Dangerous Memories

1685 Copy of the Code                                                                

The slave trade was also a system governed by the laws of the nation-states.  In this case the law dictated the form of punishment to be meted out to runaway slaves of the Caribbean.  Maroons were punished by castration.  Such cruelty was meant to suppress rebellion, but the punishment fell short of execution in order to continue to reap the benefits of slave labor.  Within one hundred years a “reform” law, “Le Code Noir,” was signed by Louis XIV of France, in 1685.  The edict declared that

A Negro who is absent for a month shall have his ears cut off and shall have a fleur de lys branded on his left shoulder.  If he again runs away, his knees shall be lacerated and his other shoulder branded.  Finally if he runs away for a third time he shall be sentenced to death.

Jose L. Franco, in Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies, 28

1743 Copy of the Code

In effect, native people were children if they submitted and savages if they resisted.  In either case, Europeans saw themselves as the superior culture bringing civilization to an inferior culture.  The colonial worldview split reality into polar parts: good and evil, body and spirit, man and nature, head and heart, European and primitive.  Indian spirituality lacks these dualisms: language expresses the oneness of all things.  God is not the transcendent Father but Mother Earth, the Corn Mother, the Great Spirit who nourishes all.

For the European such beliefs were pagan.  Thus, the conquest was rationalized as a necessary evil that would bestow upon the heathen Indians a moral consciousness that would redeem their amorality.  The impetus which drove the conquistador’s invading wars was not exploration, but the desire to expand empire, not discovery of new land, but the drive to accumulate treasure (gold), land, and cheap labor (slaves).  The worldview which converted bare economic self interest into noble, even moral, motives was a notion of Christianity as the one redemptive religion which demands fealty from all cultures.

There were some Christians who were converted to the Indians and slaves.  Bishop Bartolome de Las Casas refused the land grant afforded him by the Crown, then preached and cried out against the enslavement of Indians by writing to the Council of the Indies and to the Pope documenting “cruelties more atrocious and unnatural than any recorded of untutored and savage barbarians…[because of] the greed and thirst for gold of our countrymen.”  Although de Las Casas lost the argument in which he challenged the European worldview, his prophetic voice earned him the friendship of the voiceless Indians.

The Bishop’s intense written debate with the prestigious jurist Sepulveda, chaplain for Charles V, reveals the supremacist worldview of European colonizers.  The Bishop argued for the abolition of the encomienda system of gold tribute which he called tyrannical, inhuman, and an offense to God.  Sepulveda said it was a system suited to the nature of Indians who, unlike the Spaniards, were somewhere between humans and monkeys, and thus it was “natural” and an expression of God’s will that barbarians and the unjust should experience punishment.

Spiritual vision informs values.  A fundamental difference between the European value system and Indian and African values is centered on relationship to the community of ancestors which includes the living and dead.  For Indian people, right relationship includes relationship with all beings, including the natural world which surrounds the human world.  The destruction of the environment was, from the Indian perspective, a destruction of spiritual equals.

It is more than a coincidence that the modern age of extinction begins in 1680.  It is often cited as the foundation of the Enlightenment….During the Enlightenment, there arose notions of a mechanistic universe and that humankind can use science and technology to shape his own ends subject only to the physical laws….The idea of the sacredness of nature is, however, a strong central theme in many non-Western cultures…..Those cultures tend to see a supportive kind of magic in the process of birth, death, and transformation which recognizes that human beings are part of a wonderful process that can be celebrated and revered….

Respect is not something that can be readily generated through dissection.  Scientists can wonder at the complexity of the biology of a leaf, can achieve something approaching awe, and even spiritual reverence, through study of the vast system of the starts, and can even grow to achieve profound respect for the complexity of life, but they have been only marginally successful at creating stories and images which transmit those feelings to young and old alike.  They have not been successful, in short, in challenging the element of Western culture which views Nature through primarily materialistic lenses because they are viewing reality through such lenses themselves….

In this short description John Mohawk delineates the radical opposition with which Western and Native American worldviews regard nature, spirituality, and science.  But it is the Western European worldview that dominates and thus appears natural.

