american-holocaust

218 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTof their forefathers and adopt the foreign religious beliefs of the peoplewho had come to kill and torture and enslave them. In addition, many ofthose who appeared to have undergone conversion turned out to be backsliders,or false conversions in the first place. The Spanish, of course, hada tried and true answer to problems of this sort: the Inquisition. So theyinstituted among the natives Inquisitorial proceedings to locate and punishthose Indians who had given false witness or who had returned to "idolatry"after claiming to have seen the light. Thus, the friars joined the conquistadorsin burning Indians at the stake. 61If the assertions of Ortiz and others regarding the habits of the Indianswere fabrications, they were not fabrications without design. From theSpaniards' enumerations of what they claimed were the disgusting foodcustoms of the Indians (including cannibalism, but also the consumptionof insects and other items regarded as unfit for human diets) to the Indians'supposed nakedness and absence of agriculture, their sexual devianceand licentiousness, their brutish ignorance, their lack of advanced weaponryand iron, and their irremediable idolatry, the conquering Europeanswere purposefully and systematically dehumanizing the people they wereexterminating. For the specific categories of behavior chosen for these accusationswere openly derived from traditional Christian and earlier Romanand Greek ideas regarding the characteristics of fundamentally eviland non-rational creatures, from Hesiod's Bronze race to the medieval era'swild men and witches. Thus, time and again, the enslavement and terroristicmass slaughter of Indians by the Spanish was justified by pointing tothe natives' supposed ignorance or their allegedly despicable and animalisticbehavior-as, for example, when Balboa's troops murdered hundredsof native people in one locale, hacking them to death and feeding them tothe dogs, because Balboa claimed that some of their chiefs were addictedto the "nefarious and dirty sin [of] sodomy." 62All this, of course-from the miraculous discovery of the lndies to thedestruction of the heathenish Incas-was part of God's master plan. Indeed,the very priest who had persuaded Las Casas to become a friar,Father Domingo de Betanzos, had widely and influentially proclaimed aprophecy during the early years of the conquest that "the Indians werebeasts and that God had condemned the whole race to perish for the horriblesins that they had committed in their paganism." Although Betanzoseventually repudiated the prophecy just before dying while on a pilgrimageto the Holy Land-several decades after pronouncing it, and apparentlyunder pressure from some of his gentler Dominican brothers-by then itwas commonly accepted truth by those of both high and low station, withinthe sacred as well as the secular communities. In fact, no sooner was Betanzosdead than his repudiated prophecy quickly was edited, revised, andrecirculated by the Dominican chronicler Davila Padilla. 63Some explanation, after all, had to be given for the apparent ease withwhich the Indians went to their graves, whether from the storms of Euro-