Myth and History in Cabeza de Vaca

As a failed conquistador, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca had to construct a different metaphor for his experience, choosing hagiography as a way to frame the value of his experience. In his prologue to La Relacion, he asks that the narrative be “received in the name of service, because this alone is what a man who came away naked could carry out with him” (142). Conquest and service are two parallel narratives in the biblical tradition, allowing Cabeza de Vaca to turn to books other than Genesis for his metaphorical and mythological structure.

For instance, he alludes to the book of Numbers in his description of the Native Americans he encounters in Florida. In Numbers 13, Moses is instructed by God to send explorers into the land of Canaan, which has been promised by God to Israel. It is a prelude to conquest, as Caleb “still[s] the people before Moses, and sa[ys], Let us go up at once, and possess it [the land]; for we are well able to overcome it” (13:30). Others are not certain of victory, however, and they give “an evil report of the land which they had searched…saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eats up the inhabitants…and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants…and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (13:32-33). Cabeza de Vaca’s description of natives is remarkably similar: “The Indians we had so far seen in Florida are all archers. They go naked, are large of body, and appear at a distance like giants. They are of admirable proportions, very spare and of great activity and strength. The bows they use are as thick as the arm, of eleven or twelve palms in length, which they will discharge at two hundred paces with so great precision that they miss nothing” (143). Not only does he invoke the biblical image of giants dwarfing the would-be conquerors, who have come to a new land with a sense of entitlement, he also adds hyperbole in his description of the proficiency of the archers, who may have been excellent marksmen, but could hardly have been expected to miss nothing.

The purpose of such passages is more subversive than the mythological purpose of Columbus’s diary. Cabeza de Vaca still positions himself as a conquistador, whatever might be said of his ostensible transformation throughout La Relacion, because his central metaphors come from Jewish stories of conquest. In this fashion, he anticipates the typology of the Puritans, who sought to create a literal New Jerusalem. Yet the imperial purpose of La Relacion is not as evident as in Columbus’s journal, because C de V’s emphasis is on his weakness and the helplessness of his band in the face of overwhelming strength. He appeals to God for help in navigation, for miraculous healing of the sick, for direction in the wilderness when he is lost, and in these regards he seems to be constructing a narrative with more humility than Columbus’s record of his voyages. However, the reality that he plans to use these anecdotes to gain favor for himself with the Spanish crown and to add knowledge to the Spanish arsenal, thus reinforcing the purpose of conquest, suggests that the spiritual themes of La Relacion are, in fact, selfish motives masquerading as piety.

Later passages, such as his claim to have discovered a spontaneously burning tree while lost in the desert, allude to Moses’s discovery of the burning bush, out of which God speaks of the promised land, “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8). C de V’s bleeding feet and singed hair evoke images of the mutilated Christ en route to his crucifixion, intensifying the martyr metaphors and reinforcing the messianic themes in order to mute the imperialism of his purpose.

The burning tree follows C de V’s ostensibly miraculous healing of sick natives, both of which illuminate the most audacious aspect of the narrative, which is a subtle bid for beatification as a saint. Among other requirements, such as a five-year period following the death of the confessor and the nomination of the same, is evidence of at least one miracle attested to by an eyewitness. C de V cleverly covers these bases with his caveats about faith healing, which were not only observed by natives, according to his narrative, but also by Castillo and others among his countrymen.

If he couldn’t be a conquistador, this brilliant mythologist paved the way for his own canonization as a saint.

Genesis as Myth in Columbus’s Journal

Speculating about the predominance or absence of violence in a hypothetical invasion of North American tribes into Europe is less useful than tracing the obvious parallels between myth and history that exist in available narratives, such as Columbus’s journal. A fascinating complication in such analysis is that Columbus’s narratives were transcribed, as was the indigenous oral literature. The effects of transcription become especially apparent in the journal of Columbus’s first voyage, where Bartolome de las Casas ostensibly tones down the potentially racist tone of the narrative.

