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CHAPTER 1
The Cemí and the Cross
Hispaniola Indians and the Regular Clergy, 1494–1517
Lauren MacDonald
Three years after the arrival of cross-bearing Europeans into his lands, one of the most powerful local leaders on the island of Hispaniola began each day by reciting Christian prayers. Guarionex made an elaborate performance of this practice and obliged his entire household to perform their prayers twice every morning. Guarionex's prayers were witnessed by two outsiders: Ramón Pané, a "humble friar" from the Order of Saint Jerome, and Guatícabanú, a Christian Indian from the northern coast of Hispaniola. Both men had been sent by Christopher Columbus to the island's interior, in part to learn about the area and in part to monitor Guarionex, whose loyalty to Columbus was uncertain. Their time among Guarionex's people was not always easy — among other things, it meant proximity to Guarionex's mother, whom Pané described as "the worst woman I have known in these parts" — but, as Pané wrote later, Guarionex himself "gave us hope that he would do whatever we wished and that he wanted to be a Christian."
Pané's satisfaction was to be short-lived. By 1498 Guarionex had abandoned Christian practices and, suspected of supporting rebellion against Columbus, fled his domains. Meanwhile, Guatícabanú, who had been baptized by Pané under the name "Juan Mateo," was murdered by men associated with Guarionex. Mourning his lost companion, Pané wrote, "I am certain he died a martyr." While writing an account of his experiences for Columbus in 1498, Pané predicted two future paths for Christian evangelization on the island. There was the possibility, Pané wrote, of converting some Indians through simple religious instruction, for he had seen Guatícabanú become a Christian easily. For others, such as the inconstant Guarionex, "there is need for force and ingenuity ... there is need for force and punishment."
Ramón Pané's diverging paths foreshadowed a repeated motif in colonial American history. Subsequent missionaries and colonial officials oscillated between the open palm and the closed fist, from the tentative embrace of indigenous concepts and practices to the violent punishment of heterodox beliefs. Yet while historians have studied these religious dynamics elsewhere in the Americas, little attention has been paid to the islands where the Spanish conquest began, possibly due to the paucity of archival sources for religion in the early Spanish Caribbean.
Much of the existing scholarship on religiosity in the early Spanish Caribbean falls into two categories: studies that use Spanish-authored sources to reconstruct precontact beliefs, or works cataloging the inexorable accretion of papal bulls and the growing numbers of priests, friars, churches, and parishes that signaled the establishment of the Church as a Caribbean institution. In both approaches, conquest-era "religion," whether indigenous or imported, is treated as a static, monolithic entity that could recede or advance but never change. In contrast, recent scholarship on other regions in the colonial Americas has investigated religious identities as dynamic, responsive, overlapping, and entangled. In that vein, this chapter argues that in the first three decades of Spanish settlement on Hispaniola, missionary figures and American Indians tried to understand foreign religiosity within familiar frameworks.
Writing to the Catholic Monarchs in 1493, Columbus claimed that the men and women of the Caribbean were people without any religion of their own. He saw no buildings of worship, no robed priests, no sacred texts. Yet the stories told by the people of central Hispaniola, translated by Guatícabanú and recorded by Pané, attested to creation myths, gods, and the marvelous. Pané's account contained stories of mankind issuing from turtles and birds, divine cemís of stone and wood, and shamans who made the dead speak. While scholars have analyzed Pané's account in order to reconstruct indigenous worldviews prior to the arrival of Europeans, little attention has been paid to the immediate environment surrounding the composition of the account, which was drawn from stories told, sung, or danced to the accompaniment of wooden drums in Hispaniola during the 1490s. The orality and choreography of each evanescent areito potentially allowed its performer to reproduce the stories of her or his community selectively and strategically. Pané described the areito as both a form of memory and a source of political legitimacy: "Just as the Moors, they have their laws gathered in ancient songs, by which they govern themselves." Long after the arrival of the Europeans, the areito continued to be a significant act of memory, negotiation, and resistance for Caribbean Indians. In subsequent decades, Spanish settlers repeatedly described the persistence of the areito on the islands.
The volatility and violence of Spanish Hispaniola shaped the stories that the people of the island's interior chose to tell Guatícabanú and Pané, as well as the stories that the two outsiders chose to record. During the first decade of the Spanish conquest, Hispaniola's indigenous inhabitants experienced violence, social upheaval, coerced labor, and political destabilization. Native leaders revolted against Columbus's tributary demands in 1494, 1495, and 1497; hunger assailed their communities during periods of famine in 1495 and 1496; and in 1497 a group of disaffected Spaniards revolted against Columbus's authority, further destabilizing political organization on the island. The stories recorded by Pané between 1495 and 1498 — full of death, exile, transformations, and frustrated desires — mirrored this disordered world.
