Gratitude 139

I think that I have already mentioned that I am reading a book about the history of Mexico, in Spanish.  This is quite interesting on a few levels.  It's giving me lots of information, for one thing, as well as giving me a good daily Spanish workout.  Because the author is quite conservative and served many years in the Mexican military it is also helping me read between the lines.  This fellow definitely does not question popular assumptions and seems even quite intent on reinforcing some of them

Such as, this bit I'm reading about the education of savages.  Please note that I am writing these words in the purest irony.  The Mexica, just one generation following conquest, were already being brainwashed and indoctrinated by the Franciscans and Jesuits.  Likely not such a bad thing, if you were a young student in Spain.  But these were children of the Aztecs, Zapotecs, Purepeche and others.  A highly advanced civilization with notable achievements in astronomy, agronomy and social organization had just been toppled and humiliated, and now most of their citizens were dead from imported diseases and mistreatment.  None of these children and youths were going to be educated in their culture, much less their own language.  They were being taught reading, writing and religion.

They were not being taught to read in their own language, Nahuatl, nor would any effort be made to create for this language a written form for some time to come.  They were being taught to read Spanish in Roman alphabet letters.  Likewise, they were not being taught to read about their own history and culture, but about Mama Espana and why she was the best Mama on the block.  As for religion, well, after all that human sacrifice they were going to be taught how to be good faithful Catholics.  Since the Inquisition was just being imported to Mexico around that time there was likely  compulsory attendance of a couple of public burnings at the stake thrown in just to teach them to stay in line.

Here in Canada we had the residential schools for native children, where basically the same crimes were perpetrated, only we didn't really kill them, just sought to kill the Indian in the child.

In Canadian Indian residential schools, the children had almost all been forcefully taken from their families, were forbidden to practice their spirituality or speak their language and basically were forced to morph into good, submissive little white girls and boys, while being beaten, raped, and otherwise humiliated by the priests and nuns into whose care they were given.  The particularly painful irony is that this was happening four hundred years following the Spanish conquest of the Mexica.  It was as if not one single thing had been learned even with all the accumulated knowledge, wisdom and education between the Spanish Middle Ages and the Twentieth Century in enlightened and progressive Canada.

In Canada we are going through a messy and very necessary process of reconciliation with our first nations people.  The Anglican and United Churches and the Government of Canada have been particularly active in offering official apologies and opening the forum for respectful dialogue.  A lot of anger, grief and bitterness is being vented, of course, and we are nowhere near finished with this particularly painful and difficult process.  We have barely started.

I am waiting to see Latin American countries, with the Catholic Church at the helm, open a similar process of reconciliation and public repentance over their treatment of their own aboriginal peoples.  This could be a rather more complicated process, given that some ninety percent of Latinos, except perhaps in predominantly white Argentina and Uruguay, have mixed racial ancestry, mostly European and Indigenous with some African and Asian, and for this reason a lot more of the trauma has been historically and culturally absorbed by the majority.  Still, the classic Spanish arrogance and pride that refuses to accept responsibility, refuses to apologize, refuses to admit to wrongdoing and error, is going to have to be reckoned with.  Only when the wounds are brought out into the open in an atmosphere of respect and mutual acceptance will healing begin and then the collective trauma that is the Latino inheritance can really begin to heal.