Seneca Chief Red Jacket's View On Religion

“ We give food to starving settlers so that they can survive the winter, settlers end up taking all the good land and let the natives starve to death.” Two hundred years before the Puritans arrived in America the European settlers came over to America accidently. Christopher Columbus was trying to find a new route to India, but landed on an Island we now know as America. When Christopher Columbus landed on the island, strange, unknown, people came up to him. He called them Indians because he thought he had landed in India. While getting to learn more about Columbus the Indians learn they have different values than the European settlers and the Puritans, once they arrive two hundred years later. Getting to know the European settlers and the Puritans, the Indians realized their outlooks on Faith, Loyalty, And Laws are vastly different and similar.

In the first section of the book, he mentions Christians first rather than the Spaniard. Las Casas would never imagine that Christians can commit such cruelties to the indigenous people. When voyaging to the New World, Hispaniola was the first land to be demolished and substantially reduce the population of Indians through the hands of Christians. In this excerpt, Casas documents all the things he sees. He states that Christians began subjugating women and children and taking them away for ill-use. They would also take their food that was earned by labor and toil (Casper and Davies 10). These acts would eventually lead the Indians to hide their food as well as women and children. Some would migrate to the mountains. Yet, Christians continued to act harshly attacking the Indians until they arrive at the village nobles, who they also misuse. Casas describes the Christians behaviors as “temerity and shamelessness” (10). He also affirms that these actions lead the Indians to expel the Christians from their lands. However, Indian weapons were ineffective against the Christians because they are "very weak and of little service in offense and still less in defense" and that it is for this reason that "the wars of Indians against each other are little more than games played by children" (10). I

Shawnee leader, Tecumseh, was not a happy Native. He blamed the greed and oppression of the Europeans for the destruction of the Native American cultures. The Europeans greed led them to strip the land from the Natives, and try in forcing their religion upon the Natives. Tecumseh believed that the land was for all. There was nothing about selling, taking, and giving the land away. The Europeans just did not have that mindset at all. Red Jacket was a Seneca leader. He was very discouraged of the fact that they took the land of the Natives, but even more because they wanted to force their religion upon the Native Americans. The Europeans were ruthless when it came to this. They did not think about their feelings and the actions that could hurt the Natives. (Doc 4, 5, 6)

The film, Black Robe, depicts the first contacts between the Huron Indians of Quebec and the Jesuit missionaries from France who came to convert them to Catholicism. Despite some of the controversial portrayals in the film, much of what was produced represented both the Huron and Jesuit perceptions of one another; the Black Robe displayed both the Jesuit frustrations with the Natives unwillingness to learn about Christianity and the Huron social mocking of the ‘black robes’. Portraying the religious, social, and economic interactions, the film, complemented by the journal of Le Jeune, Bruce Trigger’s book The Jesuits and the Fur Trade, and Neal Salisbury’s writings in Religious Encounters in a Colonial Context, gives a convincing portrait of both the Natives and the Jesuits side of the encounter.

In 1800’s following the American Revolution, the new American Government and the indigenous Native American people had to learn how to coexist. In order to successful work with together, there was a need for translators and mediators. One of these mediators was named Red Jacket, a chief and orator for the Seneca Tribe in New York. For his leadership and efforts in maintaining peace, Red Jacket was recognized by President George Washington. In 1805, the U.S government sought to proselytize, convert the Native Americans to Christianity, the Seneca tribe which was met by opposition from Red Jacket and his people. In the speech, Red Jacket Defends Native American Religion, 1805, Red Jacket builds an argument to persuade his

For this essay I will be talking about the book “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies” by Bartolomé de Las Casas. Whom wrote this to the King of Spain, Prince Philip II, in 1542 to protest what was happening in the New World to the native people. I will be explaining many things during this essay. The first thing I will go over is what the books tells us about the relationship between Christianity and the colonialism. The second thing I will talk about is if it was enough to denounce the atrocities against indigenous people. Next, if it is possible to

Europeans tore through America in the 1700s and destroyed the lives of Native Americans, and yet their culture remained principled with a high level of respect and honor. This is shown in a meeting that was held by the six nations of the Iroquois, where Chief Red Jacket gave a speech on the Native Americans view on missionary stations that the Europeans wanted to set up. Red Jacket explained their past with the first settlers, “We gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison in return” (1). These first Europeans set the tone for how these new colonist treated the natives. They took what they wanted and left a trail of death and destruction in their path. However, the natives acted in return with upstanding respect and treated these missionaries

