Spain and the New World

The background of the expulsion was the Spanish Inquisition, a form of what might be called religious cleansing, meant to tell the moral authority of the Roman Church in world(a) and Spain in particular and meant to guarantee the benefits of religious hegemony. The New terra firma became an opportunity to extend such hegemony even further epoch at the same time increasing the international prestige, as well as the scale of economic benefits, of Spain. Religious credendum in the context of what came to be called the age of discovery had the burden of encouraging the explorers who followed Columbus and Spain to the New World to feel a sense of entitlement to whatever benefits there that they were clever or severe enough to exploit and a sense of mission toward the peoples they came upon. The pith of that is difficult to describe as other than one of authoritative extermination, dispossession, and subjugation on the part of European-Americans.

But encounters cannot be judged altogether by their effects; process, too, is part of the experience. In that regard, Calloway makes the point that indwelling American history "is also part of a share past" and that the indigenous peoples of the New World responded to the Europeans "in a variety of ways and coexisted with the newcomers as often as they fought against them." In part, that can be attributed to the fact of intermarriage, in some cases initiated by abduction of white persons by Indians.

" dialect of Congress to Visiting Iroquois Delegation, 1776." Major Problems in American Indian History, 2d ed., Ed. Albert L. Hurtado and Peter Iverson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 164-5.

Martin, Joel W. The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

The existence of distinct ideas of the holy among various indigenous peoples did not prevent the Europeans from seeing them as an undifferentiated mass. According to Salisbury, that convention began with Columbus, who designated the people in San Salvador as Indians, a designation that persists to the modern period. The absence of a European appreciation of cultural and/or linguistic contrariety among the peoples of the New World is consistent with the idea that the principal European preoccupation was with instrumental displacement and conquest in the supporter of wealth acquisition rather than with acculturation and exchange. Further, at least from the perspective of the exploring Europeans, the invading culture was meant to be experienced by the receiving one as an unmediated whole. Salisbury cites the "ambitious array and missionary efforts" launched in New Spain, which as a virtual(a) extended from Florida across the lower South and Texas to New Mexico. The result, establish chiefly on what can be interpreted as Spanish intransigence before the "other," seems to have been less a series of cross-culture encounters than a program of culture clash:

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