Because [the Eurocentric worldview]is the one we have grown up with, it is sometimes hard to see it as just that –one of several different ways of relating to reality.  Eurocentrrism is distinguished by a kind of one-dimensional seeing—that of a privileged white Western male.  It is a perspective that assumes the thinking “I” as the center of the universe.  Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”  How different this is from the African worldview in which the individual is affirmed as being only in relation to the “we” of his/her community—family/clan—including those not born and those who have departed.

Sheila Collins, “Are the Multiculturalists Politically Correct?” 7

John Mohawk, “Toward a Reverence for Nature,” unpublished paper

http://thelouvertureproject.org/index.php?title=Le_Code_Noir

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/40/186.html

http://www.millersville.edu/~columbus/papers/scott-m.html

http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=633

1685 Copy of the Code                                                                  

The slave trade was also a system governed by the laws of the nation-states.  In this case the law dictated the form of punishment to be meted out to runaway slaves of the Caribbean.  Maroons were punished by castration.  Such cruelty was meant to suppress rebellion, but the punishment fell short of execution in order to continue to reap the benefits of slave labor.  Within one hundred years a “reform” law, “Le Code Noir,” was signed by Louis XIV of France, in 1685.  The edict declared that

A Negro who is absent for a month shall have his ears cut off and shall have a fleur de lys branded on his left shoulder.  If he again runs away, his knees shall be lacerated and his other shoulder branded.  Finally if he runs away for a third time he shall be sentenced to death.

Jose L. Franco, in Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies, 28

1743 Copy of the Code

In effect, native people were children if they submitted and savages if they resisted.  In either case, Europeans saw themselves as the superior culture bringing civilization to an inferior culture.  The colonial worldview split reality into polar parts: good and evil, body and spirit, man and nature, head and heart, European and primitive.  Indian spirituality lacks these dualisms: language expresses the oneness of all things.  God is not the transcendent Father but Mother Earth, the Corn Mother, the Great Spirit who nourishes all.

For the European such beliefs were pagan.  Thus, the conquest was rationalized as a necessary evil that would bestow upon the heathen Indians a moral consciousness that would redeem their amorality.  The impetus which drove the conquistador’s invading wars was not exploration, but the desire to expand empire, not discovery of new land, but the drive to accumulate treasure (gold), land, and cheap labor (slaves).  The worldview which converted bare economic self interest into noble, even moral, motives was a notion of Christianity as the one redemptive religion which demands fealty from all cultures.

There were some Christians who were converted to the Indians and slaves.  Bishop Bartolome de Las Casas refused the land grant afforded him by the Crown, then preached and cried out against the enslavement of Indians by writing to the Council of the Indies and to the Pope documenting “cruelties more atrocious and unnatural than any recorded of untutored and savage barbarians…[because of] the greed and thirst for gold of our countrymen.”  Although de Las Casas lost the argument in which he challenged the European worldview, his prophetic voice earned him the friendship of the voiceless Indians.

The Bishop’s intense written debate with the prestigious jurist Sepulveda, chaplain for Charles V, reveals the supremacist worldview of European colonizers.  The Bishop argued for the abolition of the encomienda system of gold tribute which he called tyrannical, inhuman, and an offense to God.  Sepulveda said it was a system suited to the nature of Indians who, unlike the Spaniards, were somewhere between humans and monkeys, and thus it was “natural” and an expression of God’s will that barbarians and the unjust should experience punishment.

Spiritual vision informs values.  A fundamental difference between the European value system and Indian and African values is centered on relationship to the community of ancestors which includes the living and dead.  For Indian people, right relationship includes relationship with all beings, including the natural world which surrounds the human world.  The destruction of the environment was, from the Indian perspective, a destruction of spiritual equals.

It is more than a coincidence that the modern age of extinction begins in 1680.  It is often cited as the foundation of the Enlightenment….During the Enlightenment, there arose notions of a mechanistic universe and that humankind can use science and technology to shape his own ends subject only to the physical laws….The idea of the sacredness of nature is, however, a strong central theme in many non-Western cultures…..Those cultures tend to see a supportive kind of magic in the process of birth, death, and transformation which recognizes that human beings are part of a wonderful process that can be celebrated and revered….

