Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion
312
Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion
312Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253349125 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2007 |
| Series: | Religion in North America |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Encounters of the Spirit
Native Americans and European Colonial Religion
By Richard W. Pointer
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2007 Richard W. PointerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34912-5
CHAPTER 1
The Sounds of Worship
With an orchestra the Jesuits could have subdued the whole continent." That memorable line from Roland Joffé's 1986 film The Mission bespeaks music's presence and power in the encounter of indigenous peoples and Europeans in the Americas. Nowhere was that more true than in Spain's colonial territories. Almost from the very start of New Spain and Peru in the early sixteenth century, missionary evangelists relied upon music as a valuable aid in the Christianization of New World inhabitants. By the mid-eighteenth-century setting of The Mission, Jesuit priests and members of other religious orders were long accustomed to training up Indian youths in the musical way they should go. In the film, Father Gabriel, played by Jeremy Irons, is seen not only teaching a group of novice violinists and leading native choirs in a well-established mission church but also initiating contact with a band of previously hostile Guaraní Indians with nothing more powerful than the sonorous sounds of his oboe. Their curiosity is sufficient to grant him entree to their community, and thus begins a familiar process of pacification and Christianization within which singing and instrument playing assume vital roles. If not quite a universal language, music, in the words, images, and tones of this film, serves as a cultural bridge, a means to friendship, and an avenue to evangelization. It symbolizes and embodies the way of peace, love, and justice championed by Father Gabriel and stands in sharp contrast to the way of the sword that would ultimately overwhelm Jesuit and Guaraní alike. Music is a gift offered by one people to another. In this case, that gift is received and in turn reciprocated in a form far more glorious — the exquisitely beautiful, and in Catholic ears profoundly holy, sounds of Indian choirs.
Joffé's depiction of what the Jesuits and their music were about in the borderlands of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil is surely more heroic than historical. Like most accounts of the Jesuit reducciónes (reductions) in South America, it romanticizes, perhaps even utopianizes, what occurred. More specifically, critics of The Mission have pointed out that in telling the story of Jesuit-Guaraní contact, the film renders the natives voiceless. Indian dialogue is rarely translated, no native character is named or developed, and no Guaraní are allowed to express any of their own cultural heritage or cosmology. The result is a film ultimately about Europeans contesting amongst themselves, told from a European perspective. Indians, as usual, are pushed to the margins.
And yet like many European "texts" relating to New World encounters, this one still helps alert eyes and ears to important dimensions of European-Indian interaction, including ways in which contact with the Indian other may have changed the European. In particular, The Mission hints at how mission Indians' music making might have affected the hearts and minds of those European newcomers who heard it. Several poignant scenes give glimpses of the range of their reactions to neophyte singing. When a young Indian boy sings part of the Latin Mass before a papal legate sent to adjudicate territorial disputes between the Jesuits and colonial officials, Father Gabriel hails the sacred sounds as proof of the natives' innate spirituality. To the local don, however, the boy is no more than a parrot mimicking what his master has taught. For him this is simply more evidence of the natives' barbaric nature and need for subjugation. The legate, under strong political pressure to rule against the Jesuits, is later taken to Mission San Miguel, where he is greeted by an Indian orchestra and then escorted into the large mission church. There he stands amazed at the sights and sounds of a cavernous sanctuary being filled with harmonious native voices. He can only confess, "nothing had prepared me for the beauty and power of the limb [of the Catholic Church] I have come here to sever." Less articulate but no less moved are the Portuguese soldiers seen in The Mission's dramatic conclusion. Sent to take possession of newly granted territory that includes the Guaraní homelands and the Jesuit mission within it, the Portuguese encounter violent resistance from the natives and some of the brothers. The invading Europeans battle on undeterred until they hear singing coming from the Indians' village. Women, children, and the elderly are gathered around Father Gabriel, standing courageously and singing hymns of their new faith. The soldiers pause in bewilderment and wonder. What are they to do to these fellow Catholics? They turn to their captain for direction. Bent on doing his duty and completing the conquest, he urges them to finish their task regardless of what they see and hear. What follows is wholesale slaughter and martyrdom. Father Gabriel and the Guaraní choir are silenced.
