The Indians in the Americas
Maybury-Lewis, David
At the beginning of his remarkable quartet Memories of Fire, the Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano gives this vivid description of the invasion of the Americas: He falls on his knees, weeps,...
...Indians, for example, were required to work without payment to build roads and were then obliged to pay tolls to use them, although non-Indians could use the same roads at no charge...
...The Spanish and Portuguese monarchs occasionally passed laws protective of the Indians and their communities...
...Luis de Torres translates Christopher Columbus's questions into Hebrew: "Do you know the kingdom of the Great Khan...
...This system has continued almost to the present day in some places, and the effects of it on Indian individuals and families are harrowingly described in the story of her life as told by Rigoberta Menchti, winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize...
...As one studies the record, one cannot help being struck by the effort and ingenuity devoted by the conquerors to this task...
...It was therefore quite logical that until recently the Brazilian government had an official policy of "emancipating" the Indians...
...He steps forward, staggering because for more than a month he has hardly slept, and beheads some shrubs with his sword...
...Ostensibly, the national security doctrine has been put forward by the military to protect Brazil's extensive frontiers...
...In countries with large indigenous populations, conservatives encroached on Indian lands and maintained Indian communities in poverty as a source of labor...
...We do not give up on democracy because the Germans once elected Adolf Hitler or because of any of the other crimes that have been committed in its name...
...Guatemala, on the other hand, has dealt with its Indian question in a different way: through repressive violence in defense of the status quo...
...They were thought of as the peoples beyond the frontier, in "Indian territory," a notional territory that was pushed steadily westward until it was swallowed up altogether at the end of the nineteenth century...
...A similar push to the south in Chile at the same time and for the same reasons led to the final defeat of the Chilean Araucanians...
...Yet the treatment of indigenous peoples since the conquest is more than the Americas' original sin, which can now be conveniently forgotten...
...Gold...
...This corrective is based on a presumption of tolerance and a desire for mutual understanding and mutual accommodation among subcultures...
...Where does the gold you have in your noses and ears come from...
...In countries with significant indigenous populations, conservatives and liberals fought civil wars over the length and breadth of the Western Hemisphere...
...That kind of violence obviously does take place, but violence may also be visited by the state on its citizens...
...In Chile, General Pinochet's government tried to destroy the identity of the large Mapuche (Araucanian) minority by forcing them to divide their lands into privately owned lots...
...Yet we feel it is realistic to try and make democracy work...
...I agree with Schlesinger's diagnosis and his convincing exposé of the absurdities of the extreme multiculturalists...
...Thus, an edict issued in 1834 in Gran Colombia made it clear that "in no tribunal or court will complaints be heard, whose sole object is to request that Indian lands not be divided...
...Let us therefore perish...
...The United States, for example, has an extraordinarily high level of interpersonal violence in comparison with other developed countries...
...Here and there they simply abolished Indians by a stroke of the pen and followed that up by trying to break up indigenous communities...
...administration was focusing on Central America, we learned little about the circumstances of the indigenous populations of the region...
...In fact, much of the violence in the world today comes from the suppression (or attempted suppression) of ethnicity in the name of the unitary state...
...From today everything belongs to those remote monarchs: the coral sea, the beaches, the rocks all green with moss, the woods, the parrots, and these laurel-skinned people who don't yet know about clothes, sin, or money and gaze dazedly at the scene...
...It is estimated that by the end of the sixteenth century the indigenous population of the Americas had been cut in half...
...Meanwhile, stocks can soon be given, willed, or sold to people who are not members of the communities...
...Reprinted and adapted by permission...
...Most of those farmers were British expatriates, which shows (if such a demonstration is still needed) that colonial brutality is not the special preserve of any one nationality...
...They attacked indigenous religions...
...they had no burning chest...
...This great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a playground for squalid savages...
...It assists small societies and threatened minorities to defend they ways of life and advocates pluralist solutions that will permit such peoples to prosper in multicultural states...
...How often are they mentioned in the news stories that most of us read...
...Their rhetoric was rejected and their party suppressed, while the indigenous bulk of Peru's population continued to be systematically marginalized...
...to imagine a nation that can tolerate indigenous cultures within its pluralism...
...512 • DISSENT...
...They lie behind the plausible falsehoods of conventional wisdom that are still subscribed to today by otherwise reasonable people...
...In the words of a Maya chronicler, "Before . . . they [the Indians] had no sickness...
...The naked men stare at him with open mouths, and the interpreter tries out his small stock of Chaldean: "Gold...
