Myths of the Spanish Conquest
Introduction:
This is a several part series on the myths of European conquest of the Americas written by a Mesoamerican historian on
r/AskHistorians and r/badhistory (no joke!). The genesis for the idea is Matthew Restall’s wonderful book Seven Myths of the
Spanish Conquest, as well as the wish to provide something interesting to my audience. They borrow the idea of debunking common
myths, and several examples from Restall, while adding in information either gleaned from their studies, and information other
wonderful Amerindian scholars have taught them. While you read, annotate in the margins – be sure to define and Spanish terms you
do not know to facilitate easier reading – then, answer the following questions in depth.
1. What is the common narrative or myth, according to the author? How is the myth usually supported or
characterized?
2. What is the MAIN argument of the author in “the reality” section? Provide at least 2-3 key points of evidence that
counter the common narrative.
3. How does the argument of the author differ from the established narrative / myth? Explain.
4. What is the significance of this challenge to the traditional narrative?
Myth 1: A Handful of Europeans Topple Empires
Bluntly stated, this myth holds that Europeans were so stinking awesome that it only took a few white guys armed with
steel weapons, firearms, horses, and a few bad pathogens to take down the largest empires in the Americas. For those
who think I’m setting up a strawman from the beginning, here you go…
“At the battle of Cajamarca recounted above, 168 Spaniards crushed a Native American army 500 times more numerous,
killing thousands of natives while not losing a single Spaniard. Time and again, accounts of Pizarro’s subsequent battles
with the Incas, Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs, and other early European campaigns against Native Americans describe
encounters in which a few dozen European horsemen routed thousands of Indians with great slaughter.” (Guns, Germs
and Steel, p.75)
At its root, the handful of adventurers myth embraces the “great men” narrative of history. To quote Restall:
“in its absolute form the “great men” approach ignores the roles played by larger processes of social change. It fails to
recognize the significance of context and the degree to which the great men are obliged to react to- rather than fashionevents, forces, and the many other human being around them.” (p.4)
Now, we’ll touch on the creation of the conquistador myth by following the paper trail detailing their exploits.
After conquistadores completed their battles, they were required to provide a review of their exploration, conquest and
settlement. These probanza de mérito served to update the monarch on events in newly conquered land, as well as
petition for rewards like offices, titles and pensions. Since the document required authors to lobby for their own gain,
probazas naturally paint the author in the best, most courageous light, while ignoring the influential role of other
conquistadores, native allies, and pure dumb luck. The greatest rewards went to the best shameless self-promotors, and
the rules of the game rewarded those willing to stab their compatriots in the back (sometimes literally) in the hope of
future gain.
Probanzas written by hopeful conquistadores looking for reward flooded back to Spain. They developed their own genre,
with their own accepted writing style, format, and rules of construction as thousands arrived at the court in Seville.
Probanzas evolved into chronicles, like Bernal Diaz’s Conquest of Mexico, and provided justification not only for the
actions of individual conquistadores, but also, in a larger sense, justified imperial expansion to bring civilization and
Christianity to the New World. Uncritically examining these documents for a history of conquest is akin to writing a
biography based on your embellished résumé. Sure, some elements of reality emerge, but when the whole point is to
make yourself, your monarch, and your god look supreme, truth becomes a flexible concept.
Unlike the majority that were likely not even seen by royal eyes, Cortés’s cartas were published and translated into five
languages, grew immensely in popularity, and were subject to royal ban as his cult of personality became a political threat
to the crown. His status only increased with Gomara’s hagiography in 1552. Again, the crown tried to suppress that as
well. Among modern English speakers, we inherit the cult of Cortés, and to a lesser extent Pizarro, through Prescott’s
The History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), and The History of the Conquest of Peru (1847). Prescott used the cartas,
probanzas, and previous works like Gomara’s to produce a story of conquest rooted in the mindset of imperial expansion
common to mid-nineteenth century Americas. Though Prescott’s books were written more than a century and a half ago,
they are still read by popular writers and laymen who fail to critically examine both the bias in his sources, as well as the
cultural influences underlying his own work. In the modern popular narrative, Cortés and Pizarro are upheld as the
ideal conquistadores, the representatives of how Europeans toppled powerful nations not fit to withstand entry into a
modern world.
The Reality: The Fates of Other Conquistadores
The myth of Cortés obscures a simple reality of conquest: many conquistadores failed, losing their lives and fortunes in
the quest for riches. In North America, most of the original attempts to gain a foothold on the continent ended in
disaster.
The inhabitants of the New World didn’t simply surrender, or run away with the sound of gunpowder, or quake at the
sight of men riding horses. They resisted, accommodated, developed alliances with, or consolidated against, Europeans
arriving on their shores. Native communities used the Spanish for their own ends, and dynamically adapted to the
changing political landscape that accompanied Spanish colonial outposts. Future write-ups on the myths of conquest will
focus on the myths of completion of conquest, the myth of Native American inactivity/hopelessness/inability to change
after contact, and the inevitable decline narrative. For right now, though, here is a quick look at the ends for several
major North American entradas just to show that Cortés’ “success” was an outlier…
•
•
•
•
•
Juan Ponce de Leon’s second journey to Florida ended in disaster shortly after landing on the Gulf Coast.
Calusas attacked his party, wounding de Leon with an arrow. The entrada returned to Cuba, where de Leon died
of his wounds.
Lucas de Ayllón mortgaged his fortune to mobilize a group of 600 colonists to head toward the U.S. southeast.
He established San Miguel de Gualdape, the first Spanish settlement in what is now the United States. The
colonists arrived too late in the season to plant, and fell ill, likely due to contaminated water sources. After
Ayllón succumbed to illness, the colony fractured and abandoned San Miguel. Less than 150 colonists survived
to limp back to Hispaniola.
After losing an eye fighting Cortés at Cempoala in Mexico, Narváez was appointed adelantado of Florida. His
unfortunate decision to split his land and sea forces after landing near Tampa Bay was but one of many
disastrous mistakes. Hunger, hostilities with the Apalachee, and illness diminished the strength of the land
forces, who failed to reconnect and resupply with their sea-based comrades. Narváez decided to skirt the gulf
coast back to Mexico, and died on a make-shift raft blown out into the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston, Texas.
Only four men, including the famous Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, survived the final overland journey through Texas
and into northern Mexico.
Hernando de Soto survived the conquest of Peru, only to die on the banks of the Mississippi after pillaging his
way through the southeast. The exact location of his grave remains unknown and the tattered remnants of his
forces limped south to the Gulf of Mexico.
The entrada into New Mexico bankrupted Francisco de Coronado. He died in Mexico City, exonerated of
changes of crimes against the Native Americans, likely because the magistrate considered him a broken man
“more fit to be governed… than govern”. Coronado’s chief lieutenant faced similar charges of brutality, was tried
in Spain, found guilty, and died in prison.
Far from universal dominance of primitive peoples who lacked the technology to resist, examining the fates of
conquistadores in North America shows the messy, violent, and complex side of contact, both for Spaniards trying to
win their fortune in the New World as well as the inhabitants they encountered. Technological “superiority” meant
nothing when faced with overwhelming numbers, poor terrain, dedicated resistance, absence of food reserves to support
a pillaging army, and a lack of logistical support to maintain frontier outposts. Upholding Cortés and the Myth of the
Conquest of Mexico as the model for Spanish success provides a false perspective on the nature of contact in the early
colonial period. A handful of adventurers never toppled an empire, and conquest would be a constant battle, a constant
negotiation, enacted over the course of centuries.
Myth 2: Cortés Conquered the Aztec Empire
This myth is closely linked to the “Handful of Adventurers” narrative, which holds Europeans were so stinking awesome
that it only took a few white guys armed with steel weapons, firearms, horses, and a smattering of bad pathogens to take
down the largest empires in the Americas. In the popular perception, a dozen or a hundred Europeans wrestled control
of the New World from Native Americans kept at bay by poor technology or fear of the white guy’s guns and horses.
Part One of the write-ups in this series addressed how the rules of the conquistador game rewarded shameless selfpromotion when lobbying the crown for offices, titles, and pensions. While Part One established that self-promoting
embellishments often occurred at the expense of comrades, or, you know, the truth, this post examines the roll of native
allies. Here, we’ll highlight how the absence of Native American allies from Spanish documents, and the popular
narrative, completely misconstrues the narrative of the fall of Tenochtitlan.
The Reality: A Native American Civil War Aided by Spanish Outlaws
Viewed from Tlaxcalan perspective, the small band Europeans provided the impetus to strike against the ruling Mexica
while minimizing their own losses. Cortés entered a complex web of Triple Alliance political intrigue when he marched
inland from Veracruz. His tendency to destroy everything and everyone he touched made him a violent and
unpredictable, though potentially useful, ally. Though Cortés managed to capitalize eventually, he came close to absolute
disaster at least five times before the fall of Tenochtitlan. In the end, his small force complemented a massive native
army of hundreds of thousands that eventually destroyed the Triple Alliance capital.
By way of background, the Mexica allied with Texcoco and Tlacopan to form the Triple Alliance in 1430, and over the
next ninety years engaged in a series of conquests that expanded their area of influence in central and southern Mexico.
Some city-states, like Tlaxcala, managed to
maintain their independence but constantly
lived in the shadow of an aggressive, expansive
neighbor. Once conquered, subordinate citystates and their elite ruling class typically
remained intact after incorporation into the
empire. Local elites controlled the tribute and
were often integrated into the Triple Alliance
Empire ruling class through marriage. Personal
loyalty was directed to the city-state, not the
greater empire, and frequent revolts required
the rapid deployment of soldiers from the core
cities to quell rebellions. Through the period of
expansion, the Mexica gradually rose to
preeminence among the three original alliance
members.
After scuttling his fleet off the Veracruz coast, Cortés and his crew of --450 fighting men had their asses handed to them
in a battle with the independent city state of Tlaxcala. Seriously, they were surrounded and isolated on a hilltop. Even
Bernal Díaz del Castillo admitted they were doomed. Despite near annihilating the Spanish forces, the ruler of Tlaxcala
(Maxixcatzin) demanded a halt in hostilities against the advice of his commander in the field (Cortés: 1; Death: 0). The
Tlaxcala sought to use these new arrivals as allies in the ongoing fight against the Triple Alliance, and gave Cortés safe
haven. When Cortés departed Tlaxcala for Cholula, a prominent city and religious center allied with the Triple Alliance,
his forces augmented --1,000 Tlaxcala soldiers.
The Tlaxcala army, with Cortés auxiliaries, arrived to a frigid reception in Cholula. Cholula should have been a suicide
mission. Cortés really had no reason to risk attacking the city. Tlaxcala and Cholula’s history of animosity created
significant tension and there is evidence the Tlaxcala convinced Cortés the Cholula planned to murder him. Cortés
responded to the tension and intrigue in typical Cortés fashion: he massacred the elites while the Tlaxcala army burned
the city (Cortés: 2; Death: 0).
