Uncomfortable Martyrdoms

On January 27, Pope Francis officially recognized the martyrdom of five Spanish Franciscan missionaries killed in September 1597 in what is now the state of Georgia. Francis labeled the martyrdom of the Venerable Servants of God Pedro de Corpa, Blas Rodríguez de Cuacos, Miguel de Añón, Antonio de Badajoz, and Francisco de Veráscola—also known as the “Georgia Martyrs”—to be in odium fidei (in hatred of the faith). The friars were murdered by an indigenous tribe because of an argument over marriage—many of the men took multiple wives. A sixth friar, Francisco de Ávila, was kidnapped and tortured before being liberated months later.

When we consider such martyr stories, we usually focus our attention on the martyrs themselves: their faith, their courage, their stories which led them to the moment when they died for the Faith. But there’s another element to martyrdom stories that has historical, political, and spiritual importance: the character of the cultures doing the actual martyring. And that’s especially the case when the default stance of our dominant cultural institutions—media, the academy, and entertainment industry—is nothing but sympathy for indigenous peoples. The Biggest Prison on ... Pappe, Ilan Check Amazon for Pricing.

The fact that the Super Bowl featured a team called “The Chiefs” provoked the customary indignation from pundits who claim such mascots are racist toward indigenous peoples. “The team’s imagery is filled with racist tropes,” declared ESPN panelist and Washington Post columnist Kevin Blackistone, who accused the team of “cultural theft wrapped in misappropriated imagery and accompanying cartoonish imitations of their customs.” Changing team names such as the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, land acknowledgements, and investigative journalism into American Indian children who died in boarding schools—these are all examples of attempts to “atone” for historic sins against indigenous peoples.

Certainly, as Catholics we should demonstrate charity and empathy for those who suffer, and the story of Native American relations with settlers and the U.S. government is categorically one of suffering, epitomized in such incidents as the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek massacre, or Wounded Knee. Even American Indians who did their best to comply with the demands of the government and military often encountered mistreatment, betrayal, and violence. And American Indians today endure great hardship, with comparatively higher incidence rates of addiction, sexual violence, and poverty than other groups in the United States.

But the dominant narrative of victimized American Indians and victimizer white settlers has a tendency to obscure what the many civilizations and tribes of our continent’s indigenous populations were truly like. This is where martyr stories can be so important.

Consider the stories of the Canadian Martyrs (though many of them were actually killed in what is now upstate New York). The French Jesuits Isaac Jogues and René Goupil, for example, were ambushed by Iroquois warriors in 1642. For months, the Iroquois subjected Jogues and Goupil to terrible tortures, including tearing off their hair, beards, and nails, and biting through their forefingers. The Iroquois eventually tomahawked Goupil to death. Jogues escaped in 1643; but three years later, in 1646, he was tomahawked by a Mohawk warrior, his severed head implanted on a pole, and his dismembered body thrown into the Mohawk River.

Three years after that, French Jesuit missionaries Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were captured by Iroquois warriors who tortured them, subjecting them to boiling water, then burning them at the stake. The Iroquois then cannibalized de Brébeuf’s body, drinking his blood and eating his heart. That same year, another French Jesuit, Noël Chabanel, was murdered by a “renegade” Huron.

Farther south, in what is now Virginia, the Powhatan—a tribe celebrated in contemporary accounts of Pocahontas—in 1571 betrayed and murdered Jesuit missionaries Juan Baptista de Segura, Gabriel Gómez, Pedro de Linares, Cristóbal Redondo, and Sancho de Zaballos. The Powhatan then tried to deceive a Spanish relief expedition later that spring by dressing in the dead Jesuits’ cassocks. (The Spanish soldiers recognized the deception, and avoided a similar fate.) How to Hide an Empire:... Immerwahr, Daniel Best Price: $15.69 Buy New $17.24 (as of 11:50 UTC - Details)

Out west, approximately 2,000 Comanches and allied North Texas Indians in 1758 attacked Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá, on the San Saba River in what is now Texas. Among those killed were two priests, Fray Alonso Giraldo de Terreros and Fray José de Santiesteban Aberín, who were seeking to evangelize the Apache. (As S.C. Gwynne describes in his best-selling book Empire of the Summer Moon, the Comanche’s brutality was especially legendary, mutilating the dead bodies of male settlers and gang-raping settler women.) A few decades after the attack on the Spanish mission in Texas, four Franciscan missionaries—Fathers Francisco Garcés, Juan Antonio de Barreneche, José Matías Moreno, and Juan Díaz—were murdered in 1781 during a Quechan uprising in what is now Arizona.

These are not stories that are well-known, even among Catholics. But they offer a gruesome window into the practices of many Native American cultures. Polygamy, torture, rape, murder, and cannibalism were all practices settlers could expect to encounter among various indigenous civilizations. Yes, it’s true, not all tribes engaged in such horrors, but many did. (For another example of cannibalism, look up the Karankawa, a tribe in present-day Texas.) And, it should be said, indigenous peoples were fighting, conquering, and enslaving each other for millennia before European settlers arrived.

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