What Is It Fairy Tales or History

let me tell you a story

once upon a time there was a people

living on an island

there were many many people oh perhaps a

hundred thousand of them

they lived contentedly on this island

until one day a ship anchored

ships offshore visited their island

before but this ship was different

because it brought people from the

outside who intended to stay

there weren’t very many of these people

just 40 of them all together

but they had scary weapons soon these

people

scattered throughout the island telling

the island people that they were there

to help them

but instead a long war broke out

that lasted 30 or 40 years when it was

over

most of the island people were dead

and those who survived were forced to

shed their customs

wear clothes and obey the new conquerors

of their honor

is this history or a fairy tale

a version of this is found in the first

histories of the marianas that i read

back in the 1960s and 70s

something close to this version is

accepted by many people even today

but there are plenty of unanswered

questions

how did 40 people conquer an island

group with a gigantic population

the weapons must have been really

powerful

or perhaps the newcomers were super race

what were the island people thinking

when they let these newcomers on their

island in the first place

why did they let them stay

is it possible that many of the island

people

joined the newcomers then too

could it be that some of the newcomers

joined the island people

were there reasons for welcoming the

newcomers

is it possible that perhaps the

newcomers really did help the island

people despite the many deaths best

time to begin serious historic

exploration

into the events surrounding the arrival

of padre

luis diego santi torres and his party

in 1668 a party that included six

jesuits

and 31 lay missionaries what do we know

we know that the original island

population of

perhaps forty thousand was reduced to

four thousand

forty years later and the spaniards were

in charge

so what happened to bring about this

upheaval

let’s take a closer look at the facts

first there were no troops with sandy

torres

just filipinos and mexicans chosen for

their trade

and for their faith they included

a woman two twelve-year-old boys chosen

for their singing voices

a sixty-year-old farmer and other

tradesmen

they were chosen for their christian

lives and their skills

not their military prowess the muskets

were frightening at first

but not too useful in real encounters

especially in canoes as the filipinos

and mexicans soon found out

violence for the most part was provoked

by cultural clashes

and by personal offense that was given

especially when the mission band started

breaking up the ancestral skulls

that the people reverenced all these

offenses

built up resentment in some of the other

people

romanians could have easily wiped out

the missionaries and their helpers if

they really wanted to

three times they gathered insufficient

force

outside the mission center in agatha

1671

1676 1685

muskets or not the spanish party was

outnumbered

20 to one but wiping out the opposition

was not the way islanders conducted

warfare

the normal pattern of warfare was a

display

a show of strength perhaps the loss of a

couple lives and then

a settlement this is how island warfare

has always been conducted

mass slaughter would have defeated the

purpose of the missionaries themselves

since they were there to save souls

not to confine of the hell according to

the beliefs in those days

so the missionaries were quick to

complain when the troops

who first arrived eight years after the

mission started

took lives recklessly

but even if the islanders had adopted

european style warfare

they would not have wiped out the

newcomers for two reasons

first they found something that the

foreigners offered

that they really wanted not just the

belief system and the faith

but iron hoop horn cultivation

cloth and weaving and so many other

things second

the foreigners were already being

protected by local allies

men leading the the local militia people

like

ignacio henanti antonio ahi

the island was never politically united

and the loosely organized village system

gave rise to such divisions

when troops finally were sent to the

islands from the mid-1670s on

they were beset by their own problems

lack of training poverty disagreement

with their officers

many of them were outright useless some

preyed on the local community

but many more about 60 by the end of the

century

established strong links with the island

community

by marrying local women

by the end of the period of intermittent

hostilities

between 1668 to 1698

that’s 30 years about 120 tomorrows had

lost their lives

in violence the foreigners had lost

themselves about 60 or 70 people

the yearly death toll over the whole

30-year period then

was about four islanders and two

foreigners

each year by 1700

a new cultural and political system was

in place

this system was a combination of new and

the old

examples well the titles

they were maintained but changed the

officials

the moving back and forth between the

town and the village

the lanchu began at that time

the continuing importance of a woman’s

line

but using of the the man’s last name

survival of the cultural place of death

and honoring the deceased

family but this time through the church

this suggests that the new cultural

forms

included an altar form of the

traditional

rather than an abandonment of the old

the old was kept but just under a new

form

in the end islanders did not simply roll

over and play dead

local people had their reasons for their

early choices

they were real-life figures not just

this faceless and feckless group of

people who allowed outsiders to come in

and impose their will

regardless of how ineffective their

muskets might have been

on every page of the historical sources

there are hints

sometimes outright screams that people

have their own strategic responses

to spanish moves often enough

the islanders organize their own

initiatives as well

perhaps it’s an injustice to present the

people of these islands as helpless

victims

who have been deprived of what is most

meaningful their cultural heritage

perhaps it’s an injustice to present the

people of these islands

as capitalist victims who have been

deprived of what is most meaningful

their cultural heritage their land their

identity

can we do just a bit more to show how

active

and resilient they were but to do so

we’ll have to give up some of our

cherished myths

our fairy tales and we will have to

develop the skill

of reading between the lines to intuit

what those who did not write these

sources

were really trying to do