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