There are reasons to believe that Las Casas responded, in part, to the Papal Bull of 1537, in which Pope Paul III defined Native Americans as humans capable of experiencing spiritual conversion (never mind the implicit assumption that they needed and wanted such a conversion). Paul III also explicitly forbade the enslavement of natives, including deprivation of their rights to property, which were likely direct responses to Columbus’s enslavement of the Taino Indians during his second and third voyages (Sullivan 119-20). As a devout Catholic, Las Casas would have wished to comply with the latest orders from the Vatican, and evidence of his hand in softening the journal appears in suspicious phrases that seem to contradict Columbus’s behavior elsewhere and also conflict with later passages in the same narrative that are ostensibly quoted from the original text of the journal.

The first-person sections of the text are meant to be read as direct quotations from the original manuscript, but conspicuous phrases emerge that suggest Las Casas’s hand in tempering their potentially inflammatory natures. For instance, the journal claims that Columbus “suffered nothing to be touched” (120) when he initially found an abandoned village and later commanded that “nothing which they had left should be taken, not even the value of a pin” (121) after watching the population of a town flee in fear of the advancing Spanish. Later, Las Casas suggests in his paraphrase that “the Admiral gave orders that nothing should be touched, which directions were adhered to” (123), which could indicate his hand in altering the previous passages rather than quoting them directly.

Perhaps most significantly, other passages in the journal suggest that Columbus was not, in fact, scrupulous about forbidding his soldiers to take advantage of the natives, as he took one young man on board and “thought to carry him home to Spain” (125) and later detained five young men who had boarded his ship (127). The text suggests that Columbus allowed the first young man to return to his people and that he also “took seven women and three children…that the Indians might tolerate their captivity better with their company” (127), caveats which are apparently intended to soften the obvious humanitarian violations of the “Admiral’s” behavior. However, if Columbus was willing to detain five young men and capture seven more of their tribespeople, it seems unlikely that he would have given a moment’s thought to the safety of their belongings, as the earlier passages suggest he did.

The fact that Pope Paul III’s proclamation appeared in 1537, roughly ten years before Las Casas is thought to have begun his transcription of Columbus’s journal, coupled with the inconsistencies inherent in the transcribed text, suggest that it was doctored with the intent to salvage some of Columbus’s reputation and preserve the heroism of his legacy. In a word, Las Casas might be said to have been mythologizing Columbus with his redactions of the text.

The mythological influence of Genesis on Columbus’s journal is also evident in a number of passages, which reinforce my assumption that a major catalyst in the European colonization of North America was the cultural predisposition to empire building that Genesis invites. Genesis 1:26-28 most directly invites the colonial mindset:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

After the fall from grace, God informs Adam that the earth is “cursed,” that he will be forced to grapple with weeds and only eke out subsistence “by the sweat of [his] brow” (Genesis 3:17, 19). These are the most influential cultural forces in the use of technology such as guns and steel to subdue the earth and enact dominion over native peoples, as per my earlier critique of Diamond’s premise.

One might reject statements like Columbus’s assertion that the “language is the same throughout these islands” (124) out of hand for their ignorance and seemingly willful inaccuracy, but this would overlook the mythological function of the text. Columbus likely would have observed the differences in language or at least have heard about them from some of the natives who were telling him stories about neighboring cannibals, so it seems that he had other reasons for presenting a simplified version to Fernando. The mythical narrative of dominion assumes that conversion to Christianity is necessary and inevitable; thus, linguistic barriers would pose a problem. Telling a story about the New World that implies easy passage for Christian values would serve a mythological purpose very well.

Similarly, Columbus maintains that “these people have no religion, neither are they idolaters, but are a very gentle race, without the knowledge of any iniquity; they neither kill, nor steal, nor carry weapons” (127). Elsewhere, he claims that the natives believed the Spanish conquistadores to have come from heaven, which precludes the dearth of religion that he ostensibly observes. From the Yuchi myth, “The Creation of the Whites,” which describes the emergence of white man from sea foam, it is clear that natives did not necessarily all associate the Spanish with angels. “Wohpe and the Gift of the Pipe,” from the Lakota tradition, suggests that some tribes assumed that deities could assume human forms and may have associated the Spanish with wakan or supernatural figures. But the very association requires a religious consciousness that Columbus identifies and denies in one breath. His mythological purpose suffers no damage from the contradiction, because the story of European dominance through conversion depends upon a spiritual consciousness–natives would not need to be “liberated” by faith otherwise–and upon obsequiousness to the one “true” Catholic faith, as is implied by the ostensible association of Columbus’s army with heaven. Historically, the contradiction doesn’t work. Mythologically, it makes perfect sense.

