Junipero Serra Religion

They believed the natives were nothing more than savages and were only good enough to be slaves. Las Casas didn’t like this. He said that the “Spaniards, with their cruelty and execrable work, have depopulated and made desolate the great continent.” For forty years more than “twelve million persons, men and women and children, have perished unjustly and though tranny by the infernal deeds and tyranny of the Christians.” The only reason why the Spaniards “killed and destroyed such infinite numbers of souls is solely because they have made gold their ultimate aim, seeking to load themselves with riches in the shortest time.” They took everything away from the natives, enslaved them and killed those who did not obey them. Everything he said about the Spaniards were completely true. They were just money hungry bullies took advantage of the Indians because the Indians thought they came from the heavens and refused to harm them. And that is just

The missions even encouraged it, offering Spanish men money and land in exchange for helping to unite the two cultures. However, although the men had no issue with bedding the Indian women, an insignificant percentage of them were willing to marry those women. The Spanish viewed the Indians as inferior and saw them as heathens that engaged in polygyny and homosexuality among other abhorrent acts. The missionaries especially frowned upon the berdaches that acted like and were treated as women, shaming and punishing them. In their attempts to “culture” the Indians, they created enemies of an otherwise peaceful people. The Spaniards engaged in what Father Junipero Serra referred to as a “plague of immorality”, raping Indian women out of stress and fear. The Mission of San Diego was destroyed by the Indians largely due to these acts, but only after the Indian population had been reduced to a fraction of what it was previously by diseases that had run rampant in their cramped living spaces in the Mission. The missionaries legitimately thought that they were saving these poor heathens, but in their ignorance they destroyed a

With the outbreak of the disease, the Native Americans thought the disease was brought by the missionaries, reason being that the villages closest to the missionaries’ cabin were first infected and suffered the most loss. In addition, areas where the missionaries were welcomed and where most people were baptized in general suffered a greater loss than those areas where the missionaries weren’t welcomed. As this thought grew in the Native Americans’ mind, the relationship previously created between the Native Americans and the missionaries had collapsed, where the villagers’ intention had now been to kill those who had caused the spread of disease, thinking that it would stop the disease from spreading further. As the disease continues to do its damage, different responses to the diseases has also occurred. On the one hand, the Native Americans blame the French missionaries for starting the disaster, leaving so many dead. On the other hand, the French missionaries thought the Native Americans was punished due to the reason that they were not believers of Christ, the missionaries were also thankful that they themselves were not infected, it’s all due to God protecting

Later on, as more colonists came to the new world, even more Indians were killed. When missionaries tried to convert the Indians, there were miscommunications over the teachings, which lead to even more deaths. When pictures of Mary and other religious symbols were given to the Native Americans, they buried them so as to ask God for a good harvest. The colonists interpreted this as denying the Christian faith, and therefore burned the Indians at the stake, so as to purify their souls. The actions of the missionaries and other colonists were so evil that when an Indian was being burned at the stake, he “asked the Franciscan friar if Christians all went to Heaven. When told that they did, [the Indian] said he would prefer to go to Hell.” The horrible atrocities that the European settlers brought upon the Indians were awful. It decimated the population, leaving less than one tenth of the Indians living compared to the amount before Columbus found America.

After observing local natives, the first Spanish conquistadors came to the conclusion that the Native Americans were barbaric and in dire need of Christian teachings. Thus, Spanish colonists made it their mission to convert the local natives to Christianity, using violence when there was resistance. In 1597, there were a series of uprisings by the Guale Indians in present-day Florida. They destroyed many missions, explaining that the Spanish missionaries had attempted to eliminate their religious practices such as feasts and celebrations. The Spanish also oppressed the Native Americans, and used them as a labor force under the encomienda system. The French, on the other hand, are known for their peaceful alliances with the Native Americans. Colonists established trade agreements with the local natives, obtaining raw goods such as fur and timber. Their peaceful relationship may in fact be attributed to the Spanish; the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty towards Native Americans made other European countries eager to prove themselves different. The French took pride in the fact that they treated the Native Americans more humanely than their Spanish counterparts. In addition, the French were not interested in expanding their territory, unlike the Spanish. They were simply looking for trade opportunities, and a mutual relationship with the Native Americans was advantageous. The primary goal of Spain

Europeans tore through America in the 1700s and destroyed the lives of Native Americans, and yet their culture remained principled with a high level of respect and honor. This is shown in a meeting that was held by the six nations of the Iroquois, where Chief Red Jacket gave a speech on the Native Americans view on missionary stations that the Europeans wanted to set up. Red Jacket explained their past with the first settlers, “We gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison in return” (1). These first Europeans set the tone for how these new colonist treated the natives. They took what they wanted and left a trail of death and destruction in their path. However, the natives acted in return with upstanding respect and treated these missionaries

“Here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the disintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole. . . . The Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind”(137).

