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Compare And Contrast Native American And Francisco Marin

1767 Words8 Pages

History is a powerful weapon usually written from the perspective of the victors and reflected in their image. The losers are rarely given the opportunity to state their side of events, but historians work to change this disparity of information and bring balance. Historians like Inga Clendinnen and Robert Ricard attempt to make sense of Native Americans’ lifestyles base on information provided by European explorers and scholars a well as remnants’ of Indigenous people. While Inga Clendinnen discusses colonial life in the Americas between 1517 to 1570, Robert Ricard focuses on describing Native American life and interactions with Spaniards from 1523 to 1572. Both Clendinnen and Ricard work to describe Native Americans in Latin Americans and …show more content…

In a specific passage, Rcard addresses how Fray Francisco Marin works to humanize the natives and place them moderately on par with the Spaniards. Ricard directly wrote, “He found them a barbarous people; he taught them to dress, feed themselves properly, and live in communities, and he initiated into civilized life” (137). Ricard gives praise to Fray Marin for helping to imposing European standards onto the natives of MesoAmerica. Also, Ricard advocates on the behalf of Fray Marin in discussing native life as unproductive until prior to what he may considers they saviors arriving to put the indigenous people on the right path to salvation. The historian reminds the reader that the native society was primitive through words like “proper”, “civilized”, and “dress” when demonstrating detailed account of interactions between the natives and the Spaniards. Although Ricard believes he is a fair assessment of how life was during the colonial era, he is only reiterating some of the exaggerated myths about past civilizations in the Americas. Clendinnen seeks to bring to light and deconstruct some of the most common assumptions surrounding the pre-colonial era in the

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