Women, an early point of contention between Europeans and indigenous Caribbean communities, were elusive and slippery figures in Pané's stories. In the early years of Spanish Hispaniola, colonial kitchens were operated by indigenous women, and some European men married high-ranking women in hopes of acquiring the land and labor of their households. The dramatically declining population of Hispaniola was partly due to the fall of births within endogamous relationships (and a concomitant rise in births within European-Caribbean unions). Tellingly, many of Pané's stories depended on the absence or alienation of women. Women appeared in animal forms; women were exiled to inaccessible islands; and bachelors were forced to build their own women using the bodies of birds and turtles.
In other stories, at a time when they were encountering influenza and other alien pathogens, the native peoples of Hispaniola grappled with the decline of perceived power held by their religious leaders. Pané recounted the retributive murder of a Hispaniola behique [shaman] by a grieving family when the man's cures proved ineffective for their loved one. "They take out his eyes and smash his testicles because they say that none of these physicians can die, however much they may beat him, if they do not remove his testicles," he wrote. The violent dismemberment of an impotent behique mirrored, in miniature, the ways in which traditional forms of indigenous power and authority were threatened, altered, or undone by the first years of Spanish colonization.
By and large, Pané did not explicitly identify parallels between Caribbean beliefs and Christian orthodoxy, with one significant exception: the cemís of stone, wood, and cotton, who acted as intermediaries between indigenous leaders and the divine. The cemís were conscious and mobile, and to be accompanied by a cemí, especially one that had elected to remain with successive members of the same lineage, was a prestigious sign of a leader's power and rectitude. Pané perceived them as demonic. "Those simple, ignorant people believe that those idols — or, more properly speaking, demons — make such things happen because they have no knowledge of our holy faith," Pané wrote. He reported that the cemís were capable of digesting food, escaping captivity, and engaging in sexual intercourse; the cemís had names, origins, and gender. "And so may God help them if the cemí eats any of those things because the cemí is a dead thing, shaped from stone or made of wood," Pané wrote.
Several years later, he was still repeating the idea that the cemís were comprehensible religious objects, and when the Indians converted, "they will burn their cemís and idols." For their part, at least some Caribbean Indians agreed on the commensurability of cemís and Christian iconography; José R. Oliver has identified two cases of Cuban Indians treating Marian icons as if they were cemís in 1511.
After Columbus's first voyage, the pope recognized Castile's claim to the Americas with the understanding that Castile would have governance over non-Christian peoples in exchange for instructing them about Christianity. Despite Castile's ostensible need to evangelize its new possessions, ecclesiastical figures were scarce in the early years of the Spanish Caribbean. In late medieval Europe, the clergy of Rome were divided between the secular clergy, who belonged to individual cathedrals or parishes, and the regular clergy, who belonged to monastic or mendicant communities and lived according to the "rules" and various objectives of their orders. In their internal histories, the regular clergy cultivated a self-image of frequent and heroic evangelical outreach among non-Christian peoples in frontier missions, but many of these missions were either small in scale or mythic. Most Dominicans, Franciscans, and other mendicant friars had little firsthand experience with mission work and were slow to participate in American evangelization. There is no clear evidence that any friar accompanied Columbus on his first voyage, and while the regular clergy joined Columbus's second expedition in 1493, many of them returned to Castile less than a year later to complain to the Catholic Monarchs about Columbus's mismanagement of the islands.
The small handful of regular clergy remaining in Hispaniola in 1494 included Ramón Pané, although it remains unclear why he had left Catalonia and joined Columbus's second voyage. The religious order to which he belonged, the Order of St. Jerome, was monastic, contemplative, and had no explicit commitment to frontier missions. When Hieronymites engaged with non-Christian peoples in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they did not follow a standard script. For example, the Hieronymite Hernando de Talavera, who served as the first bishop of conquered Granada and its Muslim inhabitants from 1493 to 1507, created an Arabic dictionary, grammar, and prayer book for the non-Christian inhabitants of his diocese. In contrast, on the other side of the Atlantic, Pané resisted learning Indian languages, and there is no evidence that he emulated Talavera's methods of conversion.
By early 1495 Pané was living at the Spanish fort of Magdalena and proselytizing among the indigenous people who lived near the fort. His first Christian convert was Guatícabanú, the Macorix-speaking man who would become his companion and collaborator in religious instruction. Pané later wrote that Guatícabanú was "the best of the Indians," and Pané "considered him a good son and brother." When Columbus asked Pané to move to Guarionex's provinces, Pané asked Columbus for permission to bring along Guatícabanú as someone who could translate for him.
