Bartolomé de las Casas, protector of Indians, was a sixteenth century Spanish missionary with a ardour for social justice.
After that they had tied him to the stake however earlier than they lit the fireplace, Hatuey, an Indian chief, was supplied a non secular reprieve by a Spanish priest. Would he like to make sure the sure passage of his soul to heaven by embracing Christianity? he was requested.
Hatuey contemplated the proposal. ‘Are there folks such as you in heaven?’ he replied. When the priest reassured him that there have been, Hatuey responded that he would favor to go to hell, the place he wouldn’t know such merciless males.
Hatuey died 500 years in the past, on the island of Cuba. The folks he needed, in any respect prices, to keep away from – even on the danger of everlasting damnation – had been the Spanish conquistadors.
The Indian chief’s dying was instrumental in shaping the seminal beliefs of 1 man: Bartolomé de las Casas. He was a slave owner-turned-Bishop-turned-chronicler who raged a life-long battle in opposition to the murderous injustices meted out to South American Indians by the colonists.
‘The spectrum of missionary work world wide covers three fairly totally different attitudes, and far in between,’ says Stephen Corry, Director of Survival Worldwide. ‘There are these, like Bartolomé who view their mission as one in all standing with the downtrodden in opposition to the oppressors; others see their job as extending the imperial energy of their church; nonetheless others are focussed on saving human souls at no matter human value.’
As ‘protector of Indians’, de las Casas was one of many first missionaries to uphold the rights of the oppressed and defend the lives of Indigenous peoples.
A up to date of Christopher Columbus, de las Casas had travelled in 1502 to La Española, a Caribbean island now referred to as Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which on the time was inhabited by the Indigenous Taínos folks. On touchdown, the Spanish settlers already on shore reportedly informed the brand new arrivals, ‘The island is doing properly, as a result of a lot gold is being mined.’
Initially he settled as a service provider and encomendero – an Indian slave proprietor – on ‘a hill nearly encircled by a wonderful and glowing little river’, and recounted that ‘these persons are essentially the most guileless, essentially the most devoid of wickedness.’
If the Indians had been devoid of wickedness, the conquistadors made up for it. It’s thought that when the conquistadors arrived within the Americas, there have been 100 million inhabitants. 90% died on contact, many succumbing to ailments, to which that they had no immunity, introduced in by the Europeans.
Those that didn’t die from imported ailments had been handled with ‘unusual cruelty’ by the aggressive invaders. They fed Indian infants to canines, hunted adults for sport and roasted males alive. ‘They suppose no extra of killing ten or twenty Indians for a pastime, or to check the sharpness of their swords,’ wrote de las Casas, persevering with:
’In the future … the Spanish dismembered, beheaded or raped 3,000 Indian folks. They reduce off the legs of the kids that ran earlier than them. They poured folks stuffed with boiling soup. I noticed all of the above issues … and numberless others.’
De las Casas additionally noticed, with uncommon perception, the ulterior motive of many conquistadors. Although the Spanish carried the Requerimiento – a royal doc that outlined Spain’s divinely ordained proper to sovereignty – into each battle, de las Casas believed that spreading the phrase of God was largely a ruse: an expedient masks. Ambition, not altruism, was the driving drive; gold, not God, was their purpose.
He believed that the conquistadors slashed and slaughtered their method like ‘ravening wild beasts’ throughout the ‘New World’ not solely in homage to Christ, however to ‘swell themselves with riches’. He suspected that they had crossed the Atlantic not solely to unfold the phrase of the Lord, however to seek out the gold that washed by means of the rivers of Amazonia and the minerals that lay beneath their rampaging ft. ‘Our work,’ de las Casas stated, ‘was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy.’ The conquistadors destroyed lives and lands, and so they informed the Indians that to avoid wasting their souls, they would wish to turn into Christians.
The systematic eradication of Indigenous methods of life and beliefs remains to be used as one of the crucial potent weapons within the oppression of tribal peoples. Such is the spiritual zeal of some excessive evangelist teams right now, that they nonetheless promulgate the road that persons are condemned to hell until they undertake Christianity.
In excessive examples, modern missionary organisations such because the New Tribes Mission have even got down to drive the primary contact with tribal peoples, with devastating and damaging penalties.
‘Whether or not or not tribal peoples die within the course of from alien diseases appears to be comparatively unimportant to some missionary teams when in comparison with securing heavenly eternity,’ says Stephen Corry.
If the greed of the conquistadors knew no bounds, neither did the integrity and outraged braveness of de las Casas. Revolted by the hypocrisy of males who proclaimed pious inspiration whereas distributing the horrors of hell, he was additionally influenced by a gaggle of Dominican preachers who requested the conquistadors, ‘Inform me, by what proper do you maintain these Indians in such a merciless and horrible servitude? Are they not males?’
De las Casas reformed his views, giving up his Indian slaves round 1515, and set about exposing the lies. He felt morally certain to tell the Spanish courtroom what was being carried out within the identify of Christ.
‘In order to not maintain felony silence regarding the wreck of numberless souls and our bodies that these individuals trigger,’ he wrote, ‘I’ve determined to print a few of the innumerable situations I’ve collected prior to now and might relate with reality.’
These truths, which grew to become in depth writings in regards to the mistreatment of the Indians – one of the crucial well-known being A Quick Account of The Destruction of the Indies – had been instrumental in prompting King Charles V to problem his ‘New Legal guidelines’ in 1542, which abolished slavery and the encomienda system, and resulted within the liberation of 1000’s of slaves.
Immediately, de las Casas is regarded as an early human rights’ activist and thought of by some as a father of liberation theology, an idea fostered as a motion within the early Sixties which believes that the Church ought to act to result in social change.
‘The liberation missionaries from the Sixties on noticed their Christian work as de las Casas noticed his,’’ says Stephen Corry. ‘They didn’t imagine that they had been working to transform the heathens, however to assist these in want. De las Casas was very a lot within the vanguard of this missionary method.’
Such beliefs are sometimes held, nonetheless, at nice private value. De las Casas suffered the disapproval, anger and threats to his lifetime of a lot of his contemporaries; many missionaries since him have been murdered for his or her humane rules.
De las Casas was pushed not by a self-regarding agenda however by a deeply-rooted sense of justice. ‘There are numerous others like them, who stand shoulder to shoulder with tribal peoples. However typically they pay the very best value for his or her compassion,’ says Stephen Corry.
The person who sang the primary mass held within the Americas was additionally one of many first to defend the lives and lands of the continent’s Indigenous peoples. De las Casas knew the Indians weren’t inferior to their oppressors. He knew that ‘all of the peoples of the world are males’ – rational human beings, a part of a single frequent humanity. ‘For all folks of those our Indies are human … and to none are they inferior,’ he stated.
‘I shall do my endeavour, if God grant me life,’ he wrote. He was granted 92 years of life. Till his dying in 1566 in a Madrid convent, he labored to finish the racist oppression of South American Indians, and continued to decry the hypocrisy and cruelty of the conquistadors.
