Thursday, October 27, 2011

Web Surfing--Christianity and Genocide


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Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific

"The [Catholic] Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out; by this means they secured that these infants went to heaven."
-- Bertrand Russell
In the 15th century and onwards, Christians discovered new lands full of unbelievers, and they did to the Africians and to the American Indians exactly what they did to the European unbeliever, but there was one difference. Christian artwork had depicted Satan and his demons as black. Not suprisingly Christians decided that Africans and Indians were a lot closer to Satan than white skinned Europeans, and they (Christians) acted accordingly to protect themselves from the "pollution" of contact with dark skinned people.

People should avail themselves and read Historian, Forrest. G. Woods' Book "The Arrogance of Faith" for an in depth exploration of the Christian origins of Racism, Slavery, and Segregation.
Link
Christian civilization, by virtue of its exclusivist heresy and monotheism, became the self-justifying destroyer of all non-Christian culture.
From: Canadian Holocaust.
By 1570 the Inquisition had established independent tribunals in Peru and the city of Mexico for the purpose of "freeing the land, which has become contaminated by Jews and heretics." Natives who did not convert to Christianity were burned like any other heretic. The Inquisition spread as far as Goa, India, where in the late 16th and early 17th centuries it took no less than 3,800 lives.

Even without the formal Inquisition present, missionary behavior clearly illustrated the belief in the supremacy of a single image of God, not in the supremacy of one all-encompassing divinity. If the image of God venerated in a foreign land was not Christian, it was simply not divine. Portuguese missionaries in the Far East destroyed pagodas, forced scholars to hide their religious manuscripts, and suppressed older customs. Mayan scribes in Central America wrote:
Before the coming of the Spaniards, there was no robbery or violence. The Spanish invasion was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, the beginning of strife.
In 1614 the Shogun of Japan, Iyeyazu, accused the missionaries of "wanting to change the government of the country and make themselves masters of the soil."
-- The Dark Side of Christian History, Helen Ellerbe
See the book: Teurer Segen - Christliche Mission und Kolonialismus by Gert von Paczensky ("Costly blessing - Christian Mission and Colonialism")

Americas

In the first few decades since 1492, it was thought that Indians did not have souls because they were "animals" in human form. Therefore, it was believed they could be hunted down like animals, which they were. It was only in 1530 CE that the Pope declared that the Indians were human. Having established their humanity, it was decided that they must be inducted into Christianity. As the Indians were unwilling, this was accomplished by force. Though the change in their status from animal to human might appear to be an improvement, in reality, little changed in their plight.
Unfortunately for the Indians, with the arrival of Christians would come the intolerance for their indigenous ways of life:
The Indian chief Hatuey fled with his people but was captured and burned alive. As
"they were tying him to the stake a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell."
What happened to his people was described by an eyewitness:
"The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties ... They built a long gibbet, long enough for the toes to touch the ground to prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles... then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive." [SH72]
-- American Holocaust, by D.Stannard
Link at The Christian Heritage
When Columbus landed in America in 1492, he mistook it for India and called the native inhabitants "Indians." It was his avowed aim to
"convert the heathen Indians to our Holy Faith"
that warranted the enslaving and exporting of thousands of Native Americans. That such treatment resulted in complete genocide did not matter as much as that these natives had been given the opportunity of everlasting life through their exposure to Christianity. The same sort of thinking also gave Westerners license to rape women.
-- The Dark Side of Christian History, by Helen Ellerbe
A total of maybe more than 150 million Indians (of both Americas) were destroyed in the period of 1500 to 1900, as an average two thirds by smallpox and other epidemics, that leavessome 50 million killed directly by violence, bad treatment and slavery.
In many countries, such as Brazil, and Guatemala, this continues even today.
Link