Cortés marched on Tenochtitlan with the Tlaxcala army of --6,000 warriors (Gómara’s estimate). He managed to mangle
the most basic forms of diplomacy, and decided the best course of action was to capture Moctezuma and hold him for
ransom in his own capital. When Pánfilo de Narváez landed on the coast to arrest Cortés for mutiny/treason the
situation grew even more desperate. An anxious Cortés left --150 Spaniards in Tenochtitlan, somehow managed to
defeat Narváez, and marched back to the Triple Alliance capital with 1,300 Spaniards plus additional Tlaxcala allies
(Cortés: 3; Death: 0). In Tenochtitlan, a new leader, Cuitláhuac, was elected in place of the captive Moctezuma. When
the Spanish murdered Moctezuma, and many Mexica elites, the fragile peace dissolved and the capital erupted in
violence. The Spanish and their Tlaxcala allies tried to escape the capital across a narrow causeway, surrounded by
Mexica troops on either side (kinda like this). More than 600 Spaniards and thousands of Tlaxcala perished as they tried
to cut their way out of the capital (Cortés: 4; Death: 0).
Tlaxcalans guided Cortés to safety, harried and hard pressed by the Mexica on the way to Tlaxcala (Cortés: 5; Death: 0).
Far from providing Cortés free room and board, the Tlaxcala demand a share of the spoils once Tenochtitlan fell, as well
as the city of Cholula, freedom from future taxes, and the right to build a citadel in Tenochtitlan. Cortés was in no place
to refuse. His weakened soldiers couldn’t fight on, and charges of mutiny/treason awaited his return to Cuba even if he
returned. With ingenuity born of absolute necessity, he aided the Tlaxcala in planning the attack against Tenochtitlan.
Six months of Tlaxcala plotting and accruing allies followed. The final force brought to the siege of Tenochtitlan
included the Tlaxcala, Texcoco, Huexotzinco, Atlixco, Chalca, Alcohua, and Tepanecs. After two and a half months of
siege aided by a disastrous smallpox epidemic, a massive Native American army and the Cortés auxiliaries entered
Tenochtitlan and destroyed the city. All told, < 2,000 Spaniards and --200,000 native allies fought in the two-year
campaign.
The use of native allies (and Native American and African slaves), or capitalizing on civil wars, was crucial to Alvarado’s
campaign into Guatemala as well as Pizarro’s war in the Inca Empire. This reliance on Native Americans as the majority
of an invading army would continue as Spanish conquest spread out from the Triple Alliance heartland. The
Huejototzingo, who composed a vital portion of the besieging force surrounding Tenochtitlan, continued to ally with
the Spanish in subsequent conquests. In 1560 the Huejototzingo rulers, in proper self-promoting form, wrote to the
Spanish crown saying:
“we never abandoned or left them. And as they went to conquer Michoacan, Jalisco and Colhuacan, and at Pánuco and
Oaxaca and Tehuantepec and Guatemala, we were the only ones who went along while they conquered and made war here
in New Spain.”
When Coronado invaded the Pueblos along the Rio Grande the entrada consisted of --400 European soldiers and several
thousand Native American allies.
Our popular narrative places the Spanish “great men” at the forefront of conquest, while simultaneously stripping
Native American populations of agency. In the popular narrative, Native Americans are rocked back on their heels by
conquest, forced into cower in constant reactionary positions, instead of driving events for their own purpose and gain.
By examining the complex web of alliances and grievances that drove Triple Alliance politics a different image of
conquest emerges. The Tlaxcala used Cortés to fight against an old foe, and later against Tenochtitlan itself, while
Cortés used the Tlaxcala to win gold/glory in the hopes of avoiding execution for mutiny and treason. Viewed from this
perspective, Cortés was not an ideal conquistador, and tales of superhuman feats of conquest erode in favor of a richer
human drama.
The Spanish “Military/Technological Advantage”
First of all, it's debatable whether the Spaniards had an advantage when it came to guns, cannon and horses. You raise
that yourself by asking "did they really carry enough gunpowder, bullets and cannon balls to defeat Aztec and Incan
armies hundreds of times their size?" Not really. Arquebuses were not the most common armament in Cortés'
expedition, and the indigenous atlatl, or spear-thrower, could easily outstrip them in both range and rate of fire, without
relying on finicky gunpowder in humid conditions.
The conquistador Andrés de Tapia records their ferocious long-range capability: “The foot soldiers headed straight
forward over the canals… and from the other side shot many arrows and spears at us, and stones from slings. Although
we killed some of them with certain field pieces we had, and with the crossbows, they did us much damage…”
Furthermore, with regards to all three pieces of military technology you mention, there are conquest accounts of
indigenous warriors learning how to deal with them. Cortés recounts in his Third Letter how, during a skirmish,
warriors from Tesaico deliberately waited for Spanish horsemen to enter a steep valley, which naturally necessitated
dismounting, before springing an ambush, negating the efficacy of Spanish cavalry.
He goes on to describe a hillside skirmish near Chalco, where not even a triple-pronged flanking attack was enough to
shift the indigenous warriors from their hilltop position that afforded protection from cavalry charges. Whilst the cavalry
certainly helped rescue Spanish soldiers from dire circumstances, the indigenous warriors quickly learned how to
neutralise their effect when opportunity afforded it.
As for gunfire, Book twelve of the Florentine Codex records how ‘when the Mexica had been able to see and judge how
the guns hit, or the iron bolts, they no longer went straight, but went back and forth, going from one side to the other,
zigzagging.’ Not only quick to appreciate the drawbacks of small-arms fire, the warriors also learned how to minimise
damage from larger weapons.
As the Codex tell us, ‘when they saw that the big gun was about to go off, everyone hit the ground, spread out on the
ground, crouched down, and the warriors quickly went in among the houses.’ By the time of the incident being
referenced, the Aztecs had experienced fewer than two months of hostilities with the Spanish, yet their warriors had
already picked up sniper evasion and artillery protection tactics that are still in use today.
The military strategies they used to defeat such huge armies were essentially using similarly huge armies of dissident
Nahua states. Estimates vary, but Cortés' native allies by the time of the final siege of Tenochtitlan certainly numbered in
the tens of thousands, and whilst European technology might change the balance of individual scraps, it was the vast
amount of native allies that allowed the conquest to happen the way it did. It's a fatal error to assume that a few hundred
plucky Spaniards managed to single-handedly cut their way across Mexico and overthrow an (albeit struggling) empire.
Myth 3: Spain Controlled a People Conquered, Reduced, and Pacified
“By divine will I have placed under the lordship of the King and Queen, Our Lords, another world, thanks to which Spain, once called poor,
is now the richest.” –Christopher Columbus (1500)
Though we might not go as far as Columbus, who in 1500 pronounced the entire New World under the lordship of the
Spanish crown, we inherit a popular narrative of contact that emphasizes completion of conquest. After the brave
exploits of a few conquistadores, colonists and missionaries submerge Native American communities and culture,
creating a peaceful, conquered people either expressly loyal to the Spanish crown too disheartened to object. The worst
versions of the narrative read like an analysis of capture the flag: a conquistador topples the capital, or establishes a
beachhead, and announces “Game Over!” as the native populace meekly accepts defeat and vanishes from the historical
record. Even Prescott, one of the most influential U.S. historians of the nineteenth century states, “the history of the
Conquest of Mexico terminates with the surrender of the capital.”
Here, we’ll return briefly to the evidence of conquest, examine how the process of claiming title over lands required local
authorities to present a completed invasion, with a pacified indigenous population. Personal claims complemented the
larger Spanish imperial justification of conquest as guided by divine providence and required by the pope’s order.
Together, these attempts to validate personal, as well as imperial expansion, established conquest as complete,
interpreted resistance as rebellion, and imbued an unfinished conquest with an air of inevitable success.
As background, during the exploration and conquest of the New World the Spanish crown sold licenses to
explore/conquer/rule a specific region. Adelantados bore the cost of mounting the hazardous expeditions into the
unknown, and successful invaders would gain from the production of their land, after the crown took it’s quinto (one
fifth of spoils and taxes). The crown benefited substantially from selling these grants. Instead of devoting prohibitively
expensive military resources to control land in the New World, these contracts placed the financial burden for territorial
expansion on would-be conquistadores. The crown gained potential income from new lands, and contractually held the
ability to regulate extremes of conquistador behavior if they failed to comply with the terms of the contract.
Punishments for abuses or failure to act in a timely manner ranged from imprisonment, to substantial fines, or revoking
the original license. Adelantados were thus placed under extreme pressure to maintain the resources required for a
successful entrada, establish a permanent base of operations, find something that made the new colony immediately
economically viable to recoup their losses and continue to hold crown support (hence the interest in precious metals),
and convince the crown the local population posed no threat to their endeavors.
Presenting their lands as both worthy of conquest and easily conquered emerged as common theme for adelantados
attempting to validate their position and maintain continued royal support. The formulaic writing style stressed not only
a completely conquered native population, but one willing to submit both to Spanish rule and the Catholic faith,
regardless of the facts. Based in religious terminology, and with papal support that acted as a divine grant of land for
Castile and Portugal, “claims of possession became the same as possession itself” (Restall, p.68).
Queen Isabel stated in 1501 that the vast number of inhabitants populating the New World were “subjects and vassals”
and should “pay to us our tributes and rights”. Just nine years after Columbus landed, and before anyone had any idea
the vastness of the Americas, all inhabitants in lands claimed by Spain were subjects of the crown, they just didn’t know
it yet. Based in these terms, Native American resistance to conquest became an unholy rebellion, and violent resistance
an illegal infringement on colonial peace. Since conquistadores were fighting rebels against the crown and the Catholic
faith, military campaigns were undertaken for pacification (not conquest). Since resistance leaders were rebels, they
could be tried and executed for treason, their followers legally enslaved for rebellion (despite the official ban on native
slavery within the empire). I’ll quote Restall here because I can’t put it better…
“This pattern can be seen in the Yucatan as well as in virtually every region of Spanish America. Having founded a new
colonial capital in 1542, named Mérida, the Spaniards in Yucatan declared the Conquest achieved and set about
“pacifying” the peninsula. But as they controlled only a small corner of it, they were obliged to engage in major military
hostilities with one Maya group after another, encountering particularly strong resistance in the northeast in the late 1540s.