Respect is not something that can be readily generated through dissection.  Scientists can wonder at the complexity of the biology of a leaf, can achieve something approaching awe, and even spiritual reverence, through study of the vast system of the starts, and can even grow to achieve profound respect for the complexity of life, but they have been only marginally successful at creating stories and images which transmit those feelings to young and old alike.  They have not been successful, in short, in challenging the element of Western culture which views Nature through primarily materialistic lenses because they are viewing reality through such lenses themselves….

In this short description John Mohawk delineates the radical opposition with which Western and Native American worldviews regard nature, spirituality, and science.  But it is the Western European worldview that dominates and thus appears natural.

Because [the Eurocentric worldview]is the one we have grown up with, it is sometimes hard to see it as just that –one of several different ways of relating to reality.  Eurocentrrism is distinguished by a kind of one-dimensional seeing—that of a privileged white Western male.  It is a perspective that assumes the thinking “I” as the center of the universe.  Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”  How different this is from the African worldview in which the individual is affirmed as being only in relation to the “we” of his/her community—family/clan—including those not born and those who have departed.

Sheila Collins, “Are the Multiculturalists Politically Correct?” 7

John Mohawk, “Toward a Reverence for Nature,” unpublished paper

http://thelouvertureproject.org/index.php?title=Le_Code_Noir

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/40/186.html

http://www.millersville.edu/~columbus/papers/scott-m.html

http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=633

 Taino

…The sailor relates that in Utopia neither money nor private property exists.  There, scorn for gold and superfluous consumption is encouraged, and no one dresses ostentatiously.  Everybody gives the fruits of his works to the public stores and freely collects what he needs.  The economy is planned.  There is no hoarding, which is the son of fear, nor is hunger known.  The people choose their prince and the people can dispose of him; they also elect the priests.  The inhabitants of Utopia loathe war and its honors, although they fiercely defend their frontiers.  They have religion that does not offend reason and rejects useless mortifications and forcible conversions.  The laws permit divorce but severely punish conjugal betrayals and oblige everyone to work six hours a day.  Work and rest are shared; the table is shared.  The community takes charge of children while their parents are busy.  Sick people get privileged treatment; euthanasia avoids long painful agonies.  Gardens and orchards occupy most of the space and music is heard wherever one goes.

Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, 61 

How has the European worldview which Columbus brought to his encounter with the natives of the Americas shaped five hundred years of history?  According to Columbus’s log, the Taino Indians were so generous that “if it be asked of them they never say no; on the contrary they invite you to share it and show you as much love as if their hearts went with it.”  How then explain the fact that all Taino men, women, and children were ordered to mine a gold tribute of three-quarters of an ounce every three months?  Indians who refused had their hands cut off.  How can one account for the brutality of a slave system causing such despair that, as Pedro Hernandez Cobas relates, whole families of Tainos flung themselves off cliffs to end their misery?  How so from a navigator on a mission of God?

The European race to acquire gold locates a fundamental clash of values—for the European, accumulation (of treasure, currency, land) wins cultural and individual honor.  The practice of accumulation, historically the basis of a capitalist economy, was as foreign to the Indian and African world as were the tall bearded strangers bearing long knives and muskets.  Accumulating abundance for purposes other than to distribute it to the community found no favor with the tribe.  The Indian practices of collectivity, sharing, and sexual freedom so captivated the Europeans that they wrote back to the “old world” of encounters with “paradise” and utopia.

While these freedoms attracted the imagination of some Europeans, most found them threatening.  The powerful of Europe (Church and State) were undivided in their desire to control the newly “found” lands and peoples.  The European worldview is best revealed in the Papal Bull of Alexander VI, which granted by right the lands of the “new world” to Spain and Portugal for the “spread of the Catholic faith.”  This document reveals both Church and State’s belief in the legal and ecclesial right of the powerful to take the lands of the less powerful.  The one transgression that was punishable by excommunication was not ownership of people and not, obviously, the ownership of land, or for that matter the appropriation of others’ land, because the Papal Bull legitimated the European state’s right to the lands of the Americas.  The great sin that merited virtual damnation was for either nation to cross the Pope’s demarcation line and attempt to take the land or inhabitants of the other.  The key here is the right (moral and legal) to property (human and nature).

