The Impact Of Spanish Mission In America

When it comes to high school history education, not many schools decided to teach on the matters of Native Americans who lived here. However, when the Spanish went to America to colonize during the mid-1700s, they recruited Native into their missions, either voluntary or forcibly. This essay will focus on the advantages, disadvantages, and why some chose to leave or stay with the Spanish Missions.

The Spanish colonizers started recruiting the Indians to become part of the mission. The Native people got convinced to join so they can baptize them into Christianity. The Spanish believed that they could convert the natives into the Spanish religion. Native people enjoyed being in a community. They started to adapt to the Spanish mission easily because of the food and the ritual.

There were Natives that were impressed by the Spanish pageantry, material wealth, and their abundant food supply. Other Natives had no other choice but to be apart of the Spanish missions because of the Spanish livestock depleting their natural food sources, and the sudden arrival of the Spanish made them turn to the mission. By joining the mission they were guaranteed reliable food supply. The Spanish took advantage of this and forcibly kept them on the mission.

A lot of Native women got raped by Spanish soldiers because their sexuality was a problem for father’s and was condemned because of the Christian faith. Chiefs, that were mainly women and came from wealthy families, married into other tribes; through diplomatic polygyny that provided kinship links that maintained prosperity and war, instead of bloodshed poaching. A lot of them died because of the disease. The major disadvantages were disease the population dramatically decline, and the majority of them suffer to death because of poor labor.

Not every Native shared the same experiences, some enjoyed the mission life while others feared it and left the mission. The causes of them leaving was because of the life-threatening disease that killed off the majority of Natives, as well as the hard labor that they were forced into. The Spanish took advantage of the Native’s situation of them not having a reliable food source, so they forced the Natives into hard working conditions. From this situation, the Natives decided to leave the mission life behind before they were overworked or killed by disease, with some still following the religion or being culturally involved with their religion and passing on their knowledge to generations to come. But some of them decided to stay because they can’t leave without permission. The majority of them hesitate to leave because they don’t want to start a new life again, they understand the difficulty of the mission life. The Indians consider the mission is their second home because they lived, worked, and died there passed through generations and generations

Natives were forced into this labor and still practiced the religion as well as passing on the knowledge of their own religion. Many died during the Spanish Mission due to disease or simply decided to leave, living the rest of their life with more ease; rather than being ruled. The Spanish were ultimately forced to leave the state due to the collapse of their colonial empire, but they still left their religion, language, and other aspects of the Hispanic culture with the Natives.