This was clearly an episode in a conquest war now in its third decade, but just as the Spaniards had already declared the
Conquest complete so did they now classify this resistance as a rebellion… This was used to justify the execution of captives,
the use of display violence (notably the hanging of women), and the enslaving of 2,000 Mayas of the region. Four centuries
later, historians were still calling this “The Great Maya Revolt.”” (p. 69)
The myth of a completed conquest protected adelantados from a revoked license, while simultaneously allowing them the
legal use of increased force to subdue rebellion. Little wonder conquest narratives adopt an air of inevitability to the
process of conquest. Adelantados, local officials, and the greater empire hoped and prayed their military endeavors would
succeed. Until they established complete control over lands granted to them by the crown, the rules of the empire
rewarded those who maintained the fiction of an uncomplicated, completed conquest. If we inherit an inevitable
narrative of conquest it is only because, in hindsight, we read the hopes of adelantados as truth.
The Reality: Slowly Growing Spanish Influence in a Land of Rebellion, Revolt, and Resistance
“But many kingdoms and provinces were not totally or entirely conquered, and there were left among other provinces and kingdoms great
portions of them unconquered, unreduced, unpacified, some of them not even yet discovered.” – Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor (1701)
Now, let’s highlight well-known conflicts to illustrate the protracted nature of conquest. Here I will briefly address some
of the better-known rebellions to show the temporal and geographic spread of resistance throughout the empire despite
official claims of completion. This is by no means an exhaustive list.
•
•
•
•
•
The popular narrative states the Inca Empire fell in 1532 with Atahualpa’s capture and execution. Some may
argue a later completion date when troops loyal to the Inca lifted the siege of Cuzco in 1536. After these
setbacks, the Inca established an independent state until the final Inca, Túpac Amaru, was executed in 1572.
Instead of rapid conquest won by the great conquistador Pizarro, that is nearly four decades of fighting. Even
after Túpac Amaru’s death, large portions of Tawantinsusyu continued to violently oppose Spanish advances.
Though capital of Mérida was established in the Yucatan in 1542, and officially the conquest of the Maya
claimed. However, independent peoples abounded on the peninsula. Both military conquest and peaceful
Franciscan attempts to incorporate the independent kingdoms failed. Petén remained independent, and
accepted refugees fleeing from Spanish controlled areas. The last independent kingdom, Itza, finally fell in 1697,
a century and a half after Spaniards raised the “Mission Accomplished” banner in Mérida.
The Chichimeca War pitted Spanish expansion against the Chichimeca confederacy only eight years after Spain
failed to completely extinguish the Mixtón Rebellion. For four decades the Chichimeca attacked neighboring
Native Americans allied to the Spanish, as well as caravans in and out of the vitally important mining towns of
Zacatecas. Between 1550 and 1600 the conflict cost more Spanish lives than any previous military conflict in
Mexico (Altman et al., 2003). The futility of military maneuvers against the guerilla tactics used by the
Chichimeca required a shift in Spanish methods of conquest. New policies emphasized the use of missions to
establish peaceful trade, as well as the relocation of firmly loyal Native American allies (in this case the
Tlaxcalan) to both act as buffers to the violence and lead the Chichimeca to peace by example.
After ninety years of near-constant tension since the first attempts at conquest, the Spanish frontier in New
Mexico collapsed in 1680. The Pueblo Revolt ousted the Spanish from New Mexico for twelve years and
jeopardized the entire northern frontier of the empire during a time when the Spanish feared growing French
and English advances.
The Yaqui Wars, started by Spain and inherited by Mexico, were a source of constant conflict from the late
1600s until 1929. Along with the end of the Caste War against the Maya, the termination of the Yaqui Wars
marked the last of centuries of conflict that ranged throughout Mexico.
The myth of the completion of conquest relies on an uncritical examination of the primary sources, as well as a denial of
the constant tensions underlying Spanish control throughout the Americas. Instead of one initial battle led by the
conquistadores of legend, this view of conquest shows how near constant armed expeditions and military actions were
required to both expand the borders, and maintain control, of a geographically widespread and ethnically diverse
empire. Though we tend to view these conflicts as isolated revolts or rebellions, they represent the extension of the fight
for conquest that existed throughout the Spanish Empire in the Americas.
Native American populations used a variety of methods to oppose conquest. Here we highlighted the armed conflicts,
but further posts will show how, for many Native Americans, the Spanish presence was a protracted invasion.
Opposition to such an invasion required a mixed response of accommodation and resistance, as well as everyday
methods of maintaining the autonomy, both legal and illegally.
Myth 4: Complete Miscommunication
Two opposite views on communication between Native Americans and the Spanish dominate the narrative of conquest.
On one extreme, contemporary Spanish accounts said their reading of official claims to territory were understood by the
Native American population in question. Conveniently, this perspective supported a completed conquest narrative
whose terms were agreeable to the conquered nations.
The focus of this post is more on the other extreme: the myth that the geographic, linguistic, and cultural divide
between Spaniards and Native Americas completely prevented the two parties from understanding each other. At best,
communication devolved into a pantomime or comedy of errors. In the worst version of this narrative all manner of
racist stereotypes support a naïve/superstitious/outright stupid Indian, and a haughty/oblivious/ignorant Spaniard,
both incapable of understanding anything outside their previous frame of reference.
The theme of total miscommunication emerged early in conquest narratives. Bartolomé de las Casas critically
emphasized the crude pantomime employed by Columbus during his voyages, as well as Columbus’ continual failure to
understand the Caribbean natives. The narrative of miscommunication continued for centuries, and when combined
with the atrocities that accompanied initial conquest, helped fuel the Black Legend. An extreme interpretation of the
myth even led Margarita Zamora to argue Columbus had aphasia (a language disorder due to brain damage) that
rendered him incapable of comprehending what he heard and witnessed in the Americas. Worst versions of the myth
assume the Spanish too proud to learn native languages, regardless of circumstance, as the imperial Juggernaut plowed
through the New World.
Conversely, other myths of miscommunication posit Native Americans were doomed to defeat because they could not
read the human signs accompanying an invading force. Popular theories of misunderstanding by Native Americans
appeal to ludicrous stereotypes such as inherently peaceful Indians who can’t understand war, or easily startled Indians
continually ran away from guns because they go boom (for more info on conquest military history see /u/pseudogentry’s
answer on how the Aztec quickly adapted battle tactics to deal with cavalry and cannon). One of my least favorite, and
sadly common, myths of miscommunication is the myth that the Aztecs saw Cortés as an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl. I
don’t have the room to address the myth, but for a superb analysis check out /u/snickeringshadow’s post here. /u/400Rabbits likewise addresses the myth that Native Americans thought horsemen were centaurs. You get the idea. Lots of
racist badhistory involving misunderstanding and miscommunication is used to explain conquest.
Here, we’ll address the various methods of establishing a baseline for communication. We’ll see how the Spanish and
various Native American populations came to understand each other’s intentions, even if perfect communication lagged
behind.
The Reality: Communication Through Translators and Context
The second post of this series addressed the vital, yet invisible, role of Native American allies. Another form of invisible
ally oft removed from the popular narrative is the role of translator. The assumption of initial contact conducted
through pantomime may apply for the very first encounters, but humans communicate through a variety of mediums.
Spaniards and Native Americans quickly developed methods of communication, both verbal and contextual.
A common conquest method for developing translators involved luring, or outright forcing, a few inquisitive or unlucky
young Native Americans onto ships during an initial, exploratory voyage. The reconnaissance voyage returned to a safe
harbor, and the kidnapped Native Americans learned Spanish in preparation for their later role as translators during the
entrada. As an example, Pizarro kidnapped two boys from the Peruvian coast in 1528. The young men were taken to
Spain, learned Spanish, and accompanied the Conquest of Peru in 1531. They acted as translators during the famous
showdown in Cajamarca in 1532 that resulted in Atahuallpa’s capture. The translators were rewarded for their service.
Pizarro granted at least one of the two men, Martinillo, a share of the Cajamarca spoils. Martinillo changed his name to
Don Martín Pizarro and settled in Lima as the Interpreter General with two encomiendas to his name.
Shipwrecked or captive Spaniards were valued in Native American communities as translators and their ability to
provide insight into European aims. As an example, in Florida the de Soto entrada encountered Juan Ortiz, a Spaniard
captured while searching for the lost Narváez * expedition. Ortiz learned the Timucua language during his years in
Florida and served as a translator while de Soto rampaged through the region. De Soto said of Ortiz, “This interpreter
puts new life into us, for without him I know not what would become of us.” Ortiz refused wear Spanish dress while
traveling with de Soto, and preferred the company of his Mocoso friends, possibly indicating his desire to keep them
informed of Spanish intentions.
Kidnapped Native American translators could also escape their captives and return to their homeland armed with new
languages and valuable insight into European objectives. Don Luis de Velasco, a Native American abducted from the
Virginia tidewater region in 1561 returned in 1571 with Franciscans establishing a mission near the James River. Don
Luis escaped and returned with an armed party that killed the Franciscan fathers. We may never know for sure, but
there is sufficient reason to believe Don Luis was Opechancanough (“He Whose Soul is White”), brother of paramount
chief Powhatan/Wahunsenacawh. Openchancanough would later advise his brother to violently oppose English
settlement at Jamestown. His insight led Powhatan/Wahunsenacawh to expand the Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom to
better oppose Spanish encroachment in the years preceding the English arrived in Virginia.
Even when clunky, Native Americans and Spaniards used any means possible to communicate. The Conquest of Mexico
famously required two translators. A shipwrecked Spaniard who lived for eight years among the Maya, Gerónimo de
Aguilar, translated Spanish to Maya, and Dona Marina/La Malinche, a Nahua noblewoman from the frontier of
Nahuatl-speaking central Mexico, then translated Maya to Nahuatl. The clunky Nahuatl to Maya to Spanish translation
was abandoned once Dona Marina/La Malinche learned Spanish and could directly translate from Nahuatl to Spanish.
Her constant presence near Cortés eventually led the Nahaus to dub Cortés Malinche, “as though captain and
interpreter were one” (Restall, p. 83). As a final aside, I’ll include a brief mention of the many Catholic missionaries who
worked to learn Native American languages. Documents like the Castilian-Timucuan catechism and confessional
published in Mexico City in 1612 constitute the earliest surviving text of a North American Indian language.
As this very brief overview attempted to show, the post-contact New World was a dynamic place with multiple methods
for establishing communication through spoken language. Though we would be naïve to assume untrained translators,
acting in tense situations and under immediate time constraints, adequately explained the complete context of
convoluted messages like the Requerimiento, the myth of compete confusion does not represent the reality of
communication during conquest. When words fail, humans read into another’s intentions and desires. Columbus could
discern hostility when he approached a new island in the Caribbean and…
“one of the Indians advanced into the river near the prow of the boat, and delivered a long speech…the Admiral…saw the
face of the Indian whom he had taken with him, and who understands the language, change color, turn yellow as wax, and
tremble mightily while saying by signs that the Admiral should leave the river because they sought to kill him.” -Bartolome
de las Casas
Columbus understood the danger of his situation without comprehending a word of the man’s speech. Likewise,
Caribbean natives from burning, plundered villages understood a raider’s goals and intentions before they could speak a
word of Spanish, or the Spanish a word of Taíno. The chiefdoms in the southeast, and the Pueblos in New Mexico
understood pillaging during de Soto and Coronado’s entradas, and continually pointed the Spaniards onward to a
(fictional) rich neighbor to usher the invaders away from their homeland.