...We rarely hear about them now, although there are one million of them in a total Chilean population of about fourteen million At the same time the United States was engaged in its own push to the West, in pursuit of its own vision of manifest destiny, and with similarly drastic consequences for the indigenous inhabitants of the "Indian territory" that was to be Indian no longer...
...The naked men watch the anger of the intruder with red hair and This article first appeared in the April 1993 issue of the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...
...The tribute was nevertheless abolished at regular intervals throughout the nineteenth century...
...they had no headache...
...Indigenous peoples, then as now, clung fiercely to their lands and communities...
...They were urged to abandon their languages and cultures and to enter the mainstream of "civilization," though in that mainstream they would be stigmatized and treated as slaves, serfs, directed workers, or peons...
...In the Americas we, and particularly the Native Americans among us, are still coping with the consequences of the oldest European imperialism...
...When Indians protest about what is being done to them in the interior of the country, they are classed with smallholders, the landless poor, and other "troublemakers" who call into question the Brazilian model of development and call attention to the glaring injustices in Brazilian society...
...This relentless effort to destroy indigenous communities led to constant Indian rebellions throughout the hemisphere...
...They considered Indio a derogatory word and Indianness a stigma—a kind of royalist, conservative, ecclesiastical device for maintaining indigenous peoples in a state of savagery...
...Indianness was thus abolished by a stroke of the pen...
...Consider the case of Brazil, whose indigenous inhabitants live scattered throughout the interior and constitute less than 0.5 percent of the total population...
...No more so, I suggest, than the idea of democracy...
...In fact, the Americas since the conquest have been a vast laboratory for the eradication of indigenous cultures...
...On one knee, eyes lifted to heaven, he pronounces three times the names of Isabella and Ferdinand...
...It is a matter of more consequence that has at times profoundly influenced the nature of modem American societies...
...Similarly, when the Marquess of Pombal decreed the abolition of Indian slavery in Brazil, the colonists refused to comply...
...Started in something like the spirit of Uncle Tom's Cabin by writers who called attention to the sufferings of the Indians, it was given forceful expression by figures such as Jose Carlos Mariategui, the theorist of Peruvian socialism, and Haya de la Tone, the leader of the APRA party (the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance...
...On one celebrated occasion, the Spanish colonists were so outraged by royal attempts to protect the Indians that the king's representative had to travel to New Spain in disguise in order to offer the royal compromise that averted outright rebellion...
...All of this was justified in the name of civilization, progress, and the manifest destiny of Argentina to extend its rule to the southern tip of the South American continent...
...These views conveniently conceal from us the facts that these societies have shown a remarkable tenacity and resilience, and that if they are destroyed, it is not by abstract laws of history or nature but by the political choices of the powerful, by our willingness to overpower them, and by our unwillingness to live and let live...
...In Mexico, after the revolution of 1910-20, an attempt was made to connect the Indians and the rural poor with the corporate state, to link them through the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party) to the national life...
...The writer continues in despair, "Let us therefore die...
...At best they were to be corralled and made over as despised and counterfeit copies of their conquerors...
...Violence in our time—and we live, arguably, in the most violent century yet—is not especially associated with ethnic divisions that undermine the state...
...Their societies had been decapitated, so their communities constituted the basis of their culture 508 • DISSENT Indians in the Americas and their dignity...
...Gold...
...the very word would be prohibited...
...Brazil's effort to "emancipate" its Indians is only the latest in a long line of measures devised to accomplish similar ends...
...The arguments of people like Las Casas or the Marquess of Pombal, who sought to abolish Indian slavery in Portuguese America, were in the ascendant...
...Such accommodation has to be taught and learned, and it depends on a serious effort to make multicultural, multiethnic systems work...
...The constitutions adopted by the newly independent republics were eloquent about the rights of man but silent about the Indians...
...Fortunately, that debate has been largely avoided, and I do not propose to renew it here...
...They were not held in servitude but were considered wards of the state...
...It was assumed that they would disappear into the mainstream...
...The world— both the New World and the Old World—was dramatically changed forever...
...In the light of this history and of the five-hundred-year effort to eradicate the indigenous cultures of this hemisphere, their resilience is quite remarkable...
...This presented at the time of the conquest, and still presents today, a challenge to every country in the Americas...
...When the U.S...
...The Spaniards were only the first of the European invaders to set about enslaving the Indians, and they did so with occasional misgivings...
...We must make hard choices between the rights of indigenous peoples and the good of the state, between stagnation and development, between progress and pluralism...