In the Christians' own words

American Holocaust, by D. Stannard:
On his first voyage he [Christopher Columbus] described the natives as follows:
"The people of this island and of all other islands which I have found and seen, ... all go naked, ... they ... are so artless and free with all they possess, that no one would believe it without having seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts..."
-- Christopher Columbus
Link
In return, Columbus and his men would teach them the Christian way - Columbus read to them in Spanish from the Requerimiento:
I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of Their Highnesses. We shall take you and your wives and children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them...
-- Christopher Columbus [devout Christian] to Native Americans, 1492
At virtually every landing on Columbus' second voyage his troops went ashore and killed indiscriminately whatever animals and birds and natives they encountered, "looting and destroying all they found," as Columbus' son Fernando put it.
Link, which has far more disturbing eye-witness descriptions of what the devoutly Christian Columbus and his men did to the Indians (referencing American Holocaust by D.E. Stannard):
As one eyewitness recalls:
"Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons and pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in the corral. ... So they would cut an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying 'Go now, spread the news to your chiefs.'...
Some Christians encounter an Indian woman, who was carrying in her arms a child at suck; and since the dog they had with them was hungry, they tore the child from the mother's arms and flung it still living to the dog, who proceeded to devour it before the mother's eyes..."
On one occasion in Cuba they
"began to rip open their bellies, to cut and kill those lambs - men, women, children, and old folk, all of whom were seated, off guard, and frightened."
After all, the Indians were only infidels,
"naturally lazy and vicious, ... idolatrous, libidinous, and commit sodomy."
In less than a decade after Columbus' first landing the native population of the island of Hispaniola - thousands and thousands of people - had dropped by a third to a half. Before the next century ended, the population of Cuba and many other Caribbean islands had been virtually exterminated.
In spite of this, people today celebrate Columbus Day in honour of this murderer who was also an admitted rapist:
In his own words, Columbus described how he himself "took [his] pleasure" with a native woman after whipping her "soundly" with a piece of rope.
-- The Dark Side of Christian History, Helen Ellerbe


When taught the mysteries of our religion, they [the Indians] say that these things may suit Castilians, but not them, and they do not wish to change their customs... I may therefore affirm that God has never created a race more full of vice and composed without the least mixture of kindness or culture... The Indians are more stupid than asses, and refuse to improve in anything.
-- Tomás Ortiz, Dominican monk, early 16th century
Arthur Barlowe, one of the first Christians ever to set foot on Virginia soil, described the natives he encountered in 1584 as follows:
"...we were entertained with all love and kindness and with as much bounty, ...as they could possibly devise. We found the people most gentle loving, and faithfull, void of all guile and treason ...a more kind and loving people there cannot be found in the world, as farre as we have hitherto had triall." [SH227]
Indeed it could not be more obvious, the natives were badly in need of better, Christian morals. Thus it is only natural the Christian welfare executioners described the way these same Indians were taught the said better, Christian morals:
"...we burnt, and spoyled their corne, and Towne, all the people beeing fledde." [SH227]
[SH] D.E.Stannard, American Holocaust. Columbus and the conquest of the New World, New York/Oxford 1992.
From: The Christian Heritage
Stolen Continents, by R.Wright:
When the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox.
-- Francisco de Aguilar, 1525
Link
In later times, the Christians, tired of seeing how many more Indians there were left to murder, would devise an easier method of execution. Having noticed how the Indians were not resistant to the disease, the Christians would purposefully spread the smallpox by giving Indians infected sheets which were previously used by smallpox patients. The contamination spread like wildfire among the Indians and felled millions.
These are the pivotal letters:
  • Colonel Henry Bouquet to General Amherst, dated 13 July 1763, suggests in a postscript the distribution of blankets to "inocculate the Indians";
  • Amherst to Bouquet, dated 16 July 1763, approves this plan in a postscript and suggests as well as "to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." (This postcript spans two pages.)