The myth of miscommunication does not accurately capture the human capacity to converse either through rapid
language acquisition, or the context of acts of aggression or peaceful encounters, or the multiple nonverbal cues that
communicate our intent in the absence of a shared language. Sure there were miscues, and honest mistakes, and
outright refusals to attempt to make themselves understood on all sides, but “forms and moments of miscommunication
were more than equaled by more or less successful readings of the statements and intentions of the foreigners” (Restall,
p. 98). The myth of two alien species encountering each other for the first time fails to explain the outcome of conquest.
Myth 5: Native American Surrender, Desolation, and Extinction
The myth of native desolation incorporates multiple sub-myths to form a greater narrative painting post-contact
Americas as an apocalyptic wasteland. Shattered remnants and refugees, mere shells of a once proud and numerous
people, try in vain to survive in a new world of death and disease following Spanish contact. Conversely, if you think
there wasn’t much here in the first place, the Spanish sweep away the few inhabitants of the New World, unveiling a
pristine paradise ripe for European colonization. Restall states:
“In its most extreme form, this perspective not only emphasizes depopulation and destruction, but perceives a more
profound desolation amounting to a state of anomie. When a society is in a state of anomie its individuals are suffering
from a sense of futility, emotional emptiness, psychological despair, and a confusion over the apparent breakdown of
previous systems of value and meaning.” (p.102)
The myth of native desolation incorporates many individual myths either encountered in previous posts, or myths I plan
to address in the future. These sub-myths include the completion of conquest, the universal application of a > 95%
mortality figure, the inevitable decline narrative, and the myth of a simple/static people incapable of adapting to the
challenges of contact.
Native desolation can be traced to growing European religious turmoil and the publications of early relaciónes, like those
of Bartolomé de las Casas, that described, in great detail, a litany of atrocities in the first years of contact. Relaciónes
fueled the construction of the Black Legend, a narrative that developed concurrent with growing English-Spanish
hostility and the repercussions of the Reformation. The Black Legend painted Roman Catholic Spaniards as brutal,
violent colonists inhumanly subjugating the poor inhabitants of the New World. The narrative emphasized desolate
Native American populations wilting away under the burning sun of Spanish oppression, conveniently leaving
Protestant colonists free of blame.
Threads of the Black Legend persisted in Protestant populations into the eighteenth century where the myth was
common knowledge among the English, Dutch, and Prussian citizens of the newly minted United States. Recently, the
universal application of catastrophic mortality due to introduced infectious disease re-emphasized the myth of native
desolation in the popular consciousness.
This write-up will revolve around the larger theme of Native American desolation after contact. Again, the popular
narrative of conquest strips Native American populations of agency, forcing them into reactionary positions instead of
participating on their own terms. The third post, A Completed Conquest, examined resistance through armed conflict.
Here we’ll focus on the abundant evidence of cultural persistence that underscores vibrant communities surviving,
adapting, and renewing in the wake of contact. I’ll address the greater myth of desolation, and provide a brief overview
of how Native American communities in Mexico emphasized their vitality in the years following the overthrow of
Tenochtitlan.
The Reality: Survival, Adaption, and Persistence
Contrary to the claims of the Black Legend, Spain never intended to widow the New World of its original inhabitants.
Simply stated, as armed conquest gave way to long-term colonization, New Spain needed a viable native population to
exploit. Colonies required Native American labor to grow food, mine precious metals, transform raw materials into
trade items, fight ongoing battles of conquest, and use existing native power structures to oversee payment of
taxes/tribute. With the tragic lessons of demographic collapse in the Caribbean, and the 1521 smallpox epidemic still
fresh in the minds of colonial governors, some of the first attempts to protect natives (like the New Laws of the Indies
for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians) emerged within two decades of the fall of Tenochtitlan.
Officially, repartimiento replaced encomiendas in New Spain, and concerns with declining Native American populations
continued to increase over time. In 1573 the Comprehensive Royal Orders for New Discoveries banned the entry of
unlicensed entradas into new lands, and prohibited violence against Indians, under threat of fine or death. Of course,
exploitation continued, the total Native American population of New Spain declined until --1600, and illegal Indian
slavery persisted wherever/whenever the will or the power of the local government failed at upholding official law. Let
me stress this; colonialism sucked. However, the full measure of colonial abuses could not extinguish Native American
populations.
Though we often perceive conquest as an irrevocable break from previous Native American lifeways, the years
immediately following the siege of Tenochtitlan was, relatively, a period of stasis for the bulk of Native Americans living
under nominal Spanish rule. In the early period, the Spanish simply did not have the numbers to radically reshape Aztec
society. Instead, they did what would be the hallmark of colonialists everywhere and relied upon the pre-existing sociopolitical structures, just with themselves now at the top.
We’ve previously addressed the vital need for Native American allies to assist the ongoing fight to consolidate control
and fight an unfinished conquest in greater Mexico. The colonial government forced existing indigenous power
structures to help govern new colonies, organize labor, and collect taxes/tribute in processes similar to those present
before European arrival. For members of the lower classes, therefore, not much changed. Crops still needed tending,
production of goods continued, and taxes on those efforts now flowed through the local elites to the new Spanish rulers.
In many ways, the indigenous communities of New Spain negotiated the gradual transition to colonial rule by
incorporating useful traits while simultaneously resisting unwanted influence. Overall, native communities continued to
emphasize communal strength. Colonial policies concerning local governing were enforced in ways that promoted local
elites and local interests. Native municipal communities and cabildos (town councils) were adapted into existing
community practice and used to advocate for the needs of the settlement. Vibrant communities emphasized their
vitality, holding plays, dances, mock battles, and festivals that celebrated community survival/continuity, often melding
traditional ritual performance with elements of Spanish theatrical tradition. Community histories, títulos, emphasized
continuity of status, residency, and occupation of the ruling elite, as well as their subordinates. In these histories, instead
of a forlorn narrative detailing the desolation of a people:
“Mayas placed the Spanish invasion, and the violence and epidemics it brought, within the larger context of history’s cycles
of calamity and recovery, relegating the Conquest to a mere blip in their long-term local experience.” (Restall, p.122)
The smallpox epidemic that accompanied the siege of Tenochtitlan, as well as wave upon wave of later epidemics,
specifically the cocoliztli epidemics in 1545 and 1576 that killed 7-17 million in highland Mexico, initiated a period of
demographic decline that undermined the existing native power structure. Unlike North America, where the native
population would hit its lowest total population by 1900, the population nadir for Mexico occurred in the late sixteenth
century. After 1600 the negotiated change in social governance gave way to more rapid transitions reflecting the
substantial loss of Native American population base. However, the established foundation of vital indigenous
communities adapting and maintaining their history, ensured the development of a diverse, multi-ethnic colony. This
deep structure remains visible in the cultural, ethnic, and genetic diversity of modern Mexico and New Mexico. As
centuries unfolded, continual interaction resulted in the development of new cultures, often neither wholly indigenous
nor wholly Spanish, reflecting the complex web of interdependence present throughout the empire.
Instead of trying to cram too much here, I’ll expand further on the themes of accommodation, compromise, and
resistance in the next myths of conquest post. The examination of life in the missions along the northern frontier will
highlight how Native Americans actively negotiated Spanish colonialism on their own terms.
Myth 6: Missions, the Full Measure of Desolation
In the popular narrative of a post-apocalyptic post-contact wasteland, the mission experience emerges as a special kind of
hell. According to the myth, in the missions, death abounds in a place designed to rid the Americas of the corrupting
influence of indigenous cultures. Powerful, oppressive friars violently remove all evidence of Native American spiritual
practice, replacing rich and diverse cultures with a uniform, boring manifestation of Christianity unintelligible to their
native charges. Native Americans are forced to abandon indigenous clothing, food resources, recreation, and culture
while they toil in the fields of the Lord. Resistance is met with punishment or the sword, as a beaten, weakened people
gradually pass away. This post will combine the two to examine the politics behind the missions in Florida, as well as
evidence for non-violent resistance that reveals a deeper, nuanced picture of life in the shadow of the cross.
The Reality: Negotiation, Autonomy, and Resistance in the Missions
After the excesses of cruelty seen in the initial years of contact, the 1573 Comprehensive Royal Orders for New
Discoveries placed missionaries at the forefront of exploration/pacification of new lands. Franciscans and Jesuits became
conquistadores of the spirit along the northern borderlands in Florida, Texas, New Mexico along the Rio Grande,
southern Arizona, and Alta California. In the fight to complete the conquest, the Crown believed missionaries could
pacify land at less cost, and with a greater impact, than soldiers. The missions provided a spiritual harvest, as well as a
vital frontier presence against encroachment from other European nations. The southwestern colonies protected
lucrative mining enterprises in Northern Mexico, and Florida provided a safe haven/support for ships crossing the
Atlantic. For this protection, New Mexico lost the Crown 2,390,000 pesos in the 17th century alone. Florida cost four
times as much.
Though covering a wide geographic range, the total number of missionaries remained small; never more than 70 at a
time for Florida, and < 50 for New Mexico. Alta California represents a unique case given the late expansion to confront
Russian merchants in San Francisco Bay, and reveals a bit about the ideal Franciscan mission demographics. In Alta
California
“the mission typically housed two friars (the majority from Spain), a mission guard of six soldiers (most of whom were
mestizos or mulattos of Spanish, African, and/or native ancestry from northern Mexico), and a thousand or more baptized
Indians” (Lightfoot, p. 5).
Isolated on the fringe of the empire, the remote colonies featured interactions not always possible in the heart of the
empire. Here, on the ragged edge, survival depended on negotiation and accommodation from all parties. Even
something as rigid as the castas racial system relaxed on a frontier where calidad (social status) could be defined by
occupation and wealth, not just ancestry and skin color.
Of course, one person’s frontier is another’s home. Analysis of Native North Americans in mission communities
requires care and nuance. On the one hand, missions are viewed as primarily carceral institutions completely under
European control and designed to extinguish indigenous cultures. Any evidence of persistence and adoption of culture
reinforces the narrative of European actors and Native American re-actors/victims. Conversely, focusing only on
resistance “in nearly every part of daily life is counterproductive and only serves to reinforce the idea of a bounded,
carceral mission landscape” (Panich & Schneider, p.21). The tightrope, then, is to describe how Native Americans
actively negotiated Spanish colonialism on their own terms. We must examine how Native Americans incorporated, or
decided against incorporating, missions into the indigenous system of power, belief, exchange, subsistence, and
residence (Panich & Schneider, p. 10).