When taken as a whole, those scenes suggest that natives are not so voiceless in this film after all. They get to have a say, albeit it comes in the form of a song. What is perhaps most striking about the three episodes just summarized is that in each case it mattered who was doing the singing. If the music and texts the Guaraní sang were familiar to Europeans, the singers themselves were not. Encountering Indians performing plainsong chants or polyphonic anthems, in whatever language, at the very least got Europeans' attention; if the film is right, it had the power to do far more. In dramatizing such moments, Joffé, intentionally or not, points toward a much broader and longer story of Indian music making leaving its mark on the colonial Spanish from their earliest days in Mexico to their final days in Alta California.
Sixteenth-century Mexico provides perhaps the most opportune window for observing how that story played out in North America. Scholars have long recognized that music was an integral part of the religious encounter between the Spanish and the indigenous populations there. Works written up through the mid-twentieth century mostly emphasized the laborious efforts of friars to use music as a tool of doctrinal and liturgical instruction. The model presented was one of the Spanish as givers and the Indians as receivers. Recent scholarship points toward the need for a different conception of the two sides' "musical interplay," one that sees give and take in both directions. During the last three decades, anthropologists and historians have transformed understanding of the peoples who inhabited central Mexico both before and after the Spanish arrived. Making much greater use of materials generated by Nahuatl-speaking Indians, scholars have moved away from describing the colonial encounter in Mexico as a matter of "straightforward clash, simple displacement, ... [or] indigenous survival through isolation," at least in those places where natives and newcomers had lots of contact. Instead, the picture is one of a complex set of interactions and borrowings. If Nahuas quickly took to some of what the Europeans brought in the 1500s, it was because parts of Spanish culture resembled longstanding aspects of their own culture. Meanwhile, Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian friars did best when they helped perpetuate indigenous ways while bringing Nahuas into the Christian fold. Indeed, some scholars go so far as to speak of the "Nahuatlization" of Christianity. Friars' openness to acculturation of that sort was greatest during New Spain's first four or five decades, when they enjoyed relative autonomy from state or ecclesiastical officials. Conclusions such as these suggest new ways of imagining music's role in shaping the relationships and exchanges between Nahua and Spanish peoples in sixteenth-century Mexico.
In particular, I want to propose that from roughly the 1520s to the 1570s or '80s, Nahua musicians and European friars formed a musical partnership. Brokered by men from both cultural communities, rather than merely being imposed by the conquerors, it stemmed from each people's distinctive though not incompatible needs and wants. The partnership proved to be comparatively short-lived. Yet its impact was significant in both the short and long runs. Multiple generations of later Spanish Catholic missionaries were inspired by New Spain's first friars and took music with them as a tool of evangelism around the world. Indigenous peoples across multiple continents thus came to have their own musical exchanges with European newcomers. More immediately, the Spanish-Nahua musical partnership left its mark on both its major participants — friars and Indian musicians — and those on its periphery — colonists and other Nahuas. The lives of natives and Europeans alike, including their religious lives, were simply different because of it.
A New World of Music
Central Mexico was a land filled with song and dance long before the Spanish arrived. Nahuatl records and early Spanish accounts testify to the important place music, and those who performed it, occupied within preconquest native society. All young adolescents, regardless of sex or social class, attended cuicacalli, "houses of song," where they were diligently instructed in the songs and dances that filled Nahua rites and festivals. Adult musicians in Nahua culture were held to high standards but also accorded high status. They formed something of a professional class whose task was to compose and perform music appropriate for the hundreds of different religious and cult ceremonies that dotted their calendar throughout the year. As part of a whole hierarchy of religious specialists, musicians had their talents called upon for the opening of new temples, coronations, funerals, battles, and a host of other occasions. Whatever the event, what was sung, played, or danced had some connection with the divine. In the Nahuas' sacralized culture, music had no life apart from rituals infused with religious content. According to Fray Toribio de Benavente, commonly known as Motolinía, one of the earliest Franciscan friars in Mexico, Aztec "festivals of song and dance ... were organized not only for the delight of the inhabitants themselves, but more especially to honor their gods, whom they thought well pleased by such service." Such occasions were highly communal. The music performed sought to express the deepest disappointments and greatest achievements of whole villages or towns. Even when soloists sang or played, their goal was collective rather than self-expression. Perhaps fittingly, their names went unrecorded, swallowed up in testimonies describing a people, not a person.
