The Importance Of The Spanish Indios

When the Spanish came to the Americas and met the Indios they didn’t know who or what they were. Many of the Spanish initially believed the Indios were barbaric savages. This was due to the fact that many of them were nudists, cannibals, they practiced human sacrifice, they had primitive weaponry compared to the Europeans, and they worshipped gods that Europeans believed to be anti-human. The Spanish weren’t even sure if the Indios were human. Because many Spanish people saw the natives as less than human, they started to take advantage of them and even waged battles with them. They eventually kept some of them as slaves and treated them the same way northern Europeans would soon treat the natives north of Mexico. However, laws were eventually placed by the Spanish crown to end the heinous act against the natives.
Antonio de Montesinos, a Spanish friar, was the first to denounce the brutal ways that the Spanish were treating the Indios. Montesinos proclaimed that the Spanish who were causing havoc were “all in mortal sin and live and die in it, because of the cruelty and tyranny they practice among these innocent peoples.”

Many Spanish colonials didn’t want to recognize the Indians as human. They wanted to take control of the people and the land that they “discovered”. Under the first set of Spanish laws in the New World, Native Americans were enslaved and forced to work for the colonials. They had no freedom. However, many Spanish friars realized that what their people were doing was wrong. They believed that the natives deserved to be free and have the same rights as everyone else. After many confrontations, the crown passed laws that granted the natives their freedom, and both the Spanish and Indios learned to live in harmony, as long as the natives converted to the Catholic faith. You can still see how the Spanish and Native American culture