Columbus’s assertion that the indigenous peoples carried no weapons must have raised some eyebrows back in Spain, particularly alongside his reports of cannibalism (since the cannibals purportedly took prisoners and dismembered them, which would have required some sort of weaponry). Historically, such a claim seems ludicrous. Mythologically, however, it reinforces the sense of religious and cultural superiority that extends from Genesis: in other words, it would have been easier to imagine colonists tending the garden of the New World if the natives were not seen as a real threat and if the colonists’ entitlement to subjugate the earth and have dominion over its wildlife (which Columbus and the Puritans associated with the “heathens”) were not in jeopardy.

Thus, the mythical thrust of Columbus’s journal can be seen as a direct extension of Genesis, with echoes of the Jewish Eden in the New World, a fertile landscape ready to yield itself to the sweat of the colonist’s brow, and a population ripe for conversion. Dominion seems obvious and inevitable–even humane–through Las Casas’s transcription of Columbus’s narrative.

Would Native America Have Colonized Europe with Guns, Germs, and Steel?

Source: “Pizzaro Conquers the Incas” (Unknown)

Jared Diamond’s brilliant explanation of geographical luck as a central cause of the technological progress in Eurasian society that culminated in guns and steel (with germ immunity being the byproduct of domesticated animals, which are the primary carriers of epidemic disease) essentially assumes that violent conquest is inevitable. Implicit in his argument is the nuance that had the native peoples of North America possessed sufficient technology, they would have inaugurated a bloody colonial history that differed from North American history mainly in setting.

For instance, he writes of the Aboriginal Australians in Guns, Germs, and Steel that “the society that they created was not a literature, food-producing industrial democracy,” and that “the reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment” (321). Later, he maintains the same about Africa’s past: “In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suits of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate” (401). If you have the weapons, then, you’re going to use them, according to Diamond’s reasoning.

I’m not so sure. Technology is not created in a moral vacuum; as cultural studies has shown us, science is always driven by its cultural context and reflects the interests of those in power. A friend quipped to me once that if another life form landed on Earth and tried to determine the most prevalent health disorder afflicting the human race, he would conclude that it was erectile dysfunction. In other words, the existence of Viagra (as opposed to, say, a safe and readily available abortion pill or a simple cure for AIDS) is, in part, a reflection of the proliferation of white men within science, particularly in roles like that of a research director, who gets to decide which questions an experiment is designed to answer and which questions it is not. If Helen Longino, in Science as Social Knowledge, is correct in arguing that value-free science is impossible to achieve, and that science instead contains either contextual values (those derived from the cultural milieu) or constitutive values (principles of the scientific method), then it is certainly NOT inevitable that 1) guns are a high priority in all cultures with technology and 2) that guns would necessarily be used to create a colonial empire.

Culture decides how technology is used, and so the stories that undergird a culture ought to tell us something about whether or not that group would wish to colonize others in a violent manner. Genesis 1-3 is the most important source of cultural assumptions in Europe, and from the outset it contains imagery that foreshadows the conquest of North America. Not only does Genesis introduce us to a vengeful God who banishes his children from Paradise, leaving their descendents with the notion that paradise always exists somewhere else, one of its creation chronologies places humanity at the top of the ecological and environmental food chain. The Mayan and Aztec empires were relatively anomalous among North American tribes, though some suggest that the Iroquois Confederacy of the Five Nations and Powhatan’s growing empire in the Virginia territory could have led to civilizations rivaling other dynasties. In contrast, tribes like the Blackfeet and Lakota preserve stories that represent their rootedness in the place they inhabit. Their home is the geographical center of the world, and no other place is thought to be better. The Sky Country or the Sand Hills may resemble the Judeo-Christian Eden, but there is no attempt in the indigenous literature to create Sky Country on earth, and there is no desire evident in these narratives to reach the Sand Hills before death would take the individual there. The effect is much different from the Genesis narrative, and based on these examples it seems safe to say that those tribes whose stories reverence the place they inhabit would have had no measurable incentive to venture across the ocean in search of the “green breast” of a new world, as Fitzgerald puts it.