    • These letters also discuss the use of dogs to hunt the Indians, the so-called "Spaniard's Method," which Amherst approves in principle, but says he cannot implement because there are not enough dogs. In a letter dated 26 July 1763, Bouquet acknowledges Amherst's approval and writes, "all your Directions will be observed."
    Historian Francis Parkman, in his book The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada [Boston: Little, Brown, 1886] refers to a postscript in an earlier letter from Amherst to Bouquet wondering whether smallpox could not be spread among the Indians:
    Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them. [Vol. II, p. 39 (6th edition)]
    From: Jeffrey Amherst and Smallpox Blankets
    Out of our regard to them we gave them [the Indians] two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.
    -- from the Journal of William Trent
    Link
    Today, many Christian conservatives try to skirt around the issue of the wilfull introduction of smallpox by repeatedly reassessing the statements of the perpetrators, until they conclude that it was all accidental and unintentional.
    From The Christian Heritage, citing American Holocaust:
    Reverend Solomon Stoddard, one of New England's most esteemed religious leaders, in
    "1703 formally proposed to the Massachusetts Governor that the colonists be given the financial wherewithal to purchase and train large packs of dogs 'to hunt Indians as they do bears'."
    Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado 11/29/1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still elder in the church ("I long to be wading in gore") had a Cheyenne village of about 600, mostly women and children, gunned down despite the chiefs' waving with a white flag: 400-500 killed. From an eye-witness account:
    "There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed ..."
    Methodist minister Colonel John Chivington's policy was to "kill and scalp all little and big" because "nits make lice."
    Link
    The Christian Hall of Shame at The Christian Heritage has a section on Andrew Jackson, Protestant, President of the United States (1828 - 1837) and Cherokee murderer

    Inquisition, slavery, and theft of land in the Americas


    The Church, particularly in South America, supported the enslavement of native inhabitants and the theft of native lands. A 1493 papal Bull justified declaring war on any natives in South America who refused to adhere to Christianity.
    -- The Dark Side of Christian History, by Helen Ellerbe
    The Inquisition was not limited to Europe, as Spaniards brought it to the Americas and used it to punish the native inhabitants. Through the 1500s, 879 heresy trials were recorded in Mexico alone. Thus, other than people, the Inquisition was one of Europe's first exports to the Americas. Church leaders supported the suppression, enslavement and murder of native inhabitants - a 1493 papal Bull justfied declaring war on all non-Christian natives in the Americas. Jurist Encisco wrote in 1509:
    The king has every right to send his men to the Indies to demand their territory from these idolaters because he had received it from the pope. If the Indians refuse, he may quite legally fight them, kill them and enslave them, just as Joshua enslaved the inhabitants of the country of Canaan.
    Link
    With this, the Papal Bull declared that the church under king Ferdinand was entitled to all land in South America.
    The Inquisition remained active until 1834, especially in Central and South America, where "heathen" natives were tortured and burned for crimes against the true faith, such as, "not believing in it".Mayan scribes in Central America wrote,
    "Before the coming of the Spaniards, there was no robbery or violence. The Spanish invasion was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, and the beginning of strife."

    Catholic fathers of the mission of San Francisco burned many Indian "witches" before the tribes were sufficiently subdued to accept God's Word.
    Henry Charles Lea said,
    "An inquisitor seems to have been regarded as a necessary portion of the missionary outfit."
    Link
    Columbus planted a cross wherever he went, vowing to "do all the mischief that we can" to natives who refused to convert. The Christians brought with them skills of torture that had been refined on their own people in Europe for hundreds of years.
    Link

    Some statistics on the death toll in South and Central America

    Native Peoples section at Victims of the Christian Faith references American Holocaust, D.Stannard:
    On Hispaniola alone, on Columbus visits, the native population (Arawak), a rather harmless and happy people living on an island of abundant natural resources, a literal paradise, soon mourned 50,000 dead.
    The surviving Indians fell victim to rape, murder, enslavement and Spanish raids.
    Also from the Native Peoples section:
    "[The] island's population of about eight million people at the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492 already had declined by a third to a half before the year 1496 was out."
    Eventually all the island's natives were exterminated, so the Spaniards were "forced" to import slaves from other caribbean islands, who soon suffered the same fate. Thus
    "the Caribbean's millions of native people [were] thereby effectively liquidated in barely a quarter of a century".
    "In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had been exterminated."
    "And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite city of Tenochtitlán [Mexico city] was next."
    Cortez, Pizarro, De Soto and hundreds of other Spanish conquistadors likewise sacked southern and mesoamerican civilizations in the name of Christ (De Soto also sacked Florida).
    "When the 16th century ended, some 200,000 Spaniards had moved to the Americas. By that time probably more than 60,000,000 natives were dead."
    Christianity was responsible for the genocide of 60 million Indians there by the end of the 16th century alone, whom the Christian perpetrators believed they were saving for Christ.

