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Imputations of Indigenous Humanity in Early Colonialisms

The debate between these two outstanding figures of sixteenth-century Spain was one of the most curious episodes in the history of the Western world. For the first time, and probably for the last, a colonizing nation organized a formal inquiry into the justice of the methods used to extend its empire. For the first time, too, in the modern world, we see an attempt to stigmatize an entire race as inferior, as born slaves according to the theory elaborated by Aristotle. — Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One

In the chapters that follow, Indian Given considers defining instances in the formation of the racial geographies of the United States and Mexico as recorded in the historical and legislative archive, in literature and film, and in political speech. I trace the emergence of these two representational and material national spaces from their respective colonial mappings of the figure of the Indian from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Before proceeding to these spatial productions of racial nationalism, however, it behooves us to consider the early colonial geo-graphings of the American continent in the face of its original inhabitants, as these mappings are constitutive of modern humanism in both its liberatory and brutal guises. Too often the birth of humanism is narrated as a northern European development of the Enlightenment. By revisiting these early colonial mappings through the critical eye of racial geography, we see not only that the origins of humanism are to be found much earlier in southern Europe, but that the encounter with the native inhabitants of the Americas itself determined humanism's form. By revisiting these early iterations of indigenous absence/presence, we can not merely tell a different origin story but more importantly understand the ongoing political ramifications and spatial consequences of these early humanist imaginings for both indigenous and nonindigenous Americans.

Specifically, two flashpoints of the early colonial period illuminate the question of the Indian-as-property in the case of New Spain, and of Indian property in the case of New England and the thirteen colonies; I will analyze both in this chapter. The first flashpoint is the historically unprecedented debate between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the just methods of conquest in the "New World," referred to by colonial historian Lewis Hanke in the opening epigraph. Convened by the Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V in 1550, the Junta de Valladolid, a specially appointed panel of fourteen learned jurists charged with adjudicating the proper method of colonial conquest, listened to these two men present their scholarly evaluations of indigenous humanity. Acts of Spanish conquest were clearly space-making enterprises, often accomplished by the grafting of Spanish colonial cities over indigenous ones. Underscoring the importance of the Valladolid proceedings in determining the racial coordinates of these space-making enterprises, all expeditions of conquests were officially suspended pending its outcome. Though this was an exceptional event in the history of European empire, as suggested by Hanke, the Junta de Valladolid was only the apogee of a debate amongst Spanish friars, jurists, scholars, colonists, administrators, and royal advisors on the nature of indigenous humanity that began in the fifteenth century with Columbus's letters to Queen Isabel after initial contact and continued through the eighteenth century with the "settlement" of New Mexico, Texas, and Alta California. If the self-reflection and autocritique of the Spanish empire at Valladolid is remarkable and noteworthy, Hanke reminds us that it was the freedom of Spanish colonists to turn Indians into property as a race that was at stake.

The second colonial flashpoint transpired more than two centuries later, but was no less foundational for the British colonies along the mid-Atlantic seaboard. With the Proclamation of 1763, the British Crown declared the Indian territories west of the Appalachian and Allegany mountain ranges closed to new settlement in the interest of protecting indigenous territories from further colonial encroachment. As in the case of the Junta de Valladolid, this proclamation was in the interest of implementing a more just means of conquest, in this case an effort to recognize and respect indigenous domains. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 unleashed a torrent of political speech by elites like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin on the impropriety of the British Crown placing indigenous property out of reach of the colonists. As in the Valladolid debate, this elite political speech contained its own assessment of indigenous humanity, which was subsequently instrumental in the construction of U.S. revolutionary identity and the drafting of the constitution in 1787. Like Sepúlveda and Las Casas, revolutionary elites positioned themselves as authorities on indigenous character, and their speech had material consequences for the racial geography of the Americas. The proclamation and the revolutionary feud that ensued represented less the endpoint of political debate on the nature of indigenous humanity than a pivotal moment in a process of mapping the continent that would continue well into the period of nineteenth-century expansion into the Great Plains and the Southwest.

