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The Black Legend, Native Americans, and Spaniards: Crash Course US History #1

From: U.S. History by Crash Course

In which John Green kicks off Crash Course US History! Why, you may ask, are we covering US History, and not more World History, or the history of some other country, or the very specific history of your home region? Well, the reasons are many. But, like it or not, the United States has probably meddled in your country to some degree in the last 236 years or so, and that means US History is relevant all over the world. In episode 1, John talks about the Native Americans who lived in what is now the US prior to European contact. This is a history class, not archaeology, so we're mainly going to cover written history. That means we start with the first sustained European settlement in North America, and that means the Spanish. The Spanish have a long history with the natives of the Americas, and not all of it was positive. The Spanish were definitely not peaceful colonizers, but what colonizers are peaceful? Colonization pretty much always results in an antagonistic relationship with the locals. John teaches you about early Spanish explorers, settlements, and what happened when they didn't get along with the indigenous people. The story of their rocky relations has been called the Black Legend. Which is not a positive legend.

Full Transcript

The Black Legend, Native Americans, and Spaniards Crash Course US History 1

speaker01 00:00:00

Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course us history. No, Stan, that's not going to work actually. I mean, we're talking about the 16th century today when this was neither United nor States. By the way, this globe reflects the fact that I believe that Alaska statehood is in fact we're going to call this whole show us history, but inevitably, it's going to involve other parts of the world. And also, not to brag, a small part of the moon. Sorry, we can be a little bit self agradable sometimes here in America. So to begin us history, we're not going to talk about the United States or this guy. We're going to talk about the people who lived here before any Europeans showed up.

speaker01 00:45:00

North America was home to a great variety of people. So it's difficult to generalize. But here's what we can say. One, when the Europeans arrived, there were no classical style civilizations with monumental architecture and empires like the Aztec or the Incas. And two, native North Americans had no metal work, no powder, no wheels, no written languages, and no domesticated animals. However, they did have farming, complex social and political structures, and widespread trade networks.

speaker01 01:08:00

Mr Green Mr Green, so they were pretty backwards. Well, I mean, or at least primitive. Primitive is a funny word, me from the past, because it implies a romanticization, these simple people who never used more than they needed and had no use for guns. And it also implies an infantilization. It's like you believe that just because you have a beeper and they didn't, they were somehow less evolved humans, but you can't see the human story is one that goes from primitive to civilized. That's not just Eurocentric, that's contemporary centric, the idea that we're moving forward as a species implies a linear progression that just does not reflect the reality of life on this planet. I get that you like to imagine yourself as the result of millennia of advancement in the very pinnacle of humanness. But from where I'm sitting, that worldview is a lot more backwards than living without the wheel.

speaker01 01:52:00

So no one knows exactly how many people lived in North America before the Europeans got here. Some estimates are as high as 75 million. But in the present us borders 2 and 10 million. And like other Native Americans, their populations were decimated by diseases such as smallpox and influenza. Actually, it was much worse than decimation, As many of you have pointed out, decimation means one in 10, this was much worse than that, It was closer, maybe 8 in 10, which would be an Otas nation.

speaker01 02:16:00

So there had been civilizations in North America, but they peaked before the Europeans arrived. The Zuni and Hopi civilization roundabout here peaked about 1002 200 CE, they had large multiple family dwellings in K canyons, which they probably left because of drought trash course world history fans will remember that environmental degradation often causes the decline of civilizations. I'm looking at you in this valley and also you entire future Earth, but complex civilizations weren't the in North America, and now we're about to begin generalizing a bad habit historians have, partly because there's a limited historical record, but also because Eurocentric historians have a bad habit of primitivism and simplifying others. So I want to underscore that there was huge diversity in the prescal tous American experience and that talking about someone who lived here in 1000 BCE and talking about someone who lived here 2000 years later is just inherently problematic that said let's go to the thought bubble most native groups in most places organized as tribes and their lives were dominated by the natural resources available where they lived.

speaker01 03:14:00

So West coast Indians primarily lived by fishing, gathering, and hunting sea mammals. Great Plains Indians were offered buffalo hunters, these tribal bands often United into loose confederacies or leagues, the best known of which was probably the Iroquois Confederacy also called the great league of peace, this was kind of like an upstate New York version of NATO, but without nuclear weapons or the incessant international meddling or Latvians. Okay? It was nothing like NATO, actually. Religion usually involved the vibrant spiritual world with ceremonies geared toward the tribes lifestyle, hunting tribe focused on animals, agricultural tribe harvests, and most Indian groups believed in a single creator God who stood above all the other deities, but they weren't monotheistic in the way that Christians who came to the New World were. American Indians also saw property VA differently from Europeans to First peoples. Land was a common resource that village leaders could assign families to use but not to own, and most land was seen as common to everyone as Blackhawk a leader of the Sauk tribe said the great spirit gave it to his children to live upon and cultivate as far as necessary for their subsistence, and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil. Thanks, thought bubble.

speaker01 04:24:00

So many of us tend to romanticize American Indians as being immune from greed and class, but in fact, there were class distinctions in Indian tribes rulers tended to come from the same families, for instance, that said, wealth was much more evenly distributed than it was in Europe. And while most tribal leaders were men, many tribes were matrilineal, meaning that children became members of their mothers family. Also, women were often important religious leaders, women also often own dwell and tools, although not land, because again, that idea did not exist. Also, in many tribes, women engaging in premarital scootie pooping wasn't taboo in general, they were just much less obsessed with female chastity than Europeans were.