    Some statistics on the death toll of the Indian Nations of North America

    Once again referencing D. Stannard's American Holocaust, the section titled Native Peoples states:
    To summarize:
    • Before the arrival of the English, the western Abenaki people in New Hampshire and Vermont had numbered 12,000. Less than half a century later about 250 remained alive - a destruction rate of 98%.
    • The Pocumtuck people had numbered more than 18,000, fifty years later they were down to 920 - 95% destroyed.
    • The Quiripi-Unquachog people had numbered about 30,000, fifty years later they were down to 1500 - 95% destroyed.
    • The Massachusetts people had numbered at least 44,000, fifty years later barely 6000 were alive - 81% destroyed.
    These are only a few examples of the multitude of tribes living before Christian colonists set their foot on the New World. All this was before the smallpox epidemics of 1677 and 1678 had occurred. And the carnage was not over then.
    All the above was only the beginning of the European colonization, it was before the frontier age actually had begun.
    The Frontier Age is the one popularised as that of 'cowboys and Indians' and known for the many massacres inflicted on the Indians by the cavalry.

    Christianity leads to destruction of libraries and temples - again

    Zumarraga, the first bishop of Mexico, is known for sending the contents of the Mayans' Texcoco Library up in flames - because they were "the Devil's work". In 1531, this Christian bishop wrote how he had personally destroyed 500 temples and 20,000 Mayan idols.
    In 1562, bishop Diego de Landa, burnt down Yucatan's grand library. Though a tiny proportion of their valuable literature was preserved from the mad Christian fires by the Mayans, bishop de Landa has left us his odious writing:
    "We found a large number of their books of these letters, and because they did not have anything in which there was not superstition and falsehoods of the devil, we burned them all, which they felt very sorry for and which caused them grief."
    -- Relación de las cosas de Yucatán "The Relating of Yucatan Things" by Fray Diego de Landa
    Christianity through the zeal of its dedicated followers has wiped out much of South America's indigenous civilisation. Because of it, we will know never know the full extent of their ancestors' written, artistic and architectural legacy.

    About the peoples marked for Christian extermination

    Though the Christians raped and tortured the Indian women, it was noted that the Native Americans did not do the same:
  • "I don't remember to have heard an instance of these savages offering to violate the chastity of any of the fair sex who had fallen into their hands." wrote the anonymous author of A Narrative of the Capture of Certain Americans at Westmoreland (1780)
  • Another anonymous writer, narrator of the battles of Trenton and Princeton, stated that British abuse of women had been "far Worse in this Respect than an Indian War, for I Never heard nor read of their Ravishing of Women ..."
  • Mary Rowlandson said of her own captivity: "I have been in the midst of roaring Lions, and Savage Bears, that feared neither God, nor Man, nor the Devil ... and yet not one of them ever offered the least abuse of unchastity to me in word or action."
  • William Apess (Pequot) asked in the 1800s, "Where, in the records of Indian barbarity, can we point to a violated female"?
  • Even Brigadier General James Clinton of the Continental Army said to his soldiers in 1779, as he sent them off to destroy the Iroquois nation, "Bad as the savages are, they never violate the chastity of any women, their prisoners."
    • Link, warning: cites a few of the copious gruesome instances of Christians raping Indian women.