The final Spanish conquistadors’ motive that greatly affected the people living in the new world was glory. This motive is plain to see in documents 3 and 5. In document three Cortez talks about how the war that he and his men are fighting in will bring them fame. In document five it’s the same thing it is Cortez who is plowing through the Indians land conquering everybody for respect in Spain. Now when you look at how did this affect the Native Americans you see that the Spanish conquistadors’ obsession with glory ended up harming Indians because the Spanish wanted conquer Indian lands so that they could win respect back in Spain.

Ch.1: Christopher Columbus discovered the New World to European migration. Queen Isabella was funding Christopher Columbus voyage. He convinces the Spain that this would open up better trading routes and it would make them wealthier. ¬¬¬¬¬¬ The Indians were all fascinated with the entire product that the Europeans has. Christopher Columbus and the Conquistadors cheated the Indians and kicked them out of their own land. The Europeans mistreated and executed all the Native Americans that they encountered. The large impact of the invasion was The Europeans captured and used the native Americans as slaves and they brought diseases, weapons, and a hostile desire for the land and control over the new world. The diseases that cause million lives of the Indians were small pox, bubonic plague, influenza, and typhoid. Also the Native Americans were no match for the firearms and explosives of the Europeans. The Native Americans were pushed back into the middle of the United States. The accomplishments of the Spanish in opening the New World to exploration, conquest, and colonization were to gain money, lands, slaves and

Despite their goodness, they were tortured and slaughtered by the Spaniards for no justifiable reason. For example in Document F, William H. Powell documented in 1853 how the Spaniards stormed into a native village with a full size artillery. The Spaniards brought crucifixes and cannons to intimidate the natives enough to force them to convert to Catholicism. As stated in Document A, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, and when he sailed that ocean and landed in the New World he found the native people.

Being that Antonio Vazquez is a Spanish priest he was more sympathetic towards the Indians. This

Tony Serra believed Croy was treated unfairly because of his Native American culture. He believed that the unfair treatment could have been traced back to how Natives were treated in the past. His defense is explained in, "So the heart of Serra's case was what he called a 'cultural defense', a parade of Indian scholars, activists and residents of Siskyou County who testified that pioneer brutality did not die out in Northern California with the last Indian campaign, the bloody Modoc war of the 1870's (which ended with the tribe's near-obliteration and the execution of its leaders, whose heads were then shipped to the Smithsonian for 'scientific investigation')" (Tabolt 32). Serra chose to defend Croy in a way that highlighted the real reasons

The Euro-Americans viewed the Native Americans beliefs and religions as devil worshipping. They believed in God, so why would anybody worship something that God didn’t approve of. Europeans wanted to spread the gospel to the Indians to try to get them to understand that their religion is wrong. Most Indians bought into the Christianity and left they knew all their live alone. William Treat was a clergyman who wanted to preach to the Indians the gospel of God. He wanted the Indians to believe in God and he wanted them to support his teachings. Europeans believed in God and they preached his word, but they didn’t have the knowledge or skills to support their preaching, other than the bible its self. Native Americans believed in Shamans and medicine

While de Las Casas talks, he uses the idea that all beings come from nature, thus native people are humans too, hence, the genocide should stop, because just like the Spanish, these people breath and live. There could have been a different argument based in the opinion of the people, some did not believe natives were humans. He uses the divine law as the other side of the natural law. God’s will be, to not kill any innocent human beings, especially Bible does not encourage the idea of torturing to convert into Christianity, people need to use good manners to persuade others. Finally, he uses the roman law idea, that is not legally right to kill someone who is defenseless. It is not a civil manner to commit such genocide to convert these innocent

a powerful weapon, and that was the weapon of being inferior to a race that had