Once again, we should not discount these efforts to revisit and revise policy toward indigenous populations by Spanish and British imperial powers as merely cynical and duplicitous justifications for rapacious conquest. The story of European colonialism in the American theater is most often narrated as such, but to do so misses an important avenue of critique. These juridical encounters with indigeneity prodigiously produced new terms for interpreting all of humanity, and by examining them with a critical eye we glean the absence/presence of the Indian at the heart of the human.

These preliminary debates in New Spain and the thirteen colonies produced colonial and national space by establishing the racial coordinates in the landscape of what Jodi Byrd (2011) has called "Indianness." In The Transit of Empire Byrd proposes the idea of Indianness as the "ontological ground" of U.S. settler colonialism, as the site "through which U.S. empire orients and replicates itself by transforming those to be colonized into 'Indians' through continual reiterations of pioneer logics" (xiii). In her deconstructive analysis, Byrd demonstrates how "Indianness" — its reiterative signification as ethnographic savagery, pathological sovereignty, and "lamentable and tragic loss" — enables the "transit" of empire as the U.S. imperial project proceeds by seeing Indians everywhere it casts its acquisitive eye (xviii). As suggested in my introduction, there was not a single transhistorical iteration of the Indian or indio, and thus I offer the friendly rejoinder that there was not a singular "Indianness" but multiple ones — as least as many as there were European colonial ventures in the Americas — each with its own set of human-making and space-making imperatives. This chapter investigates early Spanish and British iterations of Indianness, not as singular ontologies but as distinct epistemologies that enabled the racial geographies of Mexico and the United States, that enabled the seeing of Indians in landscape in multiple, useful guises. As Byrd suggests, Indianness serves the ontological purpose of constituting the colonizer, not the native. Nevertheless, colonial Indiannesses (plural) continue to resonate in the twenty-first century, deeply impacting indigenous politics of the present.

In her meticulous comparison of British and Spanish colonialism, American Pentimento, Patricia Seed (2001) argues that the two contemporary expressions of indigenous political identity in the Americas — as subjects desiring rights in Latin America versus subjects desiring land in the United States — correspond to the imperial imperatives of labor versus land. Spanish settlers' appetite for indigenous labor produced abject indigenous subjects stripped of dignity who now demand rights as full members of Latin American nation-states, while British settlers' appetite for land produced displaced indigenous subjects stripped of autochthonous domains who now demand self-determination in separate sovereignties from the United States. I sympathetically suggest that Seed's exemplary materialist analysis provides us with an incomplete explanation not only of the long life of the distinct iterations of Indianness in the United States and Latin America, but also of the actual unfolding of Spanish and British colonialism. After all, Spanish settlers also desired and acquired indigenous land while British settlers also indentured and enslaved indigenous labor. The "land versus labor" dichotomy in comparative colonial historiography — itself an iteration of the rapacious-colonizer narrative — is symptomatic of the deeper cartographies of racialization, of seeing Indians in and as landscape. The dispossession and indenture dichotomy, in other words, is an effect of racial geography and not its cause, an effect of how colonial powers visualized and produced the absence/presence of actual indigenous peoples, of how indigenous peoples were made useful in the visual and cartographic production of space, and as such, racial geography offers a supplement to Seed's analysis.

"Though They Be Outside the Faith of Jesus Christ"

The historical context for the debate at Valladolid is twofold. On one hand, the debate took place within the context of the conquest as it transpired in the theater of the Americas and within the chambers of the Council of the Indies. On the other hand, the debate also took place within the theater of Europe during Christianity's epic confrontation with the Ottoman Empire. Spain was at the center of both theaters in the aftermath of the Reconquista, as the ascendant empire and as the defender of Christian orthodoxy. In the American theater the 1550 debate was neither the first time expeditions were suspended while inquiries were conducted into the conditions of conquest, nor the first time that a Spanish king and the Council of the Indies sought expert opinions from juries of scholars and ecclesiastics. In 1514, King Ferdinand suspended an expedition while he considered its legitimacy, and in 1532–1533 the Council of the Indies solicited opinions from the first ecclesiastical junta convened to ascertain indigenous capacity for self-government and for Christian instruction. That junta, comprised of bishops and friars who had served as evangelizers in the New World, advised that the Indians were rational beings capable of conversion (Hanke 1974, 12–13). Rather than settling the debate, the official council statement to this effect precipitated declamations from detractors of indigenous character followed by statements from its defenders.