Violence is another matter. Had the Huron or the Iroquois gained guns and steel, they would have likely used it for bloody ends, given their brutal torture of war prisoners and occasional practice of cannibalism. The war songs of the Blackfeet, Crow, Lakota, and Ojibwe show that violence was a central part of their culture and that military conflict with unfamiliar societies may have been inevitable in the hypothetical arrival of North American tribes on the shores of Europe.

But the oral literature does not suggest that Indians were possessed with a sense of urgency about acquiring more land or transforming that land into the Edenic paradise that the Puritans believed they were sent into the wilderness to create. If geography had allowed the native tribes to progress more rapidly than
Europe, there would almost certainly have been a flowering of printed literature, if the survival of the oral tradition is any indication. The extinction of the buffalo, however, would not have been predetermined by human nature, and the wholesale slaughter of the Spanish, French, and English would not have commenced with the same insistence on spiritual superiority and the need to conquer a continent on behalf of the Sun Chief.

Perhaps more importantly, Iroquois or Narragansett explorers would not have been driven by the lingering sense of displacement from paradise that the Genesis narrative invites. Had the natives of North America sallied forth, in other words, they would not have been looking for a new home, and that is one of the strongest reasons for rejecting Diamond’s view of bloody conquest as the only possibility for first contact between societies.

Creation of the Whites

This is a difficult story to address, because it seems so neutral and gives an account of first contact that seems non-violent. The narrator suggests that the whites “asked the Indians to give them a portion of it [the land] that they might live on it” (66), which we’ll see in later narratives rarely held true in other scenarios. Roger Williams and Thomas Morton were among the few colonists who purchased land from Native Americans and established friendly trade relations with them, so we might use the Yuchi tale to drive home the point that all settlers were not the same and that the population of the New World was highly diverse. Given what Jared Diamond and others tell us about the Greenland Norse, and given the competition between England, Spain, and France for colonial empires, we can assume that the Yuchi tale could pertain to the Norse, the Spanish, the French, or the English: all would alike be seen as “whites” by the native eye.

Such guesswork is less fruitful than attention to the nuances of the story, itself, namely, what the narrative can tell us about European culture from an outside perspective. Why were the whites so restless? What’s all this business about carrying land away in boxes, and then coming back to inform the Indians that “their land was very strong and fertile” (66)? The Yuchi, Passamaquoddy, Iroquois, Narragansett, and Pequot tribes already knew their land was fertile, so the fact that Europeans would feel the need to state the obvious tells us something about the sense of cultural superiority that most explorers brought with them. Perhaps we can deduce something from the boxes about the scientific nature of European society, which had led to technologies like guns and steel, as Diamond points out.

One irony in the narrative is the ostensible tentativeness of the settlers, who seem to skirt the coast in their “house-boat” before returning multiple times and always in greater numbers (65). European history likes to conceive of this period of exploration as an epoch of fearless swashbucklers, but from the indigenous point of view it seems that European fearlessness was directly proportional to numerical advantage. We’ll talk more about Diamond’s explanation of colonial history and its relationship to geographical luck, which may challenge some of our assumptions about American identity.

The questions raised by the Yuchi narrative are more valuable than the conclusions it invites, since most conclusions about this tale cannot avoid being highly speculative. Questions about first contact and race relations should lead us to approach this as a more metaphorical kind of story, where we try to hear the spirit of the story rather than trying to piece together a literal history from it. What does it tell us about the Yuchi people? What does it tell us about Europeans from the indigenous point of view? What does it suggest about the colonial history that followed?