With such a high calling, it is no wonder Nahua musicians trained rigorously. Proper service to the gods and the community demanded near perfect performances. Moreover, some of the very instruments upon which they played were thought to be divine. Nahuas considered the teponaztli and the huehuetl, their two principal types of drums, to be earthly manifestations of gods sent here in temporary exile. Playing them improperly or moving to their sounds inexactly in a public setting could apparently have dire consequences. At least that is the impression conveyed in several early missionary reports. Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, written in the 1540s, claimed that if a singer, player, or dancer erred, "then the ruler commanded that they place in jail whoever had done the wrong; they imprisoned him, and he died." Even if the stakes were not ordinarily that high, there is little doubt that indigenous musicians and the communities they served took their work very seriously.
It is equally clear that performers and listeners alike also delighted in their work. Nahua festivals could be both solemn and joyous occasions. Whatever the mood, singers, players, and dancers usually carried on for hours, if not days. Their sounds and movements literally set the tone of community praise and lament. Crowds eagerly gathered to watch and sometimes join in the music making. Motolinía reported that amid a fiesta "the people hearing the beginning of the kettle drums all feel the singing and start to dance." The people's movements were so well synchronized that "all the dancers from Spain that see this are astounded." Local nobles went one step further. They hired professional singers to be part of their households. Caciques wanted to hear not only the old songs but new compositions commemorating the great acts of their leaders, past and present, according to Dominican missionary Diego Durán. Just that type of music was being written and sung as late as the 1550s. Cult songs (xochicuicatl) reappeared in Mexico City during that decade, hailing the memory of fallen warrior ancestors.
By that time, Spanish conquistadors and padres had had more than a generation to take stock of the Nahuas and their music. The reverse was also true. Hernán Cortés's entourage had included several fine musicians whose talents were immediately showcased. Their minstrel songs quickly caught the attention of central Mexico's indigenous peoples. So, too, did the centrality of music within Spanish worship. Bernal Díaz's account of the expedition's early days indicates that Fray Bartolomé de Olmedo "who was a fine singer, chanted Mass" on the first Sunday following their reaching shore. When Motecuhzoma's representatives arrived to negotiate with the aliens, the Indian diplomats were likely struck by Cortés's insistence that talks be delayed until a makeshift altar could be constructed and worship offered to their Spanish god. The words and symbols of that Catholic ritual no doubt seemed strange, if not bizarre, to native eyes and ears. But the fact that it was sung might very well have seemed appropriate and proper to peoples long accustomed to approaching their gods in song.
It is not surprising, then, that when the Spanish began their Christianization efforts in earnest following their military victory in the early 1520s, they wasted little time in exposing the Nahuas more fully to the sounds of their faith and that many Nahuas responded with interest and enthusiasm. On the Spanish side, as the first groups of friars arrived, they brought with them not only a fair amount of musical expertise but an expectation that music would pervade their daily religious life in the New World as it had in the Old. They also anticipated that music would be among the means employed to pass on Christian faith to New Spain's indigenous peoples. Even so, they were not quite prepared for the extent of native musical ability or the speed with which Nahuas warmed to Catholic sacred music. Friars were naturally delighted to find so many willing listeners to their chant. By 1540, Mexico's first bishop, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, gleefully reported to Emperor Charles V that "experience teaches us how much the Indians are edified by it [church music], for they are great lovers of music, and the religious who hear their confessions tell us that they are converted more by music than by preaching, and we see them come from distant regions to hear it." On the Nahua side, music-filled religious ritual was one among many elements of Spanish religious practice and belief that were sufficiently akin to native patterns to give them an air of familiarity and, as a result, a relatively high degree of acceptability. Alongside other common features such as sumptuously decorated temples, a yearly round of feasts and processions, and close links between religious and political authority, sacred music making struck Nahuas as both appropriate and valuable. What is more, according to James Lockhart, "for the people of preconquest Mesoamerica, [political or military] victory was prima facie evidence of the strength of the victor's god. One expected a conqueror to impose his god in some fashion." In other words, Indians assumed they would be taught what to believe and how to practice their new rulers' faith. As a result, Lockhart says, "after the Spanish conquest, [the Nahuas] needed less to be converted than to be instructed." He claims that even the friars defined their work more often in terms of teaching than evangelism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Encounters of the Spirit by Richard W. Pointer. Copyright © 2007 Richard W. Pointer. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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