bout. Demings II, G.R. pg 4For example, one of these very laws was” Every Sunday and obligatory feast day they may come there [to church] to pray and hear mass, and after mass they shall bring them back to the estates and feed them pots of cooked meat, in such wise that they eat better on that day then on any other”(Sherman 297). This is not to say that the natives were without what we would consider “barbaric” traditions. For instance there are many accounts on the treatment of their prisoners of war, one of which I will summarize shortly. As it turns out, a prisoner has a pretty good life. As it starts they are fed with the best food available, and the men are given wives, their captors will even allow their daughters and sisters to marry these prisoners. As soon as they’ve outlived their worth and are sufficiently fat, they are finally slain and eaten with great ceremony. To the prisoner it is a great honor to be defiant as well as jubilant in the face of your slayers (De Lery 122-133). We consider cannibalism a vile act, but when you have an entire continent that participates in the right, who were the Europeans to say it was wrong? Were not the Europeans also wrong in living in filth, because bathing was said to wash away the natural defenses of the earth? We do know today that cannibalism can lead to some bad diseases, but that was just a recent discovery.To further demonstrate the arrogance of the European settlers, there are a few papers written on the reactions to what the Natives called religion. To start with the paper states that “there is no people so brutish, nor any nation so barbarous and savage, as to have no feeling that there is a divinity”(De Lery 134). Once again the “we are the only ones who are right” attitude of the Europeans is made apparent, by the previous statement. Demings II, G.R. pg 5Upon further examination of the religion of the natives, ...
