Genocide's tension, etc.

 Thoughts on the reading: 

To use the term "genocide" to describe a process has continuously troubled me, as McDonnell and Moses lay out in their conclusion of "Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas." Like them, I am also struck by the notion that on one hand, calling something a genocide brings attention to the event. On the other hand, genocide has struck me as a term for "victims" or peoples that somehow lack historical agency, perhaps because it conjures images of prisons, camps, and lifeless bodies. It somehow seems to turn away from "the continuity of folk cultures that persisted just as they changed" (McDonnell and Moses 521) as these people employ survival strategies. Maybe because of the Jewish presence in media, the genocide of the Holocaust never seems like the Jewish people are lost to history, but for Native American and Hawaiian genocides, there is a certain "pastness" that at least in my experience, appears to cling, which goes back to Lemkin's idea of genocide as cultural death--could this be related to Renato Rosaldo's "imperialist nostalgia?"* 

Moreover, if Lemkin "regarded the extinction of culture as genocide" and "equated culture with high culture" (McDonnell and Moses 514), does this mean he did not believe in such a thing as decolonization? What did he think of decolonization? 

Another question that came up for me while reading Las Casas (it's a bit random and different from my other question): Most of the places, especially in the beginning of Las Casas's account speaks of the islands of the Indies, and one of the main points Las Casas makes is that these islands go from "populous and filled with native-born peoples" (5) to "uninhabited and despoiled of people" (7). Do reports that Las Casas writes against and even Las Casas's account itself help contribute to the idea of islands as solitary and isolated? Elizabeth DeLoughrey notes in Routes and Roots that Western empires used “western models of passive and empty space such as terra and aqua nullius, which were used to justify territorial expansion” (3) that separates the routes of connection among island archipelagoes. 

*a mood of nostalgia that makes racial domination appear innocent and pure; people mourning the passing or transformation of what they have caused to be transformed. Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: A person kills somebody and then mourns the victim; or someone deliberately alters a life form and then regrets that things have not remained as they were. . . Imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of "innocent yearning" both to capture peoples' imagination and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination (R. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis), quickie def. from here.

Questioning the Possibility of Unforced Conversions during the Conquest of Latin America

In “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas,” Michael A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses explain that Lemkin considered only those Spanish missionaries who “imposed forced conversion [as being] guilty of cultural genocide” (511). I, however, am very skeptical of the notion that conversions of a conquered group to the religion of their conquerors can truly be unforced. I see it as being analogous to what we were discussing last class, the impossibility of consensual sex in situations like Bosnia. The levels of power between the aggressors and conquered peoples in, for instance, the Conquest of Latin America make it practically impossible, I think, for the decision to convert to be made purely on the basis of belief. It seems to me that it almost becomes a prerequisite for survival, or at the very least an attempt to reap the benefits of assimilating into the dominant culture.

In the situation described by Bartolome de las Casas, for instance, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were very aware of the possibility that they could be slaughtered or enslaved by the Spanish conquistadores, and that seems to have contributed to their decision to convert. The instance Las Casas relates about missionaries in Peru, I think, makes this clear. The tribe these missionaries are attempting to convert allows the friars to enter only if they agree to prevent other Spaniards from accompanying them, and guarantee that no “violence or offence would be done the Indians there by any Christians” (51). Obviously, they are very aware that the Spaniards posed a real danger to them. The attempt to assimilate Spanish culture and religion that ensued--swearing fealty to the Spanish monarchs, sending their sons to Catholic school, etc.--could be viewed as the efforts of the indigenous peoples to ensure that the missionaries continue their protection of the city.

It’s also, I think, important to note that one of Las Casas’ key reasons for complaining about the conquistadores’ rapacious behavior is that they are preventing the conversion of the indigenous peoples of Latin America. He describes the various tribes as being very open to Catholicism, and so the conquistadores’ chief crime is that they are condemning these people--who could easily have been “saved”--to eternal damnation. The soldiers, according to Las Casas, always prevent the friars from accomplishing their mission of conversion by building up too much hatred and resentment among the tribes, or by arriving--as in the aforementioned case in Peru--in a town where the conversion has already begun to occur and undoing everything the missionaries have done, thus “condemn[ing the townsfolk] to that same darkness of ignorance and spiritual poverty in which they then were” (53). Las Casas’ primary justification for improving the treatment of indigenous tribes is thus that they can be converted to Catholicism. If the tribes had proven more resistant to the idea of forsaking their own gods, their own culture, I really must wonder whether Las Casas would have been so eager to defend them. 

And if the indigenous people had converted entirely willingly, does that at all alter the fact that the end result of these conversions is the--at least partial--destruction of their culture? Does the cultural genocide become any less devastating or any more justifiable if the conquered peoples supposedly consented to it? And how would we even define or guarantee genuine consent to conversion in these situations?