...Canada, by contrast, has a much lower level of interpersonal violence, yet that nation's ethnic divisiveness is often held up as an example of the kind of conflict that the United States must at all costs avoid...
...We know that the Europeans brought with them a gold fever that astounded the Indians and a ruthlessness that many of the indigenous peoples discovered too late, but they also brought worse...
...These consequences can be seen FALL • 1993 • 509 Indians in the Americas in the contemporary circumstances and concerns of modern American states...
...to imagine a nation that does not need to extinguish the traditions that nourish it, because it inspires in its citizens a commitment to a transcendent Americanism...
...What kind of a country do we want it to be...
...I see little point in arguing over the relative cruelty of these as opposed to those conquerors...
...They let pestilence loose in the Americas...
...Under this system Indians were tricked or forced into accepting contracts that they did not understand and often tried unsuccessfully to repudiate—contracts that obliged them to work for long periods of time for miserable wages or for payment in kind...
...The Marquess sent his brother to Brazil to enforce the edict, but his brother listened to the colonists and advised Pombal to abolish the Jesuits instead, which he duly did...
...King of kings...
...This was an option only in the regions or countries with the sparsest indigenous populations...
...In the liberal vision of the future there would be no more Indians...
...Why are their concerns treated as a matter of national security...
...In all our current preoccupation with Mexico, how often do we read about the large indigenous population of that country...
...This attitude and this process were not peculiar to the Americas...
...Then he raises the flag...
...The indigenous challenge to the United States is to make a further leap of the imagination, beyond the ideals of democracy and egalitarianism...
...They are doomed by the march of progress and must inevitably disappear...
...What is the contemporary significance of the Indian question in countries where indigenous peoples are an insignificant fraction of the total population...
...Nevertheless, in spite of its shortcomings, it produced a long period of comparative social stability in the Mexican countryside—a stability that is even more remarkable if we compare it with the experience of other American nations...
...The government discovered that it could not FALL • 1993 • 507 Indians in the Americas manage the economy without exacting "the Indian tribute," as it was called...
...All over the world indigenous peoples were being conquered and dispossessed in the name of civilization...
...China...
...The challenge is, What kind of a country is ours...
...They also moved to break up the lands held by indigenous communities, hoping to force the Indians to abandon their traditional ways and to enter the modern labor market...
...In Ecuador, for example, the new constitution adopted in 1852 excluded Indians (the majority of the population) from citizenship...
...Incidentally, serious multiculturalism would require as much effort from minorities that feel they have been wronged as it would from the majority that is accused of excluding them...
...Palaces...
...Consider, for example, the contrasts between Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru, all countries with large indigenous populations...
...they were also affronted by those peoples and communities that held their lands in common...
...They imposed forced labor of various kinds...
...This was enacted by President Benito Juarez, himself part Indian and proud of it, in 1856...
...That cure includes such measures as the tendentious rewriting of history, the introduction of curricula whose main purpose is to make minorities feel good, the denial of any merit to Western civilization, the insistence on adherence to inane standards of political correctness, and the espousal of an anything-goes relativism...
...It had to be abolished repeatedly because each abolition was more theoretical than real, and Indians went on being forced to pay...
...they had no consumption...
...In fact, the defense of indigenous rights is subversive in a different sense...
...Meanwhile, real genocide was committed in the far south, where small populations of nomadic Ona and Yaghan were hunted down and killed like animals by the local sheep fanners...
...In 1879-80 General Roca's campaign, known in Argentine history books as the Conquest of the Desert, was expressly intended to annihilate the Araucanians and to seize and redistribute their lands...
...In his book The Winning of the West, Teddy Roosevelt justified the conquest of the Indians in terms that probably represented the prevailing attitude of the invaders as they moved westward after the Civil War: "The settler and the pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side...
...Many of the Indians did die...
...This was arguably the most extraordinary meeting in the history of humankind...
...In 1821 Simon Bolivar said at the Congress of Clicuta that lands alienated from the Indians in Gran Colombia (corresponding roughly to modern Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador combined) during the tumultuous years leading up to independence should be returned to them "as soon as circumstances permit...
...They did not see why the Jesuits should be allowed to gather Indians in their mission communities while the colonists were deprived of Indian slaves...
...Yet I have just called for sober reflection on the conquest, and this is what I shall attempt...
...In effect, Brazil's indigenous peoples are held to threaten and undermine the state simply by wishing to be themselves, by being reluctant to evaporate into the mainstream...
