While browsing through my morning internet news feeds, I came across this riveting article title: “Apache historian questions official narrative: ‘How is it possible that 120 soldiers cut off the feet of 8,000 of our brave Indigenous people?’” The historian alluded to in the title is one Alfonso Borrego, a great-grandson of the famous Apache leader Geronimo. The alleged foot-choppers were troops under the command of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate y Salazar.
The context of the alleged foot-chopping was hostilities that broke out between the conquistadors and the Acoma people in present-day New Mexico in the late 1590s. The Acoma had killed some pillaging Spaniards, resulting in a punitive expedition led against the Acoma by Oñate. According to legend, Oñate retaliated against the Acona by cutting the right foot off 8,000 captives.
Borrego correctly challenges the numbers, asking how 120 conquistadors could manage to capture 8,000 natives and cut their right feet off. Sure, the conquistadors had firearms, but the firearms were cumbersome muzzle-loaders; although a single shot could put a native down, it would then require considerable time to reload before being able to get off a second shot. Although Borrego stated that his research turned up no verification of this particular atrocity, he did come across a document stating that Oñate had given gifts to the natives.
But Borrego leaves a lot out. Oñate’s punitive expedition resulted in the massacre of anywhere from 800 to 1,000 Acoma and the destruction of their pueblo. Of the 500 or so survivors taken prisoner, certain of the males had some toes or tips of toes cut off as a part of their punishment (amputation of an entire foot would have rendered them incapable of performing the forced servitude to which they had been sentenced). Oñate ended up being banished from New Mexico by the Spanish government for his treatment of the Acoma.
It turns out that Borrego has an agenda, and that agenda is the sanitizing of Spanish colonizers and the demonizing of English colonizers, making only the latter responsible for the alleged genocide against Native Americans. He plays fast and loose with the truth, stating that the English killed off all the Wampanoag:
But where are the Wampanoag today? Not one left! Why? Because the English killed them all. People say no, it was smallpox. Smallpox? Then why were the Indigenous under Spanish rule not affected?
Well then, all those people calling themselves Wampanoag up there in New England must be impostors, and Borrego needs to tell the Federal Government to stop recognizing them as Native Americans. Just as nutty is Borrego’s assertion that the Indigenous under Spanish rule were not affected by smallpox. There’s an entire Wikipedia article devoted to describing just how the Indigenous under Spanish rule were affected: “History of smallpox in Mexico.” The horrific effect of a plague on the Wampanoag is well attested, and more recent research indicates that it probably wasn’t smallpox but rather leptospirosis, a disease carried by black rats on English ships.
The essence of Borrego deconstructed is that we have a man who is a descendant of a famous Native American and whose given name and surname are of Spanish origin. Borrego is a Spanish speaker born in El Paso, and here in the United States, Hispanics are a minority, as are Native Americans. In the lingo of intersectionality, Borrego has two boxes to check, a Hispanic box and a Native American box, and he can’t have the two boxes warring against each other. In order to escape his cognitive dissonance, he sanitizes the Hispanic box and projects their excesses onto Anglos.
