifying bloodshed in the name of God.”

Gutierrez also writes about the reaction of the Spanish to the Pueblo Revolt, stating that the revolt was not a rejection of racial or monarchical subjugation rather, “…the Spanish understood the revolt as a clear rejection of Christianity.”

It is evident by Bartolome’s writing that the colonizers rarely, if ever, recognized the existence of a religion among civilizations of the native people. Bartolome regrets that so many would “die without the least light of Religion.” This is even more evident in the recognition of Christian martyrdom in the name of colonization and the suggested purging of heresy in the Native American oppression.

This concept of martyrdom in imperialistic culture is an idea worth exploring today. How does Americanism (used in this context as a religion of the citizens of the United States) utilize martyrdom to justify ongoing wars and so-called “just war” in the present day? At any given moment here in the U.S. citizens rise to their feet and cover their hearts at the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner, an American product of war and I would argue a celebration of the endurance of American martyrs. What exactly is Memorial Day and what are its implications about American religious culture? These are interesting ideas to explore as we dive into the history of the colonizers, religious martyrs and our own imperialistic endeavors.

Response to de las Casas, Tears of the Indians

E. Shaskan Bumas, in an article with the attention-grabbing title "The Cannibal Butcher Shop," calls attention to a peculiar feature of the English-language existence of Bartolome de las Casas's Brevísima relación: in English translation, de las Casas hardly seems to be either Catholic or Spanish. Bumas remarks that de las Casas becomes "something of an honorary Protestant and a posthumous ally to the Protestant cause." (Bumas 2000: 108) Bizarrely, the preface attached by the translator of Tears of the Indians uses the Spanish violence against the aboriginal inhabitants of the Caribbean and of Central America as a defense of the violence perpetrated by the (Protestant) English against the (Catholic) Irish in Ireland and as a call for war with Catholic Spain. However much Spanish cruelty de las Casas witnessed and recorded, it seems doubtful that a subject of the Spanish crown and Catholic priest would have taken that cruelty as cause for an English war against his nation, let alone as an account of why the English needed to fight the Irish. According to Bumas,  the addition of grotesque engravings and woodcuts — some, as we saw in Tears of the Indians, with little connection to the (still-grotesque) activities described in the text — to translations of Brevísima relación was a common enough practice in Protestant countries. I cannot help but wonder how much was added to, or omitted from, the text of the various seventeenth-century English translations of Brevísima relación, from which I have read excerpts (but never the whole) in more contemporary English translations.

Bumas 2000: Bumas, E. Shaskan. "The Cannibal Butcher Shop: Protestant Uses of las Casas's 'Brevísima relación' in Europe and the American Colonies." Early American Literature 35, no. 2 (2000): 107-136.

Symbolism and Power

Susan Juster remarks in her essay, "What’s "Sacred" about Violence in Early America? Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World," that, "For the historian of colonial America, the question is not the ubiquity of religious violence but the apparent scarcity of it. The starkest and most brutal forms of persecution—the burning of heretics, wholesale destruction of sacred places and objects, the forced expulsion and enslavement of outsiders such as Jews and Huguenots—were noticeably absent from the British colonies. But the European periphery produced new and sometimes bizarre forms of sacred violence: the ritualized assaults by Puritans on witches and Indians, which some scholars consider a peculiar form of iconoclasm; the proliferation of martyr tales within the context of slavery and Indian captivity; and the emergence of a hyperbolic rhetoric of suffering and redemption that traveled easily from religious to secular genres. Colonial Americans seemed (in good Protestant fashion) particularly adept at vicarious forms of violence. Words and objects, not people, were their main targets."[1]


In other words, it seems to me that colonial Americans attacked symbols, with the intent to destroy those symbols instead of people. By attacking symbols, they asserted their hegemony over others. According to Laiten, hegemony is “the political forging—whether through coercion or elite bargaining—and institutionalization of a pattern of group activity in a state and the concurrent idealization of that schema into a dominant symbolic framework that reigns as common sense.”[2] The only way to assert their full dominance over others is to attack the symbols of the opposition. By destroying the symbols of others, and replacing them with their own, they impose their own version of reality--of common sense--over their enemies. There were fewer people in the colonies, so killing political or religious enemies wasn't as practical as instead destroying their symbols and reality, and dominating them by replacement of those symbols with their own.


