Father Bartolome de Las Casas and indigenous defense during colonization

Colonization

European Colonization

Father Bartolome de Las Casas

Father Bartolome de Las Casas is one of the most prominent advocates of the Cuban indigenous people. He actually owned slaves himself at one point, yet he set his own slaves free and renounced the practice. He also joined the Dominican order of Christianity and protested against the cruel and unusual punishment that the indigent people had suffered. He was especially against the practice of encomienda which is to trade a life for other material possessions. He wrote:

"The Indies were discovered in 1492. In the following year a great many Spaniards went there with the intention of settling the land. Thus, forty-nine years have passed since the first settlers penetrated the land, the first so claimed being the large and most happy isle called Hispaniola, which is six hundred leagues in circumference…And all the land so far discovered is a beehive of people; it is as though God had crowded into these lands the great majority of mankind."

Although he had great admiration for the land, he did not think highly of the Spanish conquests. "And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons."

While others thought that the indigenious peoples could not govern themselves, Bartolome found them to be highly intelligent and capable of self-governance, even without the Grace of God. He also compared these peoples with other Indian tribes in the South Americas; who had been highly organized. It is likely that the Spanish conquistadors did not have the patience or the want to see the indigenous population for what it was. Rather, they acted like Barbians and treated these peoples with no dignity.