• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1833 0

off so many members of the Haudenosaunee that the alliance was forced to replenish itself by adopting abductees and prisoners of war. At the time of the conference at least a quarter of the Haudenosaunee were former captives. At great personal risk, many Indian leaders attended the conference even after they knew that influenza was in Montreal. Dozens died. Among them was the Huron leader Kondiaronk, a famed orator who had, more than any other, convened the gathering as a last-ditch effort to avoid internecine conflict. His body was placed on a bed of beaver pelts, covered by a scarlet cloth, and surrounded by a copper pot, a rifle, and a sword. In their diversity, the objects symbolized the peaceful mixing of cultures that Kondiaronk hoped lay in the future.

Nobody knows how many died during the pandemics of the 1770s and 1780s, but even if one had a number it wouldn’t begin to tally the impact. Disease turned whole societies to ash. Six Cree groups in western Canada disappeared after 1781; the Blackfoot nation, blasted by smallpox, sent peace emissaries to Shoshone bands, only to find that all had vanished. “The country to the south was empty and silent,” Calloway wrote. So broken were the Omaha by disease that according to tradition they launched a deliberately suicidal attack against their enemies. Those who did not die quit their villages and became homeless wanderers.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone. And not just once, but over and over again. In our antibiotic era, how can we imagine what it means to have entire ways of life hiss away like steam? How can one assay the total impact of the unprecedented calamity that gave rise to the world we live in? It seems important to try. I would submit that the best way to come near to encompassing the scale and kind of the loss, and its causes, is to look at the single case where the intellectual life of a Native American society is almost as well documented as its destruction.

FLOWERS AND SONG

In 1524, according to colonial accounts, an extraordinary face-off took place in one of the great buildings of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Triple Alliance—the Aztec empire, as it is better known—which Hernán Cortés had conquered three years before.*13 Facing each other across a room, two delegations of elite clerics battled over the nature of God. On one side were twelve eminent Franciscan monks, who had traveled from Europe in a mission authorized by Pope Hadrian VI. On the other were twelve high priests from the Triple Alliance, men who had wielded immense spiritual and political power until Cortés shuttered the grand temples and brought down the clerisy. Although the pope in Rome had authorized the friars’ mission, all twelve were Spanish, because Spain had conquered the empire, and because Spain, which had spent centuries extracting itself from the rule of African Muslims, had experience with powerful alien ideologies. Analogously, the priests of the Triple Alliance were probably all Mexica. The Mexica were the dominant partner in the Alliance, and they had founded and populated Tenochtitlan, the empire’s biggest city.

The Franciscans’ mission had begun with a request by Cortés. Cortés believed that the military conquest of the Alliance had to be accompanied and justified by an equivalent spiritual conquest. The Indians, he said, must be led to salvation. And he asked King Charles V of Spain for some priests to do the job. In turn the king turned to the pope for his blessing and advice. Cortés did not want “bishops and pampered prelates,” wrote historian William H. Prescott, “who too often squandered the substance of the Church in riotous living, but…men of unblemished purity of life, nourished with the learning