David E. Stannard

This controversial treatise focuses on the social and cultural issues involved in the invasion of the Americas by European nations. It describes the suppression or extermination of native cultures, and focuses on the cultural and ideological principles behind the colonization efforts.

The Conquest of the New World

American Holocaust

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And while European cities then, and for centuries thereafter, took their drinking water from the fetid and polluted rivers nearby, Tenochtitlán’s drinking water came from springs deep within the mainland and was piped into the city by a huge aqueduct system that amazed Cortés and his men—just as they were astonished also by the personal cleanliness and hygiene of the colorfully dressed populace, and by their extravagant (to the Spanish) use of soaps, deodorants, and breath sweeteners.

Recently, three highly praised books of scholarship on early American history by eminent Harvard historians Oscar Handlin and Bernard Bailyn have referred to thoroughly populated and agriculturally cultivated Indian territories as “empty space,” “wilderness,” “vast chaos,” “unopened lands,” and the ubiquitous “virgin land” that blissfully was awaiting European “exploitation.”

Employing what Edward W. Said has called “the moral epistemology of imperialism,” the approved histories of such societies—the United States, Israel, South Africa, and Australia among them—commonly commence with what Said refers to as a “blotting out of knowledge” of the indigenous people. Adds another observer, native peoples in most general histories are treated in the same way that the fauna and flora of the region are: “consigned to the category of miscellaneous information. . . . they inhabit the realm of the ‘etc.’”25 Once the natives have thus been banished from collective memory, at least as people of numerical and cultural consequence, the settler group’s moral and intellectual right to conquest is claimed to be established without question.

With such a wealth of resources, the Ohlones did not depend upon a single staple. If the salmon failed to run, the people moved into the marshes to hunt ducks and geese. If the waterfowl population was diminished by a drought, the people could head for the coast where a beached whale or a run of smelts might help them through their troubles. And if all else failed, there were always shellfish: mussels, clams, and oysters, high in nutrients and theirs for the collecting. . . . All around the Ohlones were virtually inexhaustible resources; and for century after century the people went about their daily life secure in the knowledge that they lived in a generous land, a land that would always support them. […] the Ohlones did not practice agriculture or develop a rich material culture, not because they failed, but because they succeeded so well in the most ancient of all ways of life.

Some of the Indians, he adds, do “begin to chastise their children, but this happens only among those that are Christians, or such as are settled in the colony. The most violent act of disapprobation that a parent might use on a misbehaving child, Charlevoix and other visitors observed, was the tossing of a little water in the child’s face, a gesture obviously intended more to embarrass than to harm.

As the Jesuit Joseph Francois Lafitau, who lived among the Indians for six years, observed: “If a cabin of hungry people meets another whose provisions are not entirely exhausted, the latter share with the newcomers the little which remains to them without waiting to be asked, although they expose themselves thereby to the same danger of perishing as those whom they help at their own expense so humanely and with such greatness of soul. In Europe we should find few [people] disposed, in like cases, to a liberality so noble and magnificent.

But, in addition to what is known about their exceptional achievements in creating a vast and complex empire of trade, commerce, politics, urban planning, architecture, art, and literature, what anthropologist and astronomer Anthony Aveni has said about the life of the mind among the Maya surely is correct:

Their cosmology lacks the kind of fatalism present in our existential way of knowing the universe, one in which the purposeful role of human beings seems diminished. These people did not react to the flow of natural events by struggling to harness and control them. Nor did they conceive of themselves as totally passive observers in the essentially neutral world of nature. Instead, they believed they were active participants and intermediaries in a great cosmic drama. 

In most respects, in fact, these people who appointed chiefs from among their ranks, but made sure that their leaders remained essentially powerless, were the classic exemplars of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s “original affluent society,” where people had relatively few material possessions, but also few material desires, and where there was no poverty, no hunger, no privation—where each person’s fullest material wants were satisfied with the expenditure of about fifteen to twenty hours of work each week.

Thus, for example, few of us today would countenance the practice of human sacrifice as a way of propitiating an angry god, as was done by a few of the highest urban cultures in Mesoamerica during the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century. However, neither would many of us support the grisly torture and killing of thousands of heretics or the burning of tens of thousands of men and women as witches, in a similar effort to mollify a jealous deity, as was being done in Europe, with theocratic approval, at precisely the same time that the Aztecs were sacrificing enemy warriors. 

Indeed, Morgan later notes, “the Indians . . . could have done the English in simply by deserting them.”99 They did not desert them, however, and in that act they sealed their fate. The same was true throughout the Americas: the cultural traits and the material achievements of the native people were turned against them once the European invasion began. Indian openness and generosity were met with European stealth and greed. Ritualized Indian warfare, in which few people died in battle, was met with the European belief in devastating holy war.

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