In 1542, a Christian missionary named Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote about the little-known realities of the brutalities occurring in the New World between Spanish conquistadors and Native Americans. Even though the Spanish originally set out to bring Christianity to the New World and its inhabitants, those evangelizing efforts soon turned into torture, mass killings, rape, and brutal slavery of the innocent natives to fulfill their greed for gold and wealth, according to Las Casas. In his primary account A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de Las Casas attempts to inform King Phillip II of the cruel acts and injustices committed by the Spanish conquistadors. Despite this condemnation, Las Casas does not reject imperialism, because he feels Spain has the obligation to spread the word of Christianity around the world. Instead, he finds fault with the Spanish conquistadors for implementing this evangelization the wrong way, by both physically harming the Native Americans and, fundamentally, in their underlying perception of them as inferior. Furthermore, the key to the coexistence of imperialism with Las Casas’ Catholic ideas and his defense of indigenous peoples lies in considering and treating these Native Americans as equals and as humanity rather than inferiors.

In Age of Expansion, Spain sent conquistadors to take over new land to gain gold, spread the word of God, and bring glory to Spain. During this conquest, the Spaniards acted very rude to the natives of the New World and saw themselves as highly superior. These first travels were led by Cortez, who made it very clear that they were the ones in charge. In an excerpt from document 1, the Spanish tell the Indians that they must “agree to let the Christian priests preach to you” or else the Spanish would take them as slaves or kill them.

The Native Americans felt betrayed by the American people. After all the work and effort to help the white man through means of trade, the Native Americans were now being forcibly removed from their homes and made to move to the other side of the Mississippi River, hundreds of miles away. The Choctaw tribe was told that they needed to choose quickly between “surrendering tribal sovereignty and removing to the west.” (Davis, 67) They were told that if they moved peacefully, they would receive rations and provisions; however, if they decided to stay-

He also mentions that the Europeans subjected the locals to vexations, assaults and iniquities. This negative connotation of these words stresses Las Casas’ opinion that what the Spanish were doing to the natives was ethically wrong. The document connects to ethics and civil engagement by having Las Casas defend through argumentation a proposal for law. Here he demonstrates that not all European leaders wanted to conquer people seen as being inhuman.

When America was first created, Native Americans were believed to be less than the White Men that were in charge of the American takeover. They were stripped of their rights and forced to make room for their intruders. As Chief Seattle’s Treaty Oration says, “the Red Man no longer has rights that [the white man] need respect”. Many Early Americans tried to justify this takeover. Thomas Hart Benton writes in his essay The Destiny of the Race, “civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of all people who have found themselves in the track of the advancing Whites.” Along with the argument of the White Man being the “dominant race”, people believed that God had given them this land, and that they had a right to take it because of this. Again, as Chief Seattle writes, “you God is not our God! Your God loves your people and hates mine!” None of these supposed “justifications” were an excuse for the pain and torment the Native Americans were put through. In other words, though the Colonists tried to justify the removal of the Native Americans, they had no good reason to uproot these people from the only home they have ever

Thus, New Spain and New France’s main problems dealt with their men having sexual relations with the Native American women. The main problem for New Spain was the continuous sexual assaults against the Native American women. The men of New Spain were soldiers helping Franciscans convert Native Americans, residing in now a days California, to Christianity (“Father Luis Jayme” 36). The reasons for the sexual assaults are due to the differences in sexual culture. Europeans follow a patriarchal system and therefore the female is inferior and often viewed as property to the male in the European culture (Castaneda 54-55). The soldiers viewed the women as someone beneath them. Another big difference is that the soldiers used “rape...as an act of domination, an act of power” while Native American warriors by no means had an sexual relations of the enemy women (Castaneda 53). Rape was viewed as an act of power because the men defiled the women, which in turn demonstrated to the Native American men that their women or “property” could easily be taken from them or at least this was the view of the soldiers. As stated by Theda Perdue, “Spaniards seized women as they seized other spoils of war” (40). Thus by sexually assaulting the women the soldiers were fulfilling their duty to control the land and the Native Americans, while the Franciscans attempted to convert the Native

It is noted by Bartholomé de las Casas that the Spaniards were so utterly fixated on the lust for Gold and power, that they lost their humanity, compassion and Christian ways. Pillaging, and murdering docile tribes in the name of God and country was certainly not the way that Christians should behave, yet Spaniards were driven by greed and a rise in power that was disproportionate to their actual merits. Their insatiable lust for riches led them to treat the passive, meek, and peace loving native people like common beasts. Or more accurately like the excrement of those beasts on the public squares. When one sees no problem burning another human being publically and then strangling them to death slowly, a re-evaluation of one’s moral compass and humanity is in order.

work being done by the natives. The Africa slaves were used mostly in the sugar plantations and