The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part six - Cabeza de Vaca and what the Indians wanted (7)
Comments on the account
Examining this account, one can see that Cabeza de Vaca was enabled to make himself useful, during the eight years that he spent with Indian communities, in three ways.
Firstly, he did heavy manual labour. Somebody had to do it, and Cabeza de Vaca was surely a robust addition to the normal labour force of women and old men. The younger Indian men were profoundly averse to manual occupations: working made a man unbearably hungry and spoiled him for hunting.
Now as a matter of fact, the last thing any Spaniard wanted to do in America was to end up working manually. For Cabeza de Vaca as a hidalgo, it would not have been normal even in Spain. He nonetheless found he could do it if he really had to. One might see this as slavery, as he sometimes does himself. But maybe if he had wandered less between tribes and tried harder to assimilate, he might in time have achieved the exempted status – and the authentic visceral horror of work that went with it.
Secondly, he was useful as a trader. There was so much conflict between the Indian communities that no ordinary Indian could have been credible in the merchant’s role. In territories where Spaniards had not yet been seen, Cabeza de Vaca was not recognisably anyone’s enemy. (He did the job so well that he feels a need to explain himself: my real motive, he says, was to see how far I could go.)
His third role is the most interesting. Like everyone else, the Indians wanted the best possible relationship with the gods, or (since Cabeza de Vaca says he never came across idolatry) let’s call them the powers of good and evil fortune. To facilitate this was the task of the medicine man. Evidently the Indian medicine men, who make an impressive showing in their Spanish colleague’s account, understood that the Spaniards could make large contributions in their own field of expertise. Far from resenting them as competitors, they took the Spaniards to lodge in their own quarters, explained to them why they should begin healing, and arranged for material pressure of the most effective kind when the Spaniards showed reluctance. Making all due allowances for Cabeza de Vaca’s gifts as a storyteller, the experiment seems to have been a success. It appears that during the last years of their stay among the Indians the four Spaniards were being led around as celebrities and supermen of the medical art, rather as Jesuits were brought in to conduct spectacular missions in this or that Catholic diocese.
One could draw some conclusions from this. Just as the druids of Ireland, according to Eugene O’Curry and myself, had once felt a need for a more powerful religious system, but without wishing to abandon all that was their own, it appears that the guiding minds in those Indian communities that Cabeza de Vaca encountered felt a need for more powerful spiritual resources. Anyone who could supply those would be met with receptive goodwill. The peacefully-preached Catholicism advocated by Bartolomé de Las Casas had a good deal going in its favour. Of course, once the Indians made it their own this Catholicism might turn out rather odd (like Catholicism in Ireland), if judged by a strict Roman standard. But as preacher after preacher would complain for centuries to come, Catholicism among the Indians would be odd in any case. Las Casas-style Catholicism might still have achieved an unmatched pre-eminence, but without the destructive long-term effects on the native Indian populations resulting from the violent imposition and maintenance of Christian power.
Juan F. Maura is irritated by supercilious Anglo-Saxons commenting on Spanish history, and understandably so. Would the Indian populations of Latin America have done better, he asks, if they had come under the rule of the British? Surely, a glance at the history of North America suggests that they would actually have fared worse? The native Indian populations would now be much smaller, and the Creole populations would be smaller also, since the Anglo-Saxons (at least since they took their Puritan turn) did not like to mix. – Those are valid points. But they should not cloud the issues which were raised in Spain and Spanish America in the early 16th century, before the Anglo-Saxons had yet shown what they were capable of doing to large parts of the world.