The Missions of La Florida
On a large scale, the missions of Florida illustrate negotiation between the indigenous power structure and the Spanish
mission system. Before contact, sedentary, maize-based agricultural populations ruled by chiefdoms dominated much of
the southeast. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived in Florida in 1565 with the order to establish a Spanish presence that
would both prevent French colonization of the Atlantic coast, and protect the treasure-laden Fleet of the Indes as it
passed through the Bahama Channel. With neither the people nor resources to effectively do so, and constrained by the
Empire’s annoying “don’t abuse the natives” policy, Spain entered into the Mississippian political world.
La Florida was no theocracy. Full-functioning Native towns permitted a Spanish mission presence as a means of levering
the Spanish Empire and the Catholic Church as allies against rival chiefdoms.
In the Mississippian tradition, rulers controlled subordinates and accepted tribute, with grand displays of wealth
indicating their ability to mobilize resources/validating their right to rule. By placing themselves in a position to channel
excess production to the colonial government (in this case maize) that Spanish friars and colonists needed to not starve,
caciques received high status items in return such as cloth, tools, and beads.
Simply stated, the colonial Spanish system in La Florida reinforced internal chiefly power… by pledging allegiance and
obedience to Spanish officials, indigenous chiefs claimed a powerful military ally in the Spanish garrison at St.
Augustine.
Franciscan missionaries functioned in a role similar to Mississippian religious specialists, and bridged the cultural gap
between the Mississippian world and Spanish culture, while hereditary chiefs maintained secular authority. Far from
lifeless desolation, caciques leveraged Spanish alliances to compete for prominence among their neighbors for more than
a century. The end of the Florida missions came in the form of English slavers and their native allies. Slavers began
attacking the missions in the seventeenth century, leading to the rapid collapse of the Florida mission system.
Autonomy in Small Things
The everyday acts of mission inhabitants show how autonomy was negotiated along the northern frontier. As the last
post mentioned, “Indians accepted one aspect of Spanish colonization in order to facilitate their rejection of another”
(Restall). Missionaries likewise accepted one aspect of Native American rebellion, while stressing obedience on another,
typically public front.
For example, official regulations required baptized Native American inhabitants of the missions to live on the premises
and procure a pass for permission to leave the mission. Escaped neophytes could be pursued, returned to the mission,
and subject to bodily punishment. In North America, however, mission authorities often realized the impossibility of
enforcing this law. Depending upon place and time, mission Indians negotiated absence from the mission to forage for
traditional foods, maintain familial connections, and continue religious practice away from the eyes of the friars.
Mission policy required neophytes to integrate European crops into existing native agricultural practices. In other words,
they should eat like Christians. Mission inhabitants resisted this demand by complementing their mission diets with
foraged foods consumed in private residences. This small act of rebellion indicates access to the surrounding landscape,
ongoing knowledge of local resources, and small-scale trade conducted outside the control of mission authorities.
Remains of acorns, seeds, fruits, fish, shellfish, waterfowl, and game have been found in mission residential structures
from Florida to California. This private rebellion was known to mission officials, who often decided not to press an
issue they couldn’t enforce. At a mission in California the fathers noted “in private, in their own houses, they prepare
their seeds which are of good quality and in abundance such as acorns, sage, chia, pine nuts and others” and remained
“very fond of the food they enjoyed in their pagan state” (Panich & Schneider, p.15).
Liberty from the missions also allowed the continuation of religious ceremonies. In New Mexico, Cochiti oral history
tells of moving dances and rituals to the hinterlands away from the missions. In Texas and California, this act of
resistance was well known to the friars, who were powerless to prevent the practice. Fermín Francisco de Lasuén,
president of the Alta California missions, wrote “if we absolutely denied them the right to go to the mountains, I am
afraid they would riot” (Panich & Schneider, p. 17). Instead of a fearful, captive population, Lightfoot estimates five to
ten percent of the total Alta California neophyte population became runaways at some point. As a compromise on
official regulations, Alta California instituted paseo (approved leave of absence), and granted mission inhabitants leave
for five to ten weeks a year. This small measure of autonomy emphasizes the constant compromise between neophytes
and the Spanish missionaries. Native Americans negotiated, in both official and covert ways, freedom of movement and
space to continue religious practice.
The separation of public and private lives is echoed throughout the mission system in North America. At Mission San
Buenaventura in California oral tradition indicates weddings consisted of two marriage ceremonies; one public Catholic
ritual, and a private native ceremony held inside the neophyte residences. The public/private dichotomy in San
Buenaventura included a variety of religious ceremonies and sacred dances. Some dances were officially permitted for
performance before the entire mission community, while others were hidden, performed in inner plazas/alleys or within
residential structures. Archaeology and ethnohistory show Native American neophytes, from the highest rank alcaldes to
poorest orphan, constantly negotiated this double life of public accommodation while maintaining private autonomy.
Archaeologically, we find evidence of a private life in the foods, tools, ornaments/clothing, and ceremonial
paraphernalia that indicate the continuation of native practices and identity, even among devout Catholics who publicly
rose to high social status in the mission hierarchy.
In both the larger reasons for accepting Spanish missionaries, and the smaller acts of resistance and accommodation, a
richer story of life in the missions emerges. Rather than a spiritless, desolate native population, we see evidence for vital
communities negotiating for autonomy and continuing to adapt. Alcaldes who used the mission system to gain public
social status negotiated a far different private world where outlawed indigenous traditions continued hidden from the
eyes of the padres. Florida caciques hoped to harness the power of Spain and the Catholic Church by admitting
missionaries to their communities, while simultaneously refusing a full transition to Spanish lifeways.
Too often the narrative of conquest focuses on illness, violence, and death. Yes, there was death, and oppression, and
disease, but this was not a terminal population waiting for the end. Here, in the missions, history, ethnohistory, and
archaeology combine to highlight rich evidence of life: a mission abounding with gambling, games, dances, feasts,
hidden performances, and religious ceremonies.
Myth 7: Universal > 95% Mortality from Introduced Infectious Disease
The dominant narrative of Native American population decline after contact cites introduced infectious diseases as the
chief mechanism of widowing the Americas of its original inhabitants. In the myth, Native Americans throughout the
New World died at unprecedented, catastrophic, apocalyptic levels, victims of invisible assailants they neither
understood nor were evolutionarily prepared to combat. In the worst versions of the narrative, immunological naïveté is
folded into the larger metaphor of Native Americans as inexperienced, genetically weaker, and helpless to defend
themselves against the oncoming tide of colonialism. Disease, a scythe cutting a path ahead of colonial encounters,
conveniently explains the absence of Native Americans from the narrative of post-contact history and obscures the
history of rebellion, revolt, conflict, peace and negotiation that followed on the heels of colonial encounters.
The Reality: A Toxic Cocktail Poured Out Over Centuries
The reality of excess mortality after contact requires an examination the complete colonial cocktail leading to population
decline, as well as the ecological factors that allowed for the initiation and propagation of epidemics. Demographic
decline occurred due to a variety of factors striking over the course of centuries, not just by disease alone.
Mexican Demographic Trends Inappropriately Generalized
The 90-95% figure that dominates the popular discourse has its foundation in the study of mortality in conquest-period
Mexico. Several terrible epidemics struck the population of greater Mexico (estimated at --22 million at contact) in quick
succession. Roughly 8 million died in the 1520 smallpox epidemic, followed closely by the 1545 and 1576 cocoliztli
epidemics where --12-15 million and --2 million perished, respectively (Acuna-Soto et al., 2002). After these epidemics
and other demographic insults, the population in Mexico hit its nadir (lowest point) by 1600 before slowly beginning to
recover.
Though the data from Mexico represent a great work of historic demography, the mortality figures from one specific
place and time have been uncritically applied across the New World. Two key factors are commonly omitted when
transferring the 90-95% mortality seen in Mexico to the greater Americas: (1) the 90-95% figure represents all excess
mortality after contact (including the impact of warfare, famine, slavery, etc. with disease totals), and (2) disease mortality
in Mexico was highest in densely populated urban centers where epidemics spread rapidly among a population directly
exposed to large numbers of Spanish colonists. Very few locations in the Americas share these ecological conditions,
making the application of demographic patterns witnessed in one specific location inappropriate for generalization to
the entire New World.
Interaction of Host, Pathogen, and Environment
As hinted earlier, any examination of disease epidemiology after contact must incorporate a larger ecological perspective.
Epidemics require the proper conditions for the host, the pathogen, and the environment to spread widely. Too often
the narrative of “death by disease alone” fails to examine the greater context that facilitated the spread of epidemics.
Infectious agents are treated as an inevitable miasma spreading ahead of contact. As the case study on the U.S. Southeast
showed, the ecological context proves how pathogens spread in conjunction with the repercussions of conquest. In the
Florida missions, early disease outbreaks failed to travel beyond the immediate surroundings due to contested buffer
zones between rival peoples. Only English slaving raids changed the social environment, erasing these protective buffer
zones, and destabilizing the region. After these raids, the first verifiable smallpox pandemic swept the U.S. Southeast.
When attacks by slavers disrupted normal life, hunting and harvesting outside the village defenses became deadly.
Nutritional stress led to famine as food stores were depleted and enemies burned growing crops. Displaced nations
attempted to carve new territory inland, escalating violence as the zone of English colonial enterprises spread across the
region. The slave trade united the Southeast in a commercial enterprise involving the long-range travel of human hosts,
crowded susceptible hosts into dense palisaded villages, and weakened host immunity through the stresses of societal
upheaval, famine, and warfare. All of these factors were needed to spread a smallpox epidemic across the Southeast, and
all of these factors led to increase mortality once the epidemic arrived.
The myth of catastrophic disease often cites an incredibly high case fatality rate for introduced pathogens in the
Americas. We hear that an infectious organism like smallpox, which historically has an overall fatality rate of 30%, killed
95% of infected Native Americans. Taken without reference to the greater ecological situation, and assuming the validity
of colonial mortality rates (a large assumption), the myth arises of an immunologically weaker Indian population unable
to respond to novel diseases.
Examining the greater context reveals how the cocktail of colonial stressors often stacked the deck against host immune
defense before epidemics arrived. Plains Winter Counts recount disease mortality consistently increased in the year
following nutritional stress (Sundstrom), and this link was understood by European colonists who routinely burned
growing crops and food stores when invading Native American lands, trusting disease and depopulation would soon
follow (Calloway). Mortality increased in populations under nutritional stress, geographically displaced due to warfare
and slaving raids, and adapting to the breakdown of traditional social support systems caused by excess conquest-period
mortality. Context highlights why many Native Americans, had decreased capacity to respond to infection, and therefore
higher mortality to periodic epidemics.