[1] Susan Juster, “What’s 'Sacred' about Violence in Early America? Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World,”Common Place, October 2005., accessed August 28, 2013, http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-01/juster/.

[2] Quoted in Myron J. Aronoff and Han Kubik, Anthropology and Political Science: a Convergent Approach (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 81.

Responce to August 29th reading

The readings provide an interesting glimpse into both inter-colonial competition and indigenous revolt, all of which used religious imagery and beliefs to justify their actions.  The English, as Carlos points out, had economic, political and historical claims to validate intervention in the West Indies. These serve to augment Phillips’ statements of English religious superiority to Spain.  The Pueblo Indians leader, Pope, used a return to indigenous religion as a cure for the famine and oppression the Native Americans were experiencing. The Spanish believed they were providing a valuable religious service to the region.  In turn, the apostate behaviour became in itself a religious cleansing for the Pueblo Indians. Each group is combining political, social, economic and religious motivations.  Is it possible to extract any one of these motivations during this time period?  Would there have been any reason to see these motivations as separate?

Is Hindsight Really 20/20?

In both the primary source reading and both secondary readings, we see examples of people coming to the new world for religious reasons.  In our primary source reading, we see a call for the English people to act on behalf of Native Americans in their situation against the Spanish crown (acting with consent from the Vatican).  Citing not only Las Casas's passionate plea on behalf of the Native Americans in their cause against the Spanish, but also Biblical characters such as David, Joshua, and Jehu, one sees a religious plea to come to their aid by intervening against the Spanish.

In the Gutierrez reading, we see another example of terrible treatment of the Pueblo Indians by the Spanish authorities.  Interestingly, Gutierrez states that, "The survivors of the Pueblo Revolt were genuinely confused about what happened.  They thought themselves blameless and selfrighteously pinned the entire disaster on the Indians." (Gutierrez, 427)

However, in our third reading, Juster -- while acknowledging atrocities against Indians and Africans -- tries to convey that that "Colonial Americans seemed (in good Protestant fashion) particularly adept at vicarious forms of violence.  Words and objects, not people, were their main targets." (Juster, 3)

Given that the American colonists had the luxury of historical hindsight in their dealings with the native Americans, did they learn from the mistakes of the Spanish?  Even the latter Spaniards in 1680, according to the Gutierrez article, did not appear to buy into Las Casas's earlier argument and were "confused about what happened" with the Pueblo Indians.  What were the differences – if any --  between how the Spanish (Catholic) government treated the American Indians versus how the American colonists on the east coast (mostly Protestant) treated Native Americans?  Is Juster correct when stating that "Colonial Americans seemed (in good Protestant fashion) particularly adept at vicarious forms of violence.  Words and objects, not people, were their main targets”? (Juster, 3)  Do you agree with Juster's argument that "the structural weaknesses of the colonial governments meant that the religious disaffected had neither the resources nor the institutional backing to mount a serious assault on the objects of their rage"? (Juster,4) 

Motivation

It strikes me as interesting that Tears of the Indians was published in London in 1656, but Casaus seems to have written the original in 1541 ("In the year 1492, the West-Indies were discovered… going about 49 years ago"). What was J.P.'s deeper motivation to translate and publish the paper about 100 years later, addressing it to not only all true Englishmen, but the King himself?

American Iconoclasm

     Within his description of the desecration of the churches and icons of the Christians, Gutierrez implies that this was a new tactic for the Pueblos, picked up from the Spanish:

"Though the Christians were aghast at how the Pueblo Indians had manifested their anger, one only has to recall the massive desecration of katsina masks, kivas, and other native sacra that occured during the Spanish conquest to understand why the Indians retaliated so exactly during the Pueblo revolt. The tables were now turned in this contest of cultures. The Indians had learned well from their overlords the functions of iconoclasm in political spectacle." (425, emphasis added)

This got me wondering how much this method of psychological warfare was truly a European export.  Was the idea of religious persecution after victory truly a foreign concept to these American peoples? I am not well-versed in American Indian history/culture, but wonder if there are any evidences of these methods being used in warfare in the past, particularly any that pre-date any widespread European presence/persecution; or if there are any instances of religious warfare that occurred between different tribes, and not just against colonial powers.

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This blog is associated with the course, Religion and War in American History
at Vanderbilt University (Fall, 2013).