In this excerpt from his “Report on the Destruction of the Indies,” the priest Bartolomé de Las Casas describes what happened to the American Indians on Hispaniola after the Spanish arrived. Read the passage and then answer the question. According to Las Casas, how did the Spanish treat American Indians in the Caribbean?
Content warning, this contains tough imagery at times.
“[T]hey assigned them [the American Indians] to each Christian, under the pretext [false reason] that the latter [the Christians] should train them in the catholic faith. . . . The care and thought these Spaniards took, was to send the men to the mines to dig gold, which is an intolerable labor; and they put the women into dwellings, which are huts, to dig and cultivate the land. . . .
They gave food neither to the one, nor the other, except grass, and things that have no substance . . . the men died of fatigue and hunger in the mines and others perished in dwellings or huts, for the same reason. It was in this way that such multitudes of people were destroyed in this island, as indeed all those in the world might be destroyed by like means.” —Bartolomé de las Casas, 1552
(1 point)
Responses
Spanish colonists concentrated on teaching them Christianity
They enslaved both men and women and let most die from overwork and starvation
They forced the men to work in sugar mines, supported by women who grew food for them