...The effort to destroy these cultures (ethnocide) was sometimes accompanied by an attempt to destroy the indigenous populations themselves (genocide...
...The assault on indigenous landholding makes for the most remarkable reading of all: it is clear that the invaders not only coveted and seized Indian lands whenever they could...
...Their clashing visions of the future paid scant attention to Indian concerns...
...The only way the Indians could be emancipated, therefore, was if they legally gave up being considered Indian and were thus deprived of their indigenous identity...
...Even the indigenous majority in Peru received scant attention in our newspapers until it was mistakenly reported that the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement was an Indian uprising...
...According to such views, "tribal" or "traditional" societies are obsolescent...
...It is one of the many ironies of the American experience that the invaders created the category of Indians, imposed it on the inhabitants of the New World, and have been trying to 510 • DISSENT Indians in the Americas abolish it ever since...
...The interpreter apologizes to Columbus in the language of Castile...
...In countries with sparse indigenous populations, such as the United States, Indians were considered to have no place in the new nation...
...they had no abdominal pain...
...The classic example of liberal legislation that was put into effect with modernizing intent and had extremely painful consequences for indigenous populations was the Reform Law in Mexico...
...Liberals, on the other hand, sought to break up traditional landholdings in the interest of modernization...
...The issue was recently and powerfully addressed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his book The Disuniting of America...
...We are asked to believe that peoples like the Yanomami, ten thousand strong and outnumbered and outgunned by the miners who have invaded their territory, might wish to link up with their less numerous brethren in Venezuela and form a separate state...
...Alternatively, violence in a country may be comparatively unrelated to ethnic divisiveness...
...Many people feared that the quincentenary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas would reopen the debate over the leyenda negra, with Spanish celebration of their heroic exploits being countered by indigenous insistence on the cruelties of the conquest...
...The independence movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not change this, nor did they do much for indigenous peoples...
...Even the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which is widely thought to be one of the more generous settlements made with indigenous peoples, was drafted to turn Indian communities into corporations and their members into stockholders...
...A third solution is possible: what I call serious multiculturalism...
...This was the Ecuadorian version of a system that proliferated throughout the Americas...
...They took Indian children away from their parents, sometimes by force, to be educated in alien schools that taught them to despise the ways of their peoples and discouraged them from speaking their own languages...
...Two years ago a survey carried out by Cultural Survival* revealed that about 120 shooting wars were going on in the world, 90 of which involved states that were attempting to suppress ethnic minorities...
...This serves as an object lesson, showing what can happen in a country where there has been no social revolution and little social mobilization, and where the elites harbor a fear of the Indian masses, who must therefore be terrorized in order to be kept in their place...
...Columbus curses in Genovese and throws to the ground his credentials, written in Latin and addressed to the Great Khan...
...They could and did rebel if deprived of forced Indian labor...
...Ethnic conflict is a great and legitimate fear, but it is important to see ethnic conflict, and indeed all violence in the modern world, in context...
...I do not think so...
...at worst they were simply to be annihilated...
...Peru, for example, had its own brand of indigenista ideology...
...Temples...
...The New World dilemma was how the invaders were to deal with the indigenous populations of the hemisphere...
...They cannot adjust to the modern world...
...In my view the event deserved to be remembered as an occasion for sober reflection rather than celebration, much as the holocaust in Nazi Europe is something we are constrained to remember without celebration...
...Meanwhile, the insistence of indigenous peoples on being allowed to maintain their own cultures is also considered subversive, for it undermines Brazil's self-image as a melting pot...
...This led to what Osvaldo Hurtado, a modem Ecuadorian 506 • DISSENT Indians in the Americas writer and president of his country, referred to as the "institutionalized illegality of Spanish colonial society...
...It is successful not because it is an indigenous uprising (it is not) but because it has brought Peru to the brink of chaos, due to the fact that the country had never made a sustained effort at national mobilization...
...This accounts for the extraordinary success of the Shining Path movement...
...The rebellions sometimes achieved considerable local success but, being local, were invariably defeated when the imperial power had gathered sufficient force to strike back at the locality...
...At the very least it is intimately related to, and diagnostic of, the forces that have shaped those societies...
...The colonists realized that the attack on indigenous landholding was a perennial and festering source of discontent, but they persevered anyway...
...Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Pol Pot's Cambodia are only the most glaring examples...
...The result of his initiative, however, was that under Porfirio Diaz and his group of advisers, known as the cientificos (scientists), these lands were reconcentrated in the hands of large agribusinesses, while the Indians and the rural poor sank deeply into poverty and peonage...