Traditionally, the discussion of epidemic disease after contact also contains an element of the post hoc ergo propter hoc
fallacy. Archaeologists uncover evidence of population dispersal in the protohistoric and assume disease led to the
abandonment of the site. Historians read de Soto’s retelling of the Plague of Cofitachequi and assumed the population
perished from introduced infectious disease. This assumption rests on the flawed notion that the New World was a
disease-free paradise, that site abandonment can only be attributed to disease, and the belief that observed epidemics
arose solely from introduced pathogens.
A full discussion of the New World disease load before contact is beyond the scope of this post, but populations in the
Americas were subject to a wide variety of intestinal parasites, tick-borne pathogens like Lyme disease and Rocky
Mountain Spotted Fever, syphilis, tuberculosis, and other pathogens. Those infectious organisms didn’t stop infecting
Native Americans after European arrival. Changes in host ecology associated with conquest could alter the transmission
cycle of native infectious organisms, and transform a benign, or at least contained, infectious organism into one capable
of causing massive mortality. Researchers propose the devastating cocoliztli epidemics, which killed millions in 1545 and
1576 in Mexico, were the work of a native viral pathogen rather than an introduced infection. The authors hypothesize
that extended drought altered the interaction of the mouse host with human populations and, combined with other
shocks of conquest, allowed for the virus to jump to humans. The story of cocoliztli encourages us to at least entertain
that idea that epidemics after contact could occur from pathogens indigenous to the New World, not solely from
introduced infectious organisms.
The “death by disease alone” myth ignores the myriad factors influencing the demography of Native American
populations after contact. Introduced infectious disease mortality was awful. However, I intentionally placed the disease
myth later in the series, after discussing abundant evidence of persisting Native American communities, to place
epidemics in the larger context of vibrant populations adapting, resisting, accommodating, and negotiating in the postcontact environment. Southeastern US populations responded to the shocks of conquest by coalescing into powerful
confederacies. Violent resistance to conquest continued throughout the Americas, and periodic waves of disease could
not diminish the vitality of mission inhabitants across the northern border of New Spain. Epidemics were not an
automatic cultural death sentence.
Humans are demographically capable of rebounding from high mortality events, like epidemics, provided other sources
of excess mortality are limited. In the mid-twentieth century when the Aché of Paraguay moved to the missions --38% of
the population died from respiratory diseases alone. However, the Aché rallied quickly and are now a growing
population. The key factor for population survival after high mortality events is limiting other demographic shocks, like
violent incursions from outsiders, providing sufficient food resources, and the territory needed for forage and hunt to
supplement food intake.
When the colonial cocktail arrived in full force demographic recovery became challenging. Warfare and slaving raids
added to excess mortality, while simultaneously displacing populations from their stable food supply, and forcing
refugees into crowded settlements where disease can spread among weakened hosts. Later reservations restricted access
to foraged foods and worsened resource scarcity where disease could follow quickly on the heels of famine. The greater
cocktail of colonial insults, not just the pathogens themselves, decreased population size and prevented rapid recovery
during the conquest.
Myth 7, Alternate Version
So, Native Americans, like all humans who aren't immunocompromised, have both an innate and adaptive immune
response that protects them from infectious organisms. Once exposed to a novel pathogen, their bodies, like all the rest
of us, start a cascade of immunological messages and defenses to combat the new disease. If successful they, like the rest
of us, will carry the memory of how to defend against that infectious organism, and mount a better response the next
time around. There is no reason to suspect some form of biological inferiority limits their ability to respond to
pathogens. As I dive into below, however, the processes of colonialism consistently created an unhealthy world for
Native Americans, and that (not immunological weakness) accounts for differential mortality due to epidemic disease.
We still see those pressures today, with increased morbidity and mortality due to Covid-19, because we still live in a
structurally violent, unhealthy world.
The root of your question might have several key flaws in understanding of the history of the Americas. I'll address those
below, before talking about the active creation of an unhealthy world.
First, there is a persistent myth that the New World was some kind of disease-free paradise until the arrival of
Europeans. New World populations played host to a wide variety of intestinal parasites (roundworm, hookworm,
whipworm, etc.), gastrointestinal diseases (Giardia, Entamoeba, and Cryptosporidium, etc.), Chagas disease, syphilis,
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (and possibly Lyme), and tuberculosis. I also hypothesized they would be subject to
occasional zoonotic events (when a non-human pathogen jumps into human hosts), just like modern populations with
frequent access to wildlife/bushmeat trade. There is also reason to believe that observed epidemics that occurred after
contact, like the cocoliztli (a Hanta Virus-like hemorrhagic fever) epidemics that swept through Mexico in the sixteenth
century, were present, though perhaps more contained, before contact. Two cocoliztli epidemics, in 1545 and 1576,
killed between 7 and 17 million people in highland Mexico, Europeans included. There is no evidence the pathogen
responsible for the epidemic arrived from the Old World, but researchers suspect a massive drought altered the
relationship between the murine host and humans, leading to increased chance of pathogen transmission, and a
catastrophic epidemic. New research has muddied the cocolitzli argument, however, after the discovery of Salmonella
enterica in contact period mass burials.
Second, there is a persistent myth that disease wiped out ~90% of Native American populations in the years
immediately surrounding contact. The 90-95% figure that dominates the popular discourse has its foundation in the
study of mortality in conquest-period Mexico. Several terrible epidemics struck the population of greater Mexico
(estimated at ~22 million at contact) in quick succession. Roughly 8 million died in the 1520 smallpox epidemic,
followed closely by the 1545 and 1576 cocoliztli epidemics where ~12-15 million and ~2 million perished, respectively
(Acuna-Soto et al., 2002). After these epidemics and other demographic insults, the population in Mexico hit its nadir
(lowest point) by 1600 before slowly beginning to recover.
Though the data from Mexico represents a great work of historic demography, the mortality figures from one specific
place and time have been uncritically applied across the New World. Two key factors are commonly omitted when
transferring the 90-95% mortality seen in Mexico to the greater Americas: (1) the 90-95% figure represents all excess
mortality after contact (including the impact of warfare, famine, slavery, etc. with disease totals), and (2) disease mortality
in Mexico was highest in densely populated urban centers where epidemics spread by rapidly among a population
directly exposed to large numbers of Spanish colonists. Very few locations in the Americas mimic these ecological
conditions, making the application of demographic patterns witnessed in one specific location inappropriate for
generalization to the entire New World.
The myth of catastrophic disease spread often cites an incredibly high case fatality rate (number of people infected who
die of that disease) for introduced pathogens in the Americas. We hear that an infectious organism like smallpox, which
historically has an overall fatality rate of 30%, killed 95% of infected Native Americans. Taken without reference to the
greater ecological situation, and assuming the validity of colonial mortality rates (a large assumption), the myth arises of
an immunologically weaker Indian population unable to respond to novel pathogens.
Examining the greater context reveals how the cocktail of colonial stressors often stacked the deck against host immune
defense before epidemics arrived.
For example, the indigenous slave trade destabilized the U.S. Southeast. When attacks by slavers disrupted normal life,
hunting and harvesting outside the village defenses became deadly exercises. Nutritional stress led to famine as food
stores were depleted and enemies burned growing crops. Displaced nations attempted to carve new territory inland,
escalating violence as the shatterzone of English colonial enterprises spread across the region. The slave trade united the
Southeast in a commercial enterprise involving the long-range travel of human hosts, crowded susceptible hosts into
dense palisaded villages, and weakened host immunity through the stresses of societal upheaval, famine, and warfare
(Kelton). All of these factors were needed to propagate a smallpox epidemic across the Southeast, and all of these factors
led to increase mortality once the epidemic arrived. Likewise, Plains Winter Counts recount disease mortality
consistently increased in the year following nutritional stress (Sundstrom), and this link was understood by European
colonists who routinely burned growing crops and food stores when invading Native American lands, trusting disease
and depopulation would soon follow (Calloway). Mortality increased in populations under nutritional stress,
geographically displaced due to warfare and slaving raids, and adapting to the breakdown of traditional social support
systems caused by excess conquest-period mortality. Context highlights why many Native Americans, like modern
refugee populations facing similar concurrent physiological stress, had a decreased capacity to respond to infection, and
therefore higher mortality to periodic epidemics.
Not to break the twenty year rule, but we still see how the construction of an unhealthy world (lack of access to clean
running water, lack of access to electricity, poor health care access, increased comorbidities, etc.) influences mortality to
a novel pathogen. Native Americans, like other minority populations in the United States, suffered higher Covid-19
mortality rates than their white neighbors.
To sum up, any individual would begin mounting an immune response once they encountered a novel pathogen. The
population as a whole would reach herd immunity once a sufficient number of individuals acquired immunity to the
new disease. There is no reason to think these fundamental processes were somehow biologically inhibited for
indigenous peoples in the Americas. The construction of an unhealthy environment, however, places any population
under stress and limits their ability to rebound from infectious organisms. If we inherit a myth of catastrophic disease
mortality after contact, and ignore the larger environmental picture, we may subconsciously internalize a story of
indigenous biological and immunological inferiority. This would be a great disservice not only to our understanding of
the past, but also our commitment to serve our neighbors in the present. The realities show a far more complex picture,
one common to all biological organisms since the beginning of life on this planet; host and pathogen and environment
all interacting in a dynamic, ever-changing biological arms race.
Myth 8: A Pristine, Uninhabited Eden
In the Myth of a Pristine Eden, few Native Americas lived in the New World at the time of contact. Worse versions of
the myth hold that inhabited areas, though few and far between, were home to nomadic groups who did little to modify
the natural environment. For those who believe the New World was richly populated at contact, but also hold to the
uninhabited Eden myth, catastrophic population decline due to disease is often blamed for winnowing Native American
population before wide-spread colonization. The Myth of a Pristine Eden explains, and excuses, the apparent rapid
movement of European colonists across the North America. Like the Death by Disease Alone myth, the Myth of a
Pristine Eden allows for the flawed, simple answer to ignorance of Native American history by assuming their absence
from the story of North America.
The Reality: A System in Motion, Obscured by Cliff’s Notes Version of History
We’ve encountered elements of the Myth of a Pristine Eden myth in previous posts. Popular films often utilize the trope
of a peaceful populace inhabiting a land largely unaltered by their presence. The notion of initial purity contrasts nicely
with the Myth of Native Desolation in response to oppression, defeat, and catastrophic population decline. Visions of
innocent Native Americans with their nonexistent societies emerged early in European accounts. Vespucci stated in
1502, that Native Americans “have no property; instead all things are held in community… They live without king and
without any form of authority, and each one is his own master” as they lived “in agreement with nature”. Those seeking
to promote English colonial enterprises in New England likewise emphasized the natural bounty of this New World,
while stressing the absence of original inhabitants.