Taino being punished by Conquistador

The native worldview had no such concept as private property.  Although there were over two thousand indigenous languages and thousands of diverse cultures amongst the Indians, few, if any, of the indigenous language forms had a word to express possession.  The Indians of “paradise” could not comprehend what was in store for them when they brought offerings of corn, berries, wild turkey, and beads as tribute to the strangers.  In a few years their sharing would be seen as childlike naiveté.  When they resisted the enforced tribute of gold, their leaders would be hanged or burned; the less radical punishment would order the resister’s hand or foot to be severed.

The story of Guaironex, a leader of Indians from the La Vega Valley of Santo Domingo, epitomizes the divergent views of relationship (to land, people and things, i.e., treasure) held by Indians and Europeans:

In 1494-95, after Columbus imposed a tribute of gold to be paid by every Taino man, woman, and child, Guaironex went to the first colonizer with a counter offer.  Guaironex’s main chiefs gathered over one thousand men with coas [planting sticks] in hand.  They offered, if Columbus would drop the gold tribute, to plant all the food the Spanish would ever want to eat.  They said to Columbus, “We will feed you here on the island and also all of your people back in Castille.  You don’t even need to work.”  But of course, the colonizers wanted gold or, in lieu of it, slaves and precious woods.

Lynn Tyler, Two Worlds, quoted in Jose Barreiro, “A Note on Tainos: Whither Progress?” View from the Shore, 7:3, 69

Western moral code demanded an upholding of law which mandated the rights of the emerging nation-states of Europe to acquire property.  Accumulation of treasure was the Crown’s objective, and church codes gave the enterprise moral justification.  Pillage, execution, destruction of entire communities of native peoples, and enslavement were seen as necessary tactics to civilize and “save the souls” of heathens.  European society recognized the rights of the powerful (the aristocracy who owned lands) but gave little or no protection to landless serfs and peasants.  Nevertheless, poor Europeans were considered Christians and civilized.  Indians and Africans were neither.  They were “savages” whose refusal to convert to Christianity (and to give up their land and culture) brought upon them whatever “force” was necessary to change their minds.  The requerimiento is and example.

The requerimiento was legally required to be read aloud to the Indians notifying them that God, through his Vicar on earth who was the Pope, had given the Spanish King the power to grant them salvation.  This document, read to the Indians in Latin, was legally required before all invasions.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03052b.htm

http://www.thenagain.info/WebChron/Americas/Tordesillas.html

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03052b.htm

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/41/013.html

http://users.dickinson.edu/~borges/Resources-Requerimiento.htm

http://www.healingtheland.com/resources/discovery/requirement.html

Metacom’s War

Metacom

In the public square stands a tall pole. On top is impaled the head of the hellhound, fiend, tawney serpent and dog, who dared to resist becoming a colonized and culturally submissive person.  He dared to drive his forces to within twenty miles of Boston in order to stop the religious and political imperialism of the Puritans.  Metacom, chief of the Wampanoag, has mobilized the largest native confederation to resist the onslaught of the whites.  His wife and son are now slaves in the West Indies. His head will stay on public display for twenty-five years.

His words will last much longer.

One hundred sixty years later, William Apes will repeat them at the Odeon in Boston.

Brothers—You see this vast country before us, which the Great Spirit gave to our fathers and us; you see the buffalo and the deer that now are our support. Brothers, you see these little ones, our wives and children, who are looking to us for food and raiment; and you now see the foe before you, that they have grown insolent and bold; that all our ancient customs are disregarded; the treaties made by our fathers and us are broken, and all of us insulted; our council fires disregarded, and all the ancients customs of our fathers; our brothers murdered before our eyes, and their spirits cry to us for revenge. Brothers, these people from the unknown world will cut down our groves, spoil our hunting and planting grounds, and drive us and our children from the graves of our fathers, and our council fires, and enslave our women and children.

This would not be the last time a native from this land the Europeans called America would speak words such as these.

Chronicles of American Indian Protest, 8-11

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6226