Name: ______________________________ Date ...



Name: ______________________________ Date: ___________ Period: ___________

A Murder Mystery: Who Is Responsible for the Deaths of Millions of Native Americans?

Congratulations!! Today you and your partner (the person sitting next to you) are detectives. Your task? To solve a murder. Historians estimate that there were perhaps 54 million native people in North and South America in 1492. In the centuries that followed Columbus’ landing, as many as 90 percent of the Native Americans died. So who was responsible?

You’ve found clues which point to the suspects below:

• King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella: Funded Columbus’ voyages in order to establish a Spanish empire in America. Other European nations followed in their footsteps.

• Christopher Columbus: Responsible for the first voyages to the Americas. First leader of the Spanish in the New World; accused of using violence to get the land and gold he wanted.

• Disease: Caused huge numbers of deaths; Native Americans had no immunities to diseases like smallpox.

• Spanish Soldiers and Conquerors: They’ve been accused of carrying out violence, war, and enslavement against the native peoples to build an empire. Inadvertently spread diseases.

Directions: Four clues were found at the scene of the crime.

1. Work together to complete AP PARTS for each clue.

2. Under Significance, include which suspect(s) you think this clue points to.

3. Answer the critical thinking questions to help you analyze and compare the sources.

4. Your homework will be to decide who to arrest! Type the arrest report (each partner will turn in his/her own arrest report). In addition to naming the suspect or suspects that you wish to arrest, write two or more paragraphs in which you:

• Explain your arguments that support your decision of who to arrest.

• Cite key pieces of evidence that support your decision (this can include quoting or paraphrasing from one of the documents).

A. In Defense of the Indian by Bartolome De Las Casas, 1552

Bartolome De Las Casas was a Spanish priest. When he first arrived in Hispaniola, he owned an estate and Native American slaves. However, after observing the Spaniards’ treatment of the Native Americans, he freed his own slaves in 1514 and convinced King Charles I of Spain to make enslaving Indians illegal in 1542. Below is an excerpt from Las Casas’ account of how the Spanish soldiers treated the Native Americans after an attack:

“Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons and pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indian’s hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying “Go now, spread the news to your chiefs.” They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow.

They burned or hanged captured chiefs.”

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B. Requerimiento, by Juan Lopez de Palacios Rubios, 1513

This was a statement Spaniards were required by King Ferdinand of Spain to read to Indians they met in the Americas. The document stated that Native Americans must accept Spanish rule and convert to Roman Catholicism, or else . . .

“I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of Their Highnesses. We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as Their Highnesses may command. And we shall take your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him.”

Author: _______________________________________________________________________________________________

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Prior Knowledge: ______________________________________________________________________________________

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Significance: __________________________________________________________________________________________

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C. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, by David E. Stannard, 1992

In this controversial secondary source, the historian David E. Stannard argues that Columbus and the explorers and settlers who followed him were responsible for genocide (genocide means the deliberate destruction of a group of people). Some agree with his interpretation, and some think that it is too biased (unfairly prejudiced in favor of one viewpoint).

Apart from his navigational skills, what most set Columbus apart from other Europeans of his day were not the things that he believed, but the intensity with which he believed in them and the determination with which he acted upon those beliefs . . . .

He was also a man with sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing such people simply because they were not like him . . . . As such, the fact that he launched a campaign of horrific violence against the natives of Hispaniola is not something that should surprise anyone. Indeed, it would be surprising if he had not inaugurated such carnage.

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D. Excerpt from chapter one of The American Pageant, a textbook by David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

. . . In [Europeans’] bodies they carried the germs that caused smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria. Indeed, Old World diseases would quickly devastate the Native Americans. During the Indians’ millennia of isolation in the Americas, most of the Old World’s killer [diseases] had disappeared from among them. But generations of freedom from these illnesses had also wiped out protective antibodies. Devoid of natural resistance to Old World sicknesses, Indians died in droves. Within fifty years of the Spanish arrival, the population of the Taino natives in Hispaniola dwindled from some 1 million people to about 200. Enslavement and armed aggression took their toll, but the deadliest killers were microbes, not muskets. The lethal germs spread among the New World peoples with the speed and force of a hurricane, swiftly sweeping far ahead of the human invaders; most of those afflicted never laid eyes on a European.

Author: _______________________________________________________________________________________________

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The Main Idea: _________________________________________________________________________________________

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Significance: __________________________________________________________________________________________

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Critical Thinking Questions:

1. Doc. A – How does Las Casas describe the treatment of the Natives by the Spanish?

2. Doc. B – How does the King’s attitude toward the Native Americans compare to Las Casas’s?

3. Doc. C – What kind of language does Stannard use to describe Columbus’s actions? To what extent do you think the primary sources support his views? (look back at the excerpt from Columbus’s letter that we read together as well)

4. Doc. D – According to the document, what was the main cause of the majority of the actual deaths among the Native American population?

ARREST REPORT

Directions: Type (Times New Roman, 12' font, 1.5 spacing, 1" margins) 2 paragraphs (or more, if you are accusing two suspects) in which you:

1. Identify the suspect or suspects are being arrested on the charge of murdering the Native Americans and

2.

• Explain your arguments that support your decision of who to arrest.

• Cite key pieces of evidence that support your decision (this can include quoting or paraphrasing from one of the documents).

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