The popular narrative inherited the myth of a New World paradise of abundance, while ignoring the tremendous effort
and planning required to extract those resources. Exaggeration of the richness of New England reached comical levels
early in colonial history. In 1628 Captain Christopher Levett wrote:
“I will not tell you that you may smell the corn field before you see the land; neither must men think that corn doth grow
naturally, (or on trees,) nor will the deer come when they are called, or stand still and look on a man until he shoot him…
nor the fish leap into the kettle, nor on the dry land, neither are they so plentiful, that you may dip them up in baskets…
which is no truer than that the fowls will present themselves to you with spits through them.”
Captain Levett had good reason to preach caution. Early English colonists, drunk on tales of natural abundance, and
gold-hungry, refused to labor to store food during the brief times of plenty, only to starve to death once the snows fell. In
a land said to be Eden, more than half the original founders of Plymouth died the first winter. Inhabitants of Jamestown
resorted to cannibalism during Starving Time in the winter of 1609, and were in the process of abandoning the
settlement when the new governor arrived with supplies in 1610.
On the other extreme, racist stereotypes of Native Americans abandon this romanticization, stating the New World was
“unused and undeveloped…life was nasty, brutish, and short” with conquest bringing “an objectively superior culture”
(The Ayn Rand Institute, quoted in Restall). This is the same racism/ignorance we touched on in the Myth of
Miscommunication. I am loathe to leave such drivel unanswered.
When Columbus encountered a New World, the cyclic pattern of consolidation and dispersal accompanying
Southeastern paramount chiefdoms like Cahokia continued, as it had, for hundreds of years. The Haudenosaunee
League was forming in modern day New York. Acres of maize supported large populations at the northern extreme of
the plant’s range. Their golden age passed, Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon and the Cliff Palace of Mesa Verde already
declined in use, their population spreading about the greater Southwest to regions with more reliant water sources.
Tenochtitlan, the seat of an expanding Triple Alliance Empire, was conservatively home to over 100,000 people. Túpac
Inca finished his wars of conquest, incorporated the Kingdom of Chimor, and extended the borders of an empire
ranging from modern-day Ecuador to Chile that encompassed over fifteen million people.
The Myth of a Pristine Eden, combined with a terminal narrative of inevitable Native American decline, interprets 1492
as the beginning of the end for Amerindians. In truth, Europeans entered a New World teeming with dynamic
populations changing, growing, collapsing, dispersing, coalescing, making war, and negotiating peace. There was no
guarantee that any colonial outpost, neither Spanish nor Portuguese nor English nor French nor Dutch, would succeed
in the shadow of two richly inhabited continents.
A Cliff’s Notes Version of North American History
The popular history of the United States encourages the omission of Native Americans by creating a narrative that
temporally jumps from 1492 to Jamestown/Plymouth to the Revolution in the same breath. As mentioned in a previous
post, the Myth of Death by Disease Alone is used as a balm to cover ignorance of Native American history, while the
Pristine Eden explains the seemingly unimpeded advancement of colonial enterprises. Absent from the narrative is the
story of North America beyond the frontier of tiny European settlements. What follows are vignettes, by no means
exhaustive, that show the combination of factors leading to extending the frontier to the Mississippi River.
•
•
•
•
•
•
For the first century of contact the bulk of European-Native American interaction occurred in Spanish Florida and
New Mexico. Ignoring this time period hides a century of Europeans fishing, exploring, and trading along the
Atlantic Coast, the negotiation and rebellion in Spanish missions, and the relative stasis of populations in the
southeast despite continual contact with Spanish colonial enterprises.
After a century of previous European trade and exploration along the New England coast, Plymouth colonists
arrived in Massachusetts on the heels of a nasty epidemic. Population decline and pressure from inland enemies
caused Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag, to change the traditional policy of opposing long-term European
settlement. Instead of driving the colonists into the sea, he sought an alliance with Plymouth. The peace lasted a
generation. When the dust settled on King Phillip’s War, the English colony barely survived. Over 3,000
Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Podunk, Narragansett, and Nashaway were dead. Native American survivors who were not
Christians were sold into slavery in the Caribbean. English colonists moved on to the newly emptied land.
Jamestown colonists arrived in Tsenacommacah (densely inhabited land), Virginia under the control of the
Powhatan mamanatocik (paramount chief) Wahunsunacawh. Wahunsunacawh/Powhatan responded to the
encroachment of the Spanish from the south by allying more than twenty tributary groups under one confederacy,
and through Captain John Smith established Jamestown as yet another tributary settlement within the greater
Powhatan sphere. Again, the peace proved short-lived. The Anglo-Powhatan Wars prompted the establishment of
the first Indian reservations, restricting the territorial limits for the original inhabitants of Tsenacommacah.
Traders operating out of English Virginia and Carolina united the greater southeast in the sale of human captives
and deerskins. The changes wrought in this English zone, the displacement, warfare, disease, exportation of slaves,
and famine, set the stage for the first smallpox pandemic from 1696-1700. The Yamasee War that followed
threatened the survival of the colony of South Carolina, but the damage was done. Slaving raids collapsed the
Spanish mission system, nearly depopulating the Florida peninsula. Survivors banded together, forming alliances of
convenience, and coalesced into confederacies. Slaving raids, warfare, and disease left the southern tidewater open
to English expansion.
From roughly 1638-1701 the Iroquois engaged in a massive, bloody expansion to monopolize the fur trade, and
quicken their dead in a mourning war writ large. The Beaver Wars engulfed the Great Lakes region. Huron, Petun,
Ottawa, Sauk, Fox, Miami, Illinois, and Kickapoo refugees fled west, to the territory of the Winnebago and
Menominee. Like slavers in the southeast, where the Iroquois raided, displacement, famine and disease followed.
After the Great Peace of Montreal, displaced refugees repopulated the Midwest, but their presence was short-lived. A
new land-hungry confederacy of 13 colonies declared their independence, and eagerly sought to expand westward.
In 1791 the young United States suffered its largest military disaster on the banks of the Maumee River. General
Arthur St. Clair led 1,400 soldiers to attack Miami villages in Ohio due to a government whose Indian policy “was
essentially a land policy” (Calloway). With 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed or wounded, practically the entire U.S. army at
the time, the defeat jeopardized the security of the new nation and emphasized the potential power of a united
Indian confederacy. Unfortunately, the Northwestern Confederacy was not to last. Shawnee, Miami, Delaware,
Wyandot, Ottawa, Ojibwa, Sauk, Fox and Mahican warriors dispersed the following winter as the U.S. conducted
damage control, and exploited divisions to undermine the confederacy.
A century after initial contact more than two million people lived east of the Mississippi River. Less than five hundred
were European. After more than three hundred years of war, epidemics, displacement, and maneuverings the
descendants European colonists finally gained hegemony east of the Mississippi by 1820 (Richter). The displacement of
Native Americans from eastern North America was neither fast nor easy nor inevitable. Myths of vacant land ignore the
processes that contributed to population dispersal, and the complicated history of Native American-European
interaction.
Myth 9: Contact Could Only Result in Native American Destruction
Of all the myths of conquest, the Terminal Narrative may be the most pervasive. In the Terminal Narrative, the
trajectory of Native American history is fundamentally altered after Columbus set foot on San Salvador. Contact marks
the beginning of the end, an event horizon after which history could only flow on one inevitable and completely
destructive course. The end is assured, and existing Native American populations lived on borrowed time, doomed to
die fighting a lost cause. The Terminal Narrative permeates nearly every popular analysis of Native American history,
prejudices our interpretation of events after contact, and replaces discussion of agency and autonomy with notions of
superiority or condescending pity for a people vanishing from the earth. As we have seen throughout the series, the
reality was far more complex.
In the past the notion that primitive peoples would always fall before the sword of the civilized supported the Terminal
Narrative. When overt academic racism became unacceptable, the reasoning shifted. Native Americans lacked key
technological innovations and were therefore overcome by a more advanced race across the sea, a people armed with
writing, steel, and firearms. The narrative of course ignored evidence of Native American writing systems, the limited
utility of steel when facing overwhelming odds and a determined resistance, a rich indigenous oral history, and the
actual ineffectiveness of early firearms in the New World. Nevertheless, intelligence triumphed over barbarism, and
Europeans spread across the globe.
Hidden in this narrative is the notion that the fault lies with the conquered, that the colonized were doomed for
replacement because they weren’t smart enough to invent the tools needed for their own survival. Jared Diamond
himself mixes condescending pity, ignorance of Native American history/racism, and blame together quite perfectly
when he states
“we find it hard to avoid the conclusion that Atahualpa “should” have been more suspicious, if only his society had
experienced a broader range of human behavior… not only did Atahualpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves,
and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats
to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history.” (Guns, Germs and Steel, p. 80)
Tawantinsuyu (the Inca) was the largest empire in the Americas. The Inca managed, through a combination of
diplomacy and wars of conquest, to incorporate diverse cultures from Colombia to Chile, from the Pacific Coast to the
Amazon Basin. To patronizingly suggest their ignorance of other cultures led to their demise is laughable.
Today, the idea of technological or racial superiority still creeps in, but disease mortality has emerged as the preeminent
theme in the Terminal Narrative. Here, we’ll address the Terminal Narrative that contextualizes the story of Native
America in terms of eventual defeat and biases our interpretation of the past.
The Reality: A Discussion Plagued by Silos of Knowledge and Creeping Determinism
The popular narrative, influenced by major popular nonfiction works and almost every textbook ever printed, uses 1492
as a dividing line to denote irrevocable change in the Americas. As we mentioned in previous posts, recounting Native
American history from a European perspective reinforces the idea of European actions and Native American reactions.
This tendency defines Native American history only as it relates to European interests, and strips indigenous
populations of autonomous actions independent of colonists. In the Native Desolation post we saw how the notion of
an irrevocable break at contact failed to reflect the experience of people like the Maya, for whom conquest was simply a
small blip in their larger perspective of history. Populations in Spanish missions continued to express autonomy and
agency where we least expected to see independence. The Pristine, Uninhabited Eden and Completed Conquest posts
showed the protracted nature of conquest, and how the successes of colonial enterprises resulted from centuries of
conflict and negotiation.
If all this evidence of vibrant populations exists, why do we still have a Terminal Narrative? To understand the Terminal
Narrative we need to investigate both how we explore the past, as well as the biases in constructing the history of the
New World. Much of the confusion and misunderstanding surrounding Native American history can be traced to the
division of information within academic departments, and our failure as a discipline to educate the public on
revolutions in the field. Finally, a key aspect in the formation of the terminal narrative is the influence of hindsight bias,
or creeping determinism.
