Colonialism 18

The Piru Indians used to believe that souls lived on after this life (…). For this purpose they put clothes on their descendants and offered sacrifices. (…) So on the day they died they killed the women they liked and servants and officials so that they would serve them in the next life . (…) The same superstition and inhumanity of killing men and women for the care and service of the deceased in the afterlife has been and is still being used by other barbaric nations.

Padre Joseph de Acosta (1589): Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias. Sevilla: Casa de Juan de Leon, p. 26.

Padre José de Acosta (ca. 1539-1600) was a Spanish Jesuit. After teaching at the university in Spain, he travelled to the Americas as a missionary in 1570. He is the author of the Historia natural y moral de las Indias from which the quote is taken.

It was by labelling the indigenous population of the Americas as bestial, cannibalistic, devil worshippers and so on, that the Spaniards justified their conquests. This is how they disguised their pursuit of gold and silver as a civilising mission (Federici 2009: 221). These accounts, reproduced by de Acosta and others, helped the Spanish crown acquire complete authority over the Americas from the Pope in 1508, and were the bases for justifying subjugation, enslavement, rape, torture and annihilation. Some pre-colonial societies in the Americas did indeed engage in mass human sacrifice. However, there was no comparison between these and the almost complete annihilation of the indigenous population organised by the Spaniards, which the Dominican monk Bartolomé de las Casas, amongst others, described. According to Cortés, 100,000 people died in the conquest of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1521 (ibid.: 222).

*James Cockcroft (1983): Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation and the State. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 19 *Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban und die Hexe. Frauen, der Körper und die ursprüngliche Akkumulation. Wien: Mandelbaum kritik & utopie, p. 267ff.

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