Among Pané's fellow ecclesiastics on the island were two Franciscan friars, Juan de la Duele and Juan Tisin. If Pané — bereft of obvious models for conversion from his own order — was developing his missionary program on the spot, the two Franciscans had recourse to a long (if somewhat embellished) institutional history of frontier missionary work. From their thirteenth-century founding, the Franciscan Order had promoted apostolic poverty, mendicant preaching, and missionary work to the edges of the Christian world, including the Islamic kingdoms ringing the Mediterranean.
At times, Pané was accompanied by Duele, and Pané likely patterned his missionary efforts after the Franciscan model. Echoing a practice associated with the Franciscans, Pané performed at least one baptism of a large group, the household of the Hispaniola leader Guanáoboconel. While the Dominicans would later criticize mass baptisms as lacking meaning for their uncomprehending participants, the Franciscans would develop a reputation for mass baptisms in New Spain as they sought to maximize the reach of the sacrament. Many Franciscans believed that the end of the world was fast approaching, which contributed to the emotional urgency of their conversion efforts. In contrast, Pané testified in 1500 that Christopher Columbus had deliberately limited baptisms so that he could continue to legally enslave men and women who remained non-Christian.
Guarionex, who was briefly the most powerful leader on Hispaniola, was never baptized. Despite his demonstration of Christian prayer, Guarionex avoided other Christian practices and, with time, even his prayer schedule slackened. While initial conversion efforts seemed propitious, the political and social tensions between indigenous leaders and Spanish authorities soured the relationship between Guarionex and his missionaries. According to Pané, "other leaders of that land ... reproached" Guarionex "because he wanted to obey the law of the Christians, because the Christians were wicked and had taken possession of their lands by force."
Guarionex was adept at Caribbean forms of political legitimization and, given the uncertain political atmosphere of Hispaniola, he may have briefly chosen dramatic expressions of Christianity to reassure the hostile forces surrounding his territory. He was skilled at negotiating with other indigenous leaders, and he benefited politically from the performance of areitos, the ceremonial song-dances that were used for the transmission of history and myth in the Greater Antilles. The areito included both vocal and bodily expressions, and Guarionex may have found a familiar echo of its physicality within the Christian prayers that Pané taught him. Guarionex's skill in the areito allowed him to leverage favors from another native leader when he ultimately fled the Europeans. In exchange for an areito performance, he successfully gained refuge for a short time. He was finally apprehended by Columbus and incarcerated, then in 1502 he perished aboard a ship bound for Castile during a storm. Guarionex's encounter with Christianity — strategic and selective — would be echoed by many Christian converts in the later missions of Spanish America.
Before Guarionex distanced himself from Christianity, Pané erected a shrine in his lands and installed icons, likely of the Virgin Mary, within. After Pané left Guarionex, a group of men associated with Guarionex broke into the chapel, stole the images, buried them in a cultivated field, and urinated on them. Some scholars have interpreted this episode as an early episode of cultural synthesis, in which Christian materials were pointedly subordinated to a Caribbean agricultural ritual. Given that the men broke into the chapel over the objections of its keepers, it seems likely that the act was intended, at least in part, as a deliberate repudiation of Christianity and the departed Pané. The Europeans understood the act in this way, and Pané reported with some satisfaction that the perpetrators were eventually burned alive by Bartolomé Columbus.
The aftermath of the icon burial revealed another merger of Christian and Caribbean meanings. To mark the spot where the icons had been buried, yams sprouted in the shape of a cross, according to Pané. This cross was discovered by the mother of Guarionex, a woman much loathed by Pané. But it was this woman who saw the cross and "took it to be a great miracle." To the Castilian authorities, she said, "This miracle has been wrought by God where the images were found. God knows why." Pané interpreted this event as a sign of the strength of Christianity: God could persuade even the "worst woman" in the Caribbean. Pané did not emphasize the fact that she was talking to "the commander of thefortress of Concepción" in the aftermath of local unrest and violence. By seizing upon this "miracle" of a Christian icon bursting forth from the Caribbean ground, she was demonstrating her diplomatic understanding of the complicated religiosity of the island's invaders.
Damp icons and green crosses were not the only potential moments of cultural synthesis in Pané's account. Guatícabanú died at the hands of unknown men while crying out his allegiance to Christianity, using both Castilian and Caribbean words: "Dios naboría daca." The indigenous word naboría was used to describe a servile class of people on the island of Hispaniola. In describing himself as the naboría of God, at least in the version of events reported to the absent Pané, Guatícabanú was bending Christianity into a Caribbean frame.
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Excerpted from "The Spanish Caribbean & the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century"
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