Silos of Knowledge, or Why Absence of Evidence is Not Evidence of Absence
Deep divisions between disciplines contribute to the formation of an academic dead space surrounding Native American
history after contact. Traditionally, historical investigations of the Americas begin with the arrival of entradas and the
emergence of a paper trail of letters, tax records, and diaries. This focus on the written record, and the Europeans
composing the record, continues throughout the colonial period. When written texts do exist to bridge the protohistoric
gap, like Mesoamerican histories that detail centuries before contact, few have been translated to English. Added to the
prehistory/history division is a traditional distrust of indigenous ethnohistorical sources and oral tradition, but
thankfully this bias is lessening of late.
A deep separation likewise exists within archaeology where the bulk of investigations focus either on solidly Native
American populations before the arrival of Europeans (prehistoric archaeology), or the archaeology of historic colonial
settlements (historic archaeology). The division between history and anthropology, the separation of two schools of
knowledge, and the use of contact as a dividing line in academic pursuits dramatically influences both investigations of
the past, as well as the narrative those investigations create. As Wilcox states in The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of
Conquest
“Generally, historians have emphasized the period of contact as a historical moment in which the pre-Columbian or
Indigenous past is segregated professionally and theoretically from the advent of Western history. The practical result of
these profession divisions is that Indians effectively disappear when archaeological investigations end and historical studies
begin.” (p. 14)
These deep divisions both between and within disciplines reinforce contact as a point of no return. One must actually
transfer between departments, alter methods, utilize different theory and evidence when shifting between the silos of
knowledge. The number of interdisciplinary scholars capable of working between disciplines increased in the last few
decades, but the repercussions of that separation continue to influence popular history. Practically, the creation of an
academic dead space is reflected in a lack of scholarship bridging the disciplines, and therefore a lack of popular history
that tells the story of the conquest period. This process becomes a recursive feedback loop. Lack of academic studies ->
lack of popular media -> lack of popular interest -> satisfaction with simple answers/myths of conquest -> lack of
academics entering the field -> lack of academic studies -> rinse and repeat.
We can little fault a popular narrative that interprets a lack of popular history on Native Americans after contact as
evidence of their absence from the historical record. When faced with academic silence, the natural assumption is that
Native American history ceases to be important. They must be doomed to die, because no one discusses how they lived.
There is a wealth of academic knowledge accumulating about Native American history, but very little is making its way
into the public consciousness where myths continue to dominate discussion. This series is an attempt bridge a tiny
portion of that gap between academia and public history, to highlight the fascinating complexity of the Americas after
contact.
Creeping Determinism
Creeping determinism, “the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable,”
influences every investigation of the past. Ignorance of the period and acceptance of simple myths allows creeping
determinism to shape how we discuss the history of the Americas, making the end seem inescapable. But it didn’t have
to unfold this way.
It is conceivable that things might have been different. There could have arisen a polyglot Floridian Republic, a
Francophone Mississippian America, a Hispanic New Biscay, a Republic of the Great Lakes, a Columbia comprising the
present Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Only if we assume a God-given drive toward geopolitical unity on
the North American continent would these possibilities be meaningless.
Europeans entered a dynamic system with populations changing, growing, collapsing, dispersing, coalescing, making war,
and negotiating peace. Colonial survival was not guaranteed. There are an infinite number of “what ifs” hidden under
the hindsight bias of a terminal narrative. At every step along the way both the Europeans and Native Americans realized
that conquest was a “close-run thing” (Restall). We do a disservice to the history of the New World when we assume
there was only one possible way to arrive at this place and time.
I struggled with how to end this write-up. There is much more to say, but I guess this will do…
“it is only when we integrate our different kinds of knowledge that the people without history emerge as actors in their own
right. When we parcel them out among the several disciplines, we render them invisible-their story which is our story,
vanishes from sight.” (Wolf)
I hope these posts sparked your interest in the time period, and provided sources for you to dig deeper. Going forward,
remember the best method for combating the myths of conquest is with an interdisciplinary approach combining
archaeology, history, oral tradition, and cultural anthropology to fold all the available evidence together into a complete
narrative. That is how we uncover the truly fascinating history hiding beneath the myths of conquest.
Myth 10: Conquistadors as Gods / Cortes as Quetzalcoatl
This is a very complicated topic and doesn't have a simple answer. There's a nugget of truth in this relating to events
described in the primary sources, but popular perception of what happened has been heavily distorted in a way that
bares little resemblance to the truth. Essentially, a number of factual events, misunderstandings, and outright myths
have been confused with each other over time. This has ultimately produced this elaborate (but largely inaccurate) story
that Cortés was an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl.
Mesoamericans calling Europeans Gods
There's a common tendency for European conquest sources to describe the natives referring to the Europeans as gods.
Most of the Spanish accounts just take this for granted. The only first-hand account I've been able to find that seems to
hint at what the natives might have actually thought is this quote from Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Bit of context, Cortés
had just told the local Totonac people to imprison an Aztec tribute collector. They explained this was effectively a
declaration of war, to which Cortés replied that he would take responsibility for it. The Totonacs were shocked:
The act they [the Totonac nobles] had witnessed was so astonishing and of such importance to them that they said no
human beings dared to do such a thing, and it must be the work of teules. Therefore, from that moment they [natives]
called us [Spanish] teules, which means gods or demons.
After this, the conquistadors start calling themselves "teules," and the natives apparently do too.
There are a few issues with this though. First, "Teule" isn't a word. "Teotl" is, but it isn't a word in Totonac. It's a Nahuatl
word. The Totonacs translated their word into Nahuatl, and then from there it was translated to Mayan, and from there
to Spanish, where it was rendered as "gods or demons." It's hard to know what the original context of the phrase was
because we don't know how it was used in the Totonac language. When later people continue calling the Spanish teotl,
it's unclear if they actually thought the Spanish were divine or if they're just calling them that because the Spanish are
calling themselves that.
Possible Meanings
The other problem comes with different concepts of divinity. The Mesoamerican concept of a "teotl" is not the same as
the Greco-Roman concept of a god. It's probably closer to the idea of a kami in the Shinto religion, in that it's not
necessarily omnipotent or immortal. To put it another way, if you were to try to translate the major figures of the
Christian religion into the Aztec world view, God, the Devil, all of the saints, all of the demons, all of the angels, and all
of the prophets would be rendered as "teotl". For that matter, so would elves, goblins, fairies, or other creatures of
Germanic folklore.
So when the natives were calling the Spanish "teotl," they could have meant gods, or they could have just meant nonhuman. Or they could have meant that they were human, but simply had the backing of supernatural powers. For all we
know, the Totonac lords could have meant it sarcastically. We only have the interaction recorded in Spanish, so there's
no way to know. Either way, the Spanish thought that the natives thought they were gods and they began claiming
divinity.They continually referred to themselves as 'teules.' When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlan, Motecuzoma put
a stop to this immediately (Diaz del Castillo 2003 p207):
“[Cortés], I know very well that these people of Tlaxcala with whom you are such good friends have told you that I am
a sort of God or [teotl] ... I know well enough that you are wise and did not believe it but took it as a joke. Behold
now, Señor [Cortés], my body is of flesh and bone like yours ... that I am a great king and inherit the riches of my
ancestors is true, but not all the nonsense and lies that they have told you about me, although of course you treated it
as a joke, as I did your thunder and lightning.”
It doesn't take a PhD to see that while Motecuzoma is talking about himself here, he's also talking about Cortés. He's
letting Cortés know that he knows he's just a human being, so he should stop claiming to be something else. Now,
during the early colonial period the Spanish didn't have the nuanced understanding of this that we do now, and this
"Spaniards as gods" thing was accepted as historical fact for a while.
Cortes as Quetzalcoatl
After the conquest, this myth got conflated with another myth: the returning god-king Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin. Some
time (likely in the 13th century AD) there was a king of a city called Tula named Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl. (IIRC,
he was probably a real person as his name is carved on a pillar at the site of Tula, but much of his story has obviously
been mythologized.) He was basically like a Mesoamerican "King Arthur" and is closely associated with the god
Quetzalcoatl for whom he is named. (Often the two are equated with each other. Mesoamerican concepts of divinity are
complicated and it wasn't uncommon for kings to associate themselves with gods.) The story goes that his nobles were
jealous of his power, and so they tricked him into disgracing himself and forced him into exile. Before he left, he cursed
those who betrayed him and vowed one day that he would return to reclaim his lost kingdom. He then got on boats and
went east across the ocean. (If the story is true, he likely went to the Yucatan Peninsula, which is due east from the coast
nearest to the Basin of Mexico.) During the Early Colonial period, this story got conflated with Cortés. Supposedly the
Aztecs believed that Cortés was a reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin - supposedly because he arrived in the year One
Reed. One Reed was the calendrical portion of Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin's name (Ce Acatl). However, most modern
scholars (for example, Mike Smith, Matthew Restall, etc.) consider this to be one of these post-hoc prophecy
attributions. Cortés does not mention it in his letters to the King of Spain, and Bernal Diaz del Castillo only makes
vague references to a prophecy about "white men with beards" who would rule over Mexico. However, Diaz del Castillo
was writing decades after the fact, when this legend of Cortés-as-Quetzalcoatl had already been established. It seems more
likely that the prophecy was attributed to Cortés after the conquest as a means of explaining what happened.
Franciscan missionaries like Motolinía began the process of converting the Aztecs to Christianity in the late 1520s. This
proved difficult because the Aztecs saw them as foreigners imposing a foreign religion. To offset this, the Franciscans
decided that it helped if the natives saw the conquest as divinely ordained. They began collecting stories from
immediately before the conquest and pitching them as omens and signs of the coming conquest. The story of the
returning god-king Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin became part of this. The Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl story became part of the
conversion efforts. And, many of Sahagún's informants were Christian Nahuas, who would have been influenced by
these early missionaries. Not surprisingly, Sahagún's version of events is filled with doomsday prophecies and stresses
how Cortes was misinterpreted to be a reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl. This obviously raises the question as to whether or
not they thought this was the case before the conquest, or if this was something they believed after their conversion to
Christianity. Most scholars today (with a few notable exceptions like Miguel Leon-Portilla) seem to lean towards the
latter interpretation, if for no other reason than the version of the Quetzalcoatl myth in the colonial sources describes
Quetzalcoatl as having white skin and a beard. He most certainly did not; that is definitely an intrusion of Christian
motifs. The answer, of course, could also be somewhere in the middle - perhaps some believed Cortes to be Quetzalcoatl
Topiltzin, but the belief became more widespread after the conquest. It is, in the end, impossible to know for sure.