Sexual Contact and Conquest

In November 1493 Christopher Columbus rediscovered America. The year before, the Genoese explorer had stumbled upon the Caribbean islands and established La Navidad on Hispaniola, leaving thirty-nine of his men behind.

The sexual exploitation of indigenous women was central to Europe's conquest of the New World. Many European explorers, settlers and soldiers were young men who saw Native Americans as enemies to be conquered. The Spanish conquistadors were largely hidalgos (lesser nobles) who enriched themselves by taking Indian lands and sentencing natives to a forced-labour system known as encomienda. They also sexually exploited native women. Assuming that nakedness and affability indicated a natural lustfulness, Spanish conquistadors used violence to force native women to become their sexual partners. As Magnus Morner observes, ‘the Spanish conquest of the Americas was a conquest of women'.^[415]

Spanish men brought with them heavily gendered notions of violence. Late medieval Europeans understood war as a masculine endeavour and the Roman Catholic Church officially designated women as non-combatants, issuing edicts against their rape and kidnapping. By the fifteenth century secular governments had banned sexual violence against an enemy's female population.

Europeans' use of sexual violence for conquest contrasted sharply with the sensibilities of Native Americans. Many indigenous peoples believed that manhood was something born of active aggression either through war or the hunt, but they did not use masculine power to exploit women.^[417] ‘For the Aztec,' notes Karen Vieria Powers, ‘sex was not seen as a form of violence or conquest.' Instead, the indigenous women that the Spanish encountered in Mexico and Peru maintained sexual rights unknown to most female Europeans; neither the Aztecs nor the Incas placed taboos on premarital intercourse or divorce. Women were entrusted with practising monogamy and self-control, although among the Incas the rape of a married woman could prompt a husband to murder.^[418]

The importance of sexual violence to conquest of the Americas raises questions about native women's consent. In 1519 Hernando Cortes received a tribute payment of twenty indigenous slave women, including Malintzin (also known as La Malinche, or Dona Marina). Malintzin proved invaluable to Cortes, serving as his translator and emissary when he defeated the Aztecs in Mexico. She also bore several children for Cortes, and today she is alternately honoured as the mother of the Mexican people and vilified as a traitor to her race. Yet her motivations remain unclear: was she forcibly raped or did she willingly become Cortes's lover? For many native women, the choice was no doubt illusory, as the Spaniards' overwhelming military power put them in a position where they could not refuse.

In the early seventeenth century France and England began to compete with Spain for North America. Although they justified their colonial schemes as rescuing Indian women from the Spanish conquistadors, both French and English colonisers sexually exploited indigenous women. French fur traders (coureurs de bois) engaged in sexual unions with Indian women, often sanc­tioned by native leaders in order to cement trading relationships. The English disdained interracial marriage and officially discouraged intercourse with Indians. At Jamestown, leaders threatened members of the all-male colony with death should any rape or run off to live with the Powhatan Indians. However, Anglo-Indian relations persisted and, in the marriage of John Rolfe and Pocahontas in 1614, were celebrated as a means of effecting peace between natives and newcomers.^[419]

Generally, the English did not rely upon Indian women to legitimate colonisation. Unlike the Spanish, who saw indigenous bodies as sources of labour, pleasure and procreation, the English viewed natives as impediments to the replication of European society in America. The Pilgrims settled at Plymouth in 1620 in part because disease had cleared the site of its Patuxet inhabitants. The Mayflower brought large numbers of English women and children to America and helped to transform the region into a New England. Nevertheless, racialised violence was gendered in the English colonies. In warfare, English colonists killed native men but spared women, believing that their gender made them easier to convert to English religion and values. The colonists also feared native men as devilish rapists. When Mary Rowlandson was captured by Wampanoags in King Philip's War (1675-8), she fretted that the ‘Barbarous Creatures' and ‘ravenous Bears' would sexually assault her, although she ultimately admitted that ‘not one of them ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me'. Such rhetoric disguised the fact that native women were far more likely to be raped by English colonists than the reverse.^[420]

By the end of the seventeenth century the population of indigenous Americans had nearly collapsed, losing as much as 90 per cent of its pre­Columbian numbers. Gendered violence had coloured the conquest, giving rise to mixed-race mestizos in Latin America and laying the groundwork in the English colonies for the treatment of African Americans.