Though many missionaries, priests and theologians implicated in European colonial activities leave a record of astounding dehumanization, not all colonial-era Christian theological accounts failed to speak out against the grave anti-Indigenous violence and ecological crises perpetrated by the Conquistadores in Abya Yala (Latin America). Bartolomé de las Casas  (1474/84-1566) advocated for the human rights of Indigenous peoples and wrote about the need to set the Indigenous populations free from slavery. In this summer gathering of our study circle "Praxis of Social Imaginaries", we will together investigate the account of Casas. 

At first a willing participant in the Spanish colonial encomienda system, through which the Spanish government enforced a politics of colonial land-grabbing and slave-holding, Casas announced in 1514 that he was  returning his Indigenous slaves and land to the governor, returning to Spain in 1515 to argue for the abolition of the encomienda system. Initially, Las Casas suggested a plan of "sustainable colonisation", in which the encomienda would be abolished and Indians would be congregated into self-governing townships to become tribute-paying vassals of the king. He still suggested that the loss of Indian labor for the colonists could be replaced by allowing importation of African slaves. His engagement with colonial activities expanded and continued, while his budding views on Indigenous rights took shape over the decades leading up to the 1550-1551 Valladolid debate, in which Casas argued Indigenous Americans deserved the same rights as the colonizers. A number of scholars and priests opposed his view, most notably the humanist scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, whose argument ignored Spanish colonial brutality, pointing instead to storied Indigenous sacrificial practices and cannibalism as justification for universal oppression of Indigenous peoples. 

In this symposium, we will be reading his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which he wrote in 1542. This work would be an important basis for Casas's approach to the Valladolid debate, as within it, Casas laid out a description of colonial brutality that undermined any argument which sought to contrast Spanish "civilized Christianity" from the claimed "primitive violence" of Indigenous Americans.