...The whole process was shot through with cruelty and injustice, with suffering and, yes, heroism...
...It would show instead that Western civilization is capable of renewal, of using its democratic traditions to lead the way into the multiethnic future that awaits us all...
...The effect of the act, if not its intention, is to provide a mechanism for phasing out the native communities altogether...
...It has much to do with a tradition that has bedeviled a number of Latin American countries: passing beautiful laws with little expectation that they will be enforced or observed...
...He argues, however, that the cure for this state of affairs proposed by the multiculturalists is worse than the disease...
...Consider, for example, the colonial debates over the treatment of Indians...
...Beside him the scribe Rodrigo de Escobedo, a man slow of pen, draws up the document...
...Such laws usually resulted from a combination of factors...
...The details are revealing...
...It reunited two portions of humanity that had been separated for forty thousand years, ever since the inhabitants of the Americas had lost touch with their Asiatic forebears...
...His monumental Historia de las Indias was a searing indictment of the conquistadors and is often thought to have been the work that first exposed the leyenda negra, or black legend, of Spanish cruelty in the New World...
...Meanwhile, the evolutionism and racism of the conquerors made the whole process seem inevitable...
...Circumstances never did, however, either in Gran Colombia or anywhere else...
...An official ideology of indigenismo guided national policy toward indigenous peoples...
...Because this was held to be a matter of right triumphing over wrong, no accommodation with the conquered populations was thought to be desirable, and none was sought...
...The new constitutions therefore promised freedom and equality for all, with no mention of the Indians and no special provisions for them...
...Peru relied less on such arrangements and more on taxes levied in cash and in labor directly on the indigenous population...
...Alternatively, the national security doctrine is said to be needed as a defense of Brazilian sovereignty because there has been wild talk in various places about internationalizing the Amazon in order to protect its ecology for the world...
...Future members of the community will not acquire stocks unless stocks are bequeathed to them by those who originally received them...
...Schlesinger admits that the traditional canon of * Cultural Survival was founded in 1972 by Pia and David Maybury-Lewis in collaboration with social scientists from Harvard...
...The liberals demanded freedom for all, including the Indians, but what they meant by this for the Indians was the freedom to cease being Indian altogether...
...Clearly, the quincentenary of such an extraordinary event should have been remembered and marked, but how...
...Juarez's intention was to modernize the country and especially to modernize Mexican agriculture...
...On the contrary, the nineteenth century was an era of such intense pressure on the indigenous peoples of the hemisphere that it could well be referred to as the time of the second conquest...
...In fact, when the crown passed laws protective of the Indians, the colonists regularly flouted them...
...At the same time the system of concertaje was institutionalized...
...FALL • 1993 • 511 Indians in the Americas American culture has reflected the traditions of only part of the country's population, excluding others and making them feel like second-class citizens...
...In this country the demands of indigenous peoples for the right to maintain their own cultures without being relegated to second-class citizenship are deemed deeply subversive, for it is feared that satisfaction of those demands will contribute to the tribalization of American society...
...Nations, as Benedict Anderson so rightly put it, are imagined communities...
...It was thus with a convenient conviction of moral superiority that the invaders constantly tried to break up the communal landholdings of the Indians...
...Is this a hopelessly utopian vision...
...It enabled labor contractors to enter into a concierto, or arrangement (elsewhere referred to less euphemistically as the enganche, or hook) with Indians...
...That hope was not fulfilled...
...Throughout the nineteenth century, then, conservative policies squeezed the Indians, while liberal policies sought to destroy their communities...
...The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived FALL • 1993 • 505 Indians in the Americas here...
...Bishop Bartolome de las Casas was so appalled by the cruelties of the conquerors and the decimation of the indigenous populations that he devoted his life to the Indian cause...
...coarse skin, who wears a velvet cape and very shiny clothes...
...If any country in the Americas could achieve this, it would be the best possible tribute to the civilization that was imposed on the hemisphere five hundred years ago, for it would show that Western civilization was not exhausted (as its critics claim) by the waning of European hegemony...
...I use the analogy deliberately, for it seems to me that the countries with the best chance of making serious multiculturalism work are those that are relatively wealthy and have traditions of democracy, tolerance, and openness—countries, in fact, like the United States and Canada and Australia...
...These Indians, who had stopped the Spanish conquest at the Bio-Bio River and had retained their independence through the three subsequent centuries, were defeated by the army's modem weaponry and reduced to penury and starvation...