    It is especially telling that while almost no Indians voluntarily lived among the colonists, the number of whites who ran off to live with the natives was a problem often remarked upon. Historian James Axtell has concluded that the whites who chose to remain among the natives
    "...stayed because they found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity - values that the European colonists also honored... But Indian life was attractive for other values - for social equality, mobility, adventure, and as two adult converts acknowledged, 'the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.'"
    -- The Invasion Within, J.Axtell
    After a century and a half of permanent British settlement in North America, even Benjamin Franklin joined numerous earlier commentators lamenting that
    "...when an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading them ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them."
    -- The Invasion Within, J.Axtell
    Likewise in regard to the education of children early European visitors such as Jesuit missionaries inevitaby marvelled at the both successful and gentle methods that were used by the Native parents to guide their children to both dignity, self-control and prideful independence. The French Jesuit Pierre de Charlevoix for example traveled through what is now New York, Michigan and Eastern Canada, and remarked:
    [While] "fathers and mothers neglect nothing in order to inspire their children with certain principles of honour ... they take care always to communicate their instructions ... in an indirect manner."
    Some of the Indians, he added,
    "... do begin to chastise their children, but this happens only among those that are Christians, or such as are settled in the colony..."
    But apart from such disturbing exceptions the Indian methods of child education prevailed, and the results were evident, for example, in a report on the Huron's councils by Father Jean de Brebeuf during the summer of 1636. One of the most
    "... remarkable things... is their great prudence and moderation of speech,"
    and exactly this was what also had impressed Charlevoix:
    "It must be acknowledged, that proceedings are carried on in these assemblies with a wisdom and a coolness, and a knowledge of affairs, and I may add generally with a probity, which would have done honour to the areopagus of Athens, or to the Senate of Rome..." [SH30]
    [AI] J.Axtell, The Invasion Within, New York 1985
    [SH] D.E. Stannard, American Holocaust. Columbus and the conquest of the New World, New York/Oxford 1992.
    From: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? at The Christian Heritage.
    Compare the treatment of children by the Indians with the treatment European children suffered under Christianity.
    The same page quotes historians on how these people shared with the settlers all that they had. One of these:
    "Indeed, Morgan later notes, 'the Indians could have done the English in simply by deserting them.' [MA40]
    They did not desert them, and in that act they sealed their fate.
    The same was true throughout the Americas: Indian openness and generosity were met with European stealth and greed. ...
    -- American Holocaust. Columbus and the conquest of the New World, D.E. Stannard
    [MA] E.S.Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, New York 1975.
    Link at the The Christian Heritage

    The egalitarian nature of Native societies did not escape the notice of the colonizers. It was a scandal in the colonies that a number of white people chose to live among Indian people while virtually no Indians voluntarily chose to live among the colonists. According to J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur,
    "Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no example of even one of these Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!"
    Link. De Crevecoeur confused "European" for "Christian". Of course these thousands of Europeans could not relinquish their ethnic origins which are biological. They abandoned Christianity to adopt the pre-Christian ways of the indigenous Indians, while the Indians never voluntarily became Christian, which De Crevecoeur wrongly described as "European".
    Richard Hill has argued that the equal status accorded to women in Native societies "fueled some [white] men's hatred towards Indians. After all, they now had to worry about their prized possession being happier with savage Indians than with them."
    Link, once again confusing European/white and Christian. The fact that many European men, women and children preferred to live in traditional, unconverted Indian society, shows that the attraction lay in the humaneness of the pre-Christian Indians and their ways.

    Perhaps one of the most common associations made with the congregations of northeastern cultures concerns their sophisticated political systems and their formal networks of international alliances, such as the Five Nation Confederacy of the Iroquois League, founded some time between the tenth and the fifteenth century, long before Columbus, and composed of the independent Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples. In the early eighteenth century the Tuscarora were admitted to the League as the Sixth Nation. Many writers, both historians and anthropologists, have argued that the League was a model for the United States Constitution, although some controversy remains. The debate focuses largely on the extent of Iroquois influence on Euro-American political thought, however, since no one denies there was an influence.

    As J.N.B.Hewitt of the Smithsonian Institution admitted more than fifty years ago:
    Some of the ideas incorporated in the League of the Five Nations were far too radical even for the most advanced of the framers of the American Constitution. Nearly a century and a half would elapse before the white men could reconcile themselves to woman suffrage, which was fundamental in the Indian government. They have not yet arrived at the point of abolishing capital punishment, which the Iroquois had accomplished by a very simple legal device. And child welfare legislation, prominent in the Iroquois scheme of things, had to wait for a century or more before the white men were ready to adopt it. [TU28f]
    -- The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League, E.Tooker
    But as another historian points out, referring to this quote, to limit the
    description of female power among the Iroquois to the achievement of "woman suffrage," ... is to not even begin to convey the reality of women's role in Iroquois society. As the Constitution of the Five Nations firmly declared: "The lineal descent of the people of the Five Nations shall run in the female line. Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall follow the status of the mother." [SH29]
    -- American Holocaust, D.E. Stannard
    From: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? at The Christian Heritage, which has far more on this topic.
    The site suggests the book Indian Givers by Jack M. Weatherford for further reading.