In the context of this furious battle over the proper treatment of the indigenous peoples, Pope Paul III issued the papal bull Sublimis Deus in 1537. The bull defended indigenous capacity, stating that any detractors were clearly under the influence of "the enemy of the human race [Satan]," as they hindered "the preaching of God's word of Salvation" by insisting Indians be "treated as dumb brutes created for our service." The wording of the bull underscores the intertwining of indigenous capacity for conversion with the colonial treatment merited by them: "The Indians are truly men and ... they are not only capable of understanding the catholic faith, but ... they desire exceedingly to receive it. ... Notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary ... [they] are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ" (cited in Hanke 1974, 21). The bull did not settle the debate, but in the ensuing years the defenders of indigenous capacity and freedom held sway over Carlos V. In 1542 a reform movement led by Dominican missionaries (including Las Casas), jurists at the Escuela de Salamanca (School of Salamanca), and other prominent theologians prevailed on Carlos V to issue the Nuevas leyes para la governación de las Indias y buen tratamiento y conservación de los Indios (New Laws for Governing the Indies and for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians). During the initial wave of conquest, the Spanish Crown had rewarded conquistadors with individual encomiendas, granting them the right to access, without payment, the labor (or goods) of entire communities of Indians, presumably in exchange for their Christian conversion and education in the Spanish language. The New Laws of 1542 affirmed the freedom of the Indians, prohibited their enslavement under any circumstances, required remuneration for their services, and, most importantly, abolished the notorious encomienda system by making it nonhereditary.

Predictably, a rebellion among the encomenderos ensued. In 1544 in Peru, Gonzalo Pizarro (brother of conquistador Francisco Pizarro) led a rebellion that deposed (and eventually killed) Spain's Viceroy Blasco Núñez Vela for attempting to implement the New Laws. The rebellion was deemed so threatening to royal authority that in 1545 Carlos V suspended several stipulations of the New Laws, including the nonhereditary clause that would have phased out the encomienda. Boosted by their success in postponing these provisions, encomenderos throughout the Spanish empire began a campaign to make their encomiendas perpetual. This in turn spurred Las Casas, then bishop of Chiapa, to set sail for Spain in 1547 for the last time to lobby for the reenactment of the suspended provisions. The Indians of Oaxaca and colonial Chiapa had granted Las Casas and his lifelong companion Friar Rodrigo de Andrada the legal authority to represent them before the Council of the Indies. The Indians of Peru subsequently authorized Las Casas to offer Felipe II as much money as necessary to end the encomienda (Hanke 1959, 29). It was in part Las Casas's indefatigable efforts that brought Sepúlveda into the fray. In the aftermath of the 1542 New Laws, and in response to Las Casas and his allies' ongoing efforts to persuade the Court of Castile to prohibit any private control of indigenous peoples, the president of the Council of the Indies, Cardinal García Jofre de Loaysa, invited Sepúlveda to prepare a treatise defending the mode of Spain's conquest and specifically indigenous indenture (Adorno 2007, 114).

Dominican theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was a renowned Renaissance scholar; as a translator of Aristotle, a philosopher, and a royal historian, Sepúlveda had already proven his ability to defend just war and Christian orthodoxy in the face of internal and external threats (Hanke 1974, 61). This brings us to the second historical context of the Valladolid debate: the rise of Lutheran reformation and the Ottoman Empire in the European theater. Sepúlveda is the joint that brought the American and European theaters together. In the second half of the 1520s, the Ottomans had amassed 100,000 troops on the eastern edge of Austria, preparing to lay siege to Vienna. By 1529, under the leadership of Suleiman I they had routed the Hungarian army and were poised to invade Europe. Sepúlveda wrote to Carlos V imploring him to come to the defense of the city, as otherwise "all Catholics, whose salvation and freedom are mainly in your hands, will be at risk and in great danger" (Losado, 9, cited in Mariscal 2006, 261). Carlos V had already banned Islamic practices and the speaking of Arabic among Morisco communities in Spain by 1526 in response to Europe's generalized preoccupation with Islamic incursions and fear of domestic collaboration.