permaculture

[Ben Martin Horst <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 9:05 PM, venaurafarm <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>wrote:

>
>
> Here's a story nobody knows. Up until something like 1773, when they
> were suppressed by the Church, the Jesuits were actually doing the Work
> of the Lord in Latin America. They went to places deep in the interior,
> now Paraguay, where they were the only Europeans there, and enlightened
> the locals, who were pretty much just primitive cannibals at the time.
> Taught them how to build ranches and churches, weave and wear clothing,
> grow crops, craft their own tools at foundry, and of course pray to the
> Lord. They were very popular.
>

I'll grant that the Jesuits were marginally better than most of the other
religious orders at work in the Americas during colonization, in that they
weren't generally actively complicit in the slaughter, kidnapping, and
slavetrading of native peoples that other orders were. But to depict the
native peoples of Paraguay as unenlightened "primitive cannibals" is
certainly not good history, but uninformed Western imperial and
ecclesiastic propaganda. I don't know who your source is on this, but I'd
suggest some deeper historical and anthropological research.

-Ben