    The Californian Indians

    California
    THIS is what happened in California a little more than a century ago, in the Spanish missions...
    [T]he Puritan minister John Robinson had complained to Plymouth's William Bradford that although a group of massacred Indians no doubt "deserved" to be killed, "Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you killed any!" [Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 374f]That was probably the only thing the New England Puritans and California's Spanish Catholics would have agreed upon. So, using armed Spanish troops, to capture Indians and herd them into the mission stockades, the Spanish padres did their best to convert the natives before they killed them.
    And kill them they did... At the mission of Nuestra Señora de Loreto, reported the Franciscan chronicler Father Francisco Paloú, during the first three years of Franciscan rule 76 children and adults were baptized, while 131 were buried... The same held true at others, from the mission of Santa Rosaliá de Mulegé, with 48 baptisms and 113 deaths, to the mission of San Ignacio, with 115 baptisms and 293 deaths - all within the same initial three year period.
    For some missions, such as those of San José del Cabo and Santiago de las Coras, no baptism or death statistics were reported, because there were so few survivors [...] that there was no reason for counting [...] And what was done was simply that they brought more natives in, under military force of arms.
    In short, the missions were furnaces of death that sustained their Indian population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more natives into their confines to compensate for the huge numbers who were being killed once they got there. [...] Thus for example, one survey of life and death in an early Arizona mission has turned up statistics showing that at one time an astonishing 93 percent of the children born within its walls died before the age of ten - and yet the mission's total population did not drastically decline. [SH136f]
    There were various ways in which the mission Indians died. [...] The personal living space for Indians in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet per person for unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex-segregated common rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet. It was perhaps a bit more space than was allotted a captive African in the hold of a slave ship sailing the Middle Passage. [...] Of course, the mission Indians also worked like slaves in the padres' agricultural fields, but they did so with far less than half the caloric intake, on average, commonly provided a black slave in Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia. [SH138]
    As one French visitor commented in the early nineteenth century, after inspecting life in the missions, the relationship between the priest and his flock "would ... be different only in name if a slaveholder kept them for labor and rented them out at will ..." But, we know now, he would have fed them better. [SH139]
    ...
    There was, of course, good reason for the Indians to fear the consequences of running away and being caught:
    Some of the run-away men were tied on sticks and beaten with straps. One chief was taken out to the open field and a young calf which had just died was skinned and the chief was sewed into the skin while it was yet warm. He was kept tied to a stake all day, but he died soon and they kept his corpse tied up.[SH142]

    The padres were also concerned about the continuing catastrophic decline in the number of babies born to their neophyte charges...
    ...a first-hand account of what happened at mission Santa Cruz when a holy and ascetic padre named Ramon Olbés came to the conclusion that one particular married couple was behaving with excessive sexual inhibition, thereby depriving him of another child to enslave and another soul to offer up to Christ:
    [narrates how the padres lewdly inspected the reproductive organs of the man and then the woman]
    At this point the woman resisted the padre's attempted forced inspection; for that impertinence she received fifty lashes, was "shackled, and locked in the nunnery." He then gave her a wooden doll and ordered her to carry it with her, "like a recently born child," wherever she went. [SH141]
    From: Mission: Possible - Genocide as a Profession at The Christian Heritage,
    where [SH] refers to D.E. Stannard, American Holocaust. Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, New York: Oxford University 1992.The method that was employed by the Catholics of Spain in capturing Indians to convert them, is repeated by Protestant missions today. See the section on how The New Tribes Mission and others operate manhunts to capture remaining non-Christian Indians for conversion.
    See also:
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