From the Native American perspective, the sixteenth century marked the beginning of the European invasion. The first Europeans to contact the Native nations were explorers, adventurers, soldiers, and missionaries, who were seeking personal glory, gold, and souls for their god.
The European myth of the Americas, often written in the form of histories, often describes the continent as a wilderness waiting to be conquered. The reality is that it was not wilderness: the Americas were settled lands, populated by people who had been developing it for thousands of years.
Briefly described below are some of the events of 500 years ago, 1523.
The Spanish Search for Chicora
Greed was an important motivating force in the Spanish exploration of North America and one commodity which led to wealth was the slave trade. Beginning with the first Spanish expedition to the Americas, Spaniards would capture American Indians and then sell them as slaves.
In 1523, two Spanish slavers—Pedro de Quejo and Francisco Gordillo—sailed up the Atlantic coast of North America, penetrating areas where word of the Spanish had not yet reached the Native American populations. They named the area Chicora.
Initially, the Spanish traded peacefully with the Catawba in what is now South Carolina. Then they forcibly abducted about 60 men and women after enticing them aboard the ships with trinkets. About half of the captives died at sea and the rest were taken as slaves to the colony of Santo Domingo in the Caribbean. The Spanish justified their actions by claiming that the Indians were cannibals and sodomites, and thus slavery and warfare against them were justified.
The Spanish slavers’ descriptions of the region gave rise to a legend of a new Andalucia, filled with abundance. They described the Indians of the area as being taller than those found on the coastal islands. One of the captive Indians—a boy named Francisco by the Spanish—told his captors a story about a rich land in the interior of South Carolina where there was great mineral wealth. The Spanish concluded that the conquest of Chicora would bring them great wealth.
The Spanish king was fascinated by the tales which the Catawba captive Francisco told of the region. Consequently, the Spanish issued a royal contract which granted Vásquez de Ayllón permission to explore and settle Chicora while providing religious instructions in the Christian doctrine to the natives.
Missionaries
The Spanish entered the Americas fresh from victories over Islam. They felt that their god was on their side and that the only true religious belief was that of Catholicism. They viewed Native American religious practices as Satanic and saw these practices as evidence that the Devil was everywhere. They envisioned themselves in a battle with Satan for Indian souls. Writer Catherine Feher-Elston, in her book Children of Sacred Ground: America’s Last Indian War, puts it this way:
“The native populations were viewed as a crop to be harvested for the Christian God.”
In their book Discovering the Americas: The Archive of the Indies, Pedro González García et al write:
“With the conversion of Indians to Christianity as its main objective and its most justifiable reason for claiming possession of those lands, in accordance with the first bull Inter Caetera, the Spanish Crown underwrote the spiritual conquest of the New World from the outset.”
In his book Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians, archaeologist Jerald Milanich writes:
“Missions were colonialism. The missionary process was essential to the goal of colonialism: creating profits by manipulating the land and its people.”
In 1523, the instructions given to the first 12 Spanish missionaries to New Spain (what is today Mexico and the American Southwest) told them that the Indians were under the control of Satan, captive to the vanity of idols, and must be redeemed for Christianity. According to the instructions, the souls of New Spain were being unlawfully reaped by the devil.
Earthen Mounds
Beginning as early as 1500 BCE, American Indians built monumental architecture using mounds of dirt. In Illinois in 1523 CE, Indian people began work on the Kincaid site. The main part of the village was a group of five mounds around a plaza area. All of the mounds were platform mounds, each of which had an important structure on it. The largest of the mounds, at the north end of the plaza, was 485 feet long, 195 feet wide, and 30 feet high.
Just to the east of the main grouping of mounds was a second group of five mounds, which included a burial mound. The burial mound was connected to another mound about 150 feet to the southwest with a ridge of earth. According to archaeologists Melvin Fowler and Robert Hall, in their chapter in the Handbook of North American Indians: Volume 15: Northeast:
“It is possible that this represents a charnel house mound and an accompanying burial mound.”
More sixteenth-century histories
Indians 101: American Indians 500 years ago, 1520
Indians 101: American Indians 500 years ago, 1521
Indians 101: The Spanish and the Southeastern Indian nations 500 years ago, 1521
Indians 101: The Zuni and the Spanish in the 16th Century
Indians 101: Acoma Pueblo and the Spanish, 1539-1599
Indians 101: Sixteenth-Century Books About Indians
Indians 101: Disease and Indians in the 16th Century
Indians 101: Sixteenth Century European Laws About Indians