...Similar attitudes persist in our own times...
...If these were controlled instead by powerful colonists, then a kind of feudalism was established on the other side of the Atlantic that challenged the power of the kings themselves...
...The ideology is now much criticized by Mexican anthropologists for being paternalistic and assimilationist, something imposed by the state on the Indians...
...Is all this a long way from the Indian question...
...For our Gods are already dead...
...They spoke of an indigenous future, not just for Peru but for the Americas...
...In 1857 slavery was formally abolished, so that black Ecuadorians were emancipated...
...The Europeans considered that concept the very essence of savagery, for it departed from the ideas of private property and individual title to land that were considered central to Western civilization...
...They tend to be the forgotten peoples of the New World...
...It seems to me that an important and essential aspect of that reflection has to be a consideration of what has happened to the indigenous peoples of the Americas since 1492...
...For further information about Cultural Survival's research, publications, projects, networks, and internship program, call 617-621-3818 or write Cultural Survival, 215 First Street, Cambridge MA 02142...
...The analogy comes to mind not because the invaders set out to massacre the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas (sometimes they did, sometimes they did not) but because the immediate consequences of the European invasion constituted the greatest demographic disaster in human history...
...In fact, the Araucanians were not actually annihilated, but they were thought to be...
...At the same time the Iberian monarchs wanted to keep control of Indian communities and Indian labor...
...At that time the course of humanity was orderly...
...In Guatemala and El Salvador, the countries with the largest indigenous populations of Central America, the modernization policies of liberalparty dictators at the end of the nineteenth century forced Indians to carry passbooks showing that they had performed the legally required number of days of labor Indians were thus obliged to work for starvation wages on the coffee plantations...
...The classic example is Argentina, where Araucanian Indians, splendid horsemen with vast herds of cattle, dominated the pampas in the nineteenth century...
...They therefore moved to break up the estates of the great landowners and the Church...
...Yet even if we concede that the suppression of ethnicity can lead to as much bloodletting as its expression, ethnic divisiveness is still a legitimate concern...
...The United States, the argument runs, has avoided such conflict, which we now see raging in other parts of the world, and should continue to do so by insisting on its own melting-pot tradition...
...Such tribalization is held to be dangerous for two reasons: it is thought to undermine American society and culture, and it is thought to lead to interethnic conflict...
...In many countries it was decreed that Indians would no longer be referred to as Indios but would instead be called campesinos (peasants...
...It need not, however, be a renewed insistence that the expression of ethnicity is divisive and that it should be superseded or suppressed by American civic culture...
...Schlesinger asserts, therefore, that the United States should combat multiculturalism, virtually in defense of its own sanity, and that it should insist on its own common culture, taught to its citizens through a curriculum suitably modified to be less exclusionary than before...
...They ceased to exist socially and culturally for nearly a century...
...I agree that the proper corrective to the traditional exclusiveness of the American canon should not be an ethnic chauvinism that replies in kind with chauvinistic countercultures...
...Both policies placed heavy burdens on the Indians, who were treated as a less than fully human labor force...
...The survivors faced a future of slavery, serfdom, or forced labor, unless they were remote enough to defend themselves at the margins of European settlement...
...they had no aching bones...
...At the beginning of his remarkable quartet Memories of Fire, the Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano gives this vivid description of the invasion of the Americas: He falls on his knees, weeps, kisses the earth...
...The alternative that the enveloping society tried to force them to accept was not very attractive...
...The extraordinary concentration of land and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor were clearly two of the most important factors that caused the Mexican Revolution that broke out in 1910...
...But there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater because of those absurdities...
...I think we tend to idealize the peace and social order maintained by the unitary state and to exaggerate the danger to this vision presented by permitting cultural distinctiveness or local autonomy to indigenous peoples or ethnic groups...
...Then he tries his Arabic, the little he knows of it: "Japan...
...They invented a whole series of ways to lure or trick those not already forced to work into peonage through debt (the debt could only be worked off—and only with difficulty...
...That is what makes it so difficult to evaluate or even to treat dispassionately...
...The conservatives demanded freedom from the mother country in order to manage their own affairs and to go on exploiting the Indians...
...It aimed to break up the great haciendas, the large landholdings of the Church, and the communal landholdings of the Indians...
...Indeed, in the United States as well as in Brazil, many people are alarmed by any challenge to the idea that their nation is a melting pot...
...Such measures have been justified over the centuries by arguments that are still used today...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