speaker01 05:00:00

The first English settlement in America was called Virginia, the idea that Native Americans were noble savages, somehow purer than Europeans, and untouched by their vices is not a new one like some of the earliest Europeans saw the Indians as per gods of physical beauty and innocent of Europeans worst characteristics. But for most Europeans there was little noble about what they saw as pure Indian savagery. I mean, Indians didn't have writing, they suffered from the terrible character flaw of being able to have sex without feeling ashamed, and most importantly, they weren't Christians, the Spanish were the first Europeans to explore this part of the world.

speaker01 05:34:00

Ju Ponce de Leon arrived in what is now Florida in 1000 and 513 looking for gold in the Fable Fountain of Youth. In 1521 he encountered a collusive braves poison tipped arrow and died before discovering that the Fountain of Youth is of course delicious died Doctor Pepper. I can taste all 20 two-three flavors, There were many more Spanish explorers in the first half of the 16th century, including one Alvar Nunez cabeza de vaca, who wandered through the American Southwest looking for gold, which I mentioned entirely because I think that guy's last name means cow head. Of course, none of these people found any gold, but they did make later European colonization easier by bringing over the microbes that wiped up most native populations.

speaker01 06:14:00

Spanish wanted to colonize Florida to set up military bases to thwart the pirates who preyed on silver laden Spanish galleons coming out of Mexico. But Spanish missionaries also came over hoping to convert local native populations. This, of course, worked out magnificently, just getting it went terribly. Many of the missions were destroyed by an uprising of Gu Indians in 1597. And I will remind you, mispronouncing things is my thing. In general, colonizing for sucked because it was hot and mosquito Spain was much more successful at colonizing the American Southwest 1000 and 610.

speaker01 06:42:00

Spain established its first permanent settlement in the Southwest at Santa Fe New Mexico. And you couldn't really say that it flourished since Santa Fe's population never got much above 3000, but it had a great small town feel. And New Mexico is really important because it's the site of the first large-scale anding by 2000 Native Americans.

speaker01 06:56:00

Against Europeans, I mean the native people who the Spanish called Pueblo had seen their fortunes declined significantly since the arrival of Europeans. How much decline? Well, between 1616 80, their population went from about 16000 to about 17000.

speaker01 07:10:00

Also, the Franciscan friars who came to convert the indigenous people became increasingly milit about stamping out all native religion. The Spanish Inquisition just wasn't very keen on the kind of cultural blending that made early conversion efforts successful. So while the Spanish saw all the Pueblos as one people, they also knew they were tribal differences that made it difficult for the Indians to unite and rise up against the Spanish. But nothing unites like a common enemy, and in 1000 and 680, a religious leader named Pope organized an uprising to drive the Spaniards out. Poe organized about 2000 warriors who killed 400 Spanish colonists and forced the rest to leave Santa Fe. So the Spanish colony in New Mexico was effectively destroyed.

speaker01 07:44:00

The Pueblos tore down all the Christian churches and replaced them with Kiva, their places of worship, but like most awesome uprisings, it didn't last. After the revolt, the Spanish were much more tolerant of indigenous religion, and they also abandoned the forced labor practice called encomienda.

speaker01 07:58:00

Oh, it's time for the new Crash Course feature. The mystery document. How mysterious? The rules here are simple. I read an attempt to identify the mystery document. If I am right, I do not get shocked by this shock pen, and if I am wrong, I do.

speaker01 08:16:00

Okay, What do we have here? The Indians were totally deprived of their freedom and were put in the harshest, fiercest, most horrible servitors. Captivity, which no one who has not seen it can understand. Even beasts enjoy more freedom when they are allowed to graze in the fields. But our Spaniards gave no such opportunity to Indians and truly considered them perpetual slaves. I sometimes came upon dead bodies on my way, and upon others who were grasping and moaning in their death agony, repeating, hungry, hungry. And this was the freedom, the good treatment, and the Christianity the Indians received. Well, that's nice.

speaker01 08:56:00

So the mystery document is always a primary source, and since the writer to our Spaniards I'm going to guess that he or she, probably he is European and a Spaniard sympathetic to the Indians, which narrows the list of suspects considerably, so it probably wasn't Desa poveda, for instance, who argued that the Indians might not even be human.

speaker01 09:11:00

OK I'm actually pretty confident here. I believe it is from a short account of the destruction of the Indies by Bartolomeo de las Casa. Stan just told me I have the author right, but the book wrong. It's a history of the Indies hate shocks, both literal and metaphorical. So we've focused a lot on the brutality of the Spanish toward the Indians, But at least one Spaniard, de las Casas recognized that his countrymen were terrible. This realization is a good thing of, but it leads us to one of the big problems when it comes to studying this time and place.

speaker01 09:45:00

The Black legend is the tale that the Spanish unleashed unspeakable cruelty on the Indians. Now that tale is true, but that idea was used by later settlers, especially the English, to justify their own settlements, like part of the reason they needed to expand their empire was to stay the Indians from the awful Spanish. But were the English so much better? Yeah, probably not. As we mentioned at the beginning of today's episode, American Indians didn't have writing, so we don't have records of their perspective. Now, some Europeans, like De Las Casas were critical of the Spaniards, but most considered the Indians heathens and implied or even outright said that they deserved whatever horrible things befell them.

speaker01 10:21:00

So at the beginning of our series, I want to point out something that we need to remember throughout. One of the great things about American history is that we have a lot of written sources. This is the advantage of the us coming onto the scene so late in the game, historically speaking. But every story we hear comes from a certain point of view, and we always need to remember who is speaking, why they are speaking, and especially which voices go unheard for. I will see you next week.

speaker01 10:47:00

Crash Course is produced and directed by a Miller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko, the associate producer is Danica Johnson, The show is written by my high school history teacher, Raul Meer, myself, and our graphics team is Thought Bubble. If you have questions about today's video, you should ask them in comments. Everybody who works on Crash Course, as well as a team of historians will be there to answer. Thanks for watching, make sure you're subscribe to Crash Course, and as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.