The Iberian World by Fernando Bouza;Pedro Cardim;Antonio Feros;

Author:Fernando Bouza;Pedro Cardim;Antonio Feros;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Amerindians in the Iberian world

Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida and Tatiana Seijas

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the varied means by which Amerindian peoples came into contact with Iberians and how indigenous societies negotiated their interactions with imperial actors like bureaucrats, churchmen, and colonists. The focus is on showing Amerindians as historical agents who shaped the development of colonial society, rather than mere objects of European policies. The Portuguese and Spanish Crowns wielded varying degrees of political sovereignty over the territories they claimed in the Americas. In vast swaths of land, indigenous people remained relatively untouched by colonial structures and instead continued to determine their own existence. This chapter thus focuses on Amerindians who lived in regions where Iberians exercised considerable political and economic power, which was usually around urban centres, mining regions, and agricultural districts.

Amerindian societies with distinct ethnic and linguistic traditions and cultural backgrounds responded in myriad ways to Iberian intrusions. While many groups collaborated with Iberian colonisers, others carried out active military campaigns against them, developing relationships in the long term that vacillated between alliances and hostilities. The wars of “conquest”, moreover, were only victorious in so far as Iberians were able to make and maintain alliances with diverse indigenous societies. These wars, alongside mass epidemics, the ongoing enslavement of indigenous peoples, the imposition of forced labour regimes, and the destabilisation of certain forms of native social organisation were all responsible for demographic catastrophes, as well as the disappearance or re-articulation of an untold number of ethnicities throughout the Americas. Scholars have had controversial debates over the size of populations in the New World prior to European contact, but ongoing research reveals very high densities. Demographic estimates vary considerably but suffice it to say that in the first decade of the sixteenth century, central Mexico had a population of between 12 and 15 million, and Peru between nine and 12 million (Cook 2004; Covey, Childs, and Kippen 2011; Storey 2012). The calculations for Brazil stand between two and four million people, but the numbers may be considerably higher given the five to six million estimate for the Amazon region alone (Hemming 1978; Monteiro 1994; Denevan 2003). Overall, population everywhere plummeted after contact with the process of colonisation, constituting a horrifying demographic disaster (Henige 1998; Alchon 2003).

The underlining violence of the Iberian colonial project did not, however, impede Amerindians from finding ways to flourish in new colonial settings and developing adaptive forms of resistance (Salomon and Schwartz 1999; Stern 1987). In colonised areas, indigenous people actively sought to ameliorate their subject status and access rights and protections conferred to them by the Iberian Crowns. In this sense, they benefited from laws issued by the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns that sought to protect their Indian allies as vassals, even as they waged wars against “enemy” Indians.

In spite of some divergences, indigenous peoples in the Spanish and Portuguese America experienced similar socioeconomic and cultural processes. Recent scholarship has emphasised the need to examine this history in a combined yet comparative perspective.

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