The Price Indians paid for Christianity
The Taino genocide (1492-1518) is where the Spanish wiped out most of the Tainos (Arawaks), the native people of the northern Caribbean (present-day Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, etc). Columbus himself set it in motion and oversaw it till 1500. In just two years under Columbus Governorship through murder, mutilation, being worked to death or suicide more than half the Indians in Hispaniola were dead. Between 1496 and 1508 more than three million people died from war, slavery and the mines. Most were already dead when smallpox arrived in 1516. By then only 12,000 remained, and within a few years the Indians were all dead, in total an estimated 8,000,000 natives. It is no exaggeration to say he is guilty of genocide
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/the-taino-genocide/
This ignorance is an artifact of historical silencing—rendering invisible the lives and stories of entire Indian peoples.
Christopher Columbus - American Indian Genocide
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/10/06/rethinking-columbus-towards-true-peoples-history
Girolamo Benzoni (1519-1570) was an Italian from Milan who spent the years 1541-1556 in the New World. His observations of Spanish imperialism were published in 1565 in La Historia del Mondo Nuovo.
Due to Bartolome de Las Casas’s writings (even his writing to the Pope), the brutalities to the Indians were not as high of an occurrence as they were before. “Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Spanish priest, historian and advocate for Native American rights, was born in Seville. As a young man, he practiced law for a short time, but, like so many other enterprising young men of his day, he went to the New World in search of new opportunities.
Bartolome De Las Casas - The Black Legend* * * * * * Project
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You did some selective editing there. Give the man some credit for eventually doing some good for the natives:
[Not until his fortieth year did Las Casas experience a moral conversion, perhaps the awakening of a dormant sensitivity as a result of the horrors he saw about him. His early efforts at the Spanish court were largely directed at securing approval for the establishment of model colonies in which Spanish farmers would live and labor side by side with Indians in a peaceful coexistence that would gently lead the natives to Christianity and Christian civilization.
The disastrous failure of one such project on the coast of Venezuela (1521) caused Las Casas to retire for 10 years to a monastery and to enter the Dominican order. He had greater success with an experiment in peaceful conversion of the Indians in the province of Tezulutlán—called by the Spaniards the Land of War—in Guatemala (1537-1540).
Las Casas appeared to have won a brilliant victory with the promulgation of the New Laws of 1542. These laws banned Indian slavery, prohibited Indian forced labor, and provided for gradual abolition of the encomienda system, which held the Indians living on agricultural lands in serfdom. Faced with revolt by the encomenderos in Peru and the threat of revolt elsewhere, however, the Crown made a partial retreat, repealing the provisions most objectionable to the colonists. It was against this background that Las Casas met Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, defender of the encomienda and of Indian wars, in a famous debate at Valladolid in 1550. Sepúlveda, a disciple of Aristotle, invoked his theory that some men are slaves by nature in order to show that the Indians must be made to serve the Spaniards for their own good as well as for that of their masters. The highest point of Las Casas' argument was an eloquent affirmation of the equality of all races, the essential oneness of mankind.
To the end of a long life Las Casas fought passionately for justice for his beloved Indians. As part of his campaign in their defense, he wrote numerous tracts and books. The world generally knows him best for his flaming indictment of Spanish cruelty to the Indians, Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552), a work based largely on official reports to the Crown and soon translated into the major European languages. Historians regard most highly his Historia de las Indias, which is indispensable to every student of the first phase of the Spanish conquest. His Apologética historia de las Indias is an immense accumulation of ethnographic data designed to demonstrate that the Indians fully met the requirements laid down by Aristotle for the good life.]
Like I said......It wouldn't hurt to do some further reading, even in your own link.
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Lies my Teacher Told Me
by James Lowen who discusses why it is even known the myth and so few people know the historical truth.
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
by Andrés Reséndez
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873
by Benjamin Madley
Indians, Slaves, and Mass Murder: The*Hidden History | by Peter Nabokov | The New York Review of Books
