" The Spanish incursion into the New World, with its brutal
destruction of indigenous peoples and their cultures and its
material exploitation of much of two continents, reverberates in
our history down to the present century. So contends prize-winning
writer Barry Lopez in this beautifully written book. "The quest for
personal possessions," he observes, "was to be, from the outset, a
series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an
end to it was never visible... in which an end to it had no
meaning." In this luminous essay, written five hundred years after
the Spanish conquest, Lopez reexamines the attitudes that informed
that event and that have underlain the entire European settlement
of America. "The assumption of an imperial right conferred by God,
sanctioned by the state, and enforced by the militia, the
assumption that one is due wealth in North America," he writes, is
apparent in the journals of people on the Oregon Trail, in the
pronouncements of nineteenth-century industrialists, and in the
political rhetoric of our own day. But, for Lopez, coming to grips
with this terrible legacy opens new possibilities. "This violent
corruption needn't define us. We can take the measure of the horror
and assert that we will not be bound by it." We can "rediscover"
our continent -- not as a source of income but as a home, a place
in which we are to find our strength and character, and in which
certain moral courtesies and obligations obtain. We can develop a
philosophy of place will enable us, finally, to take up a true
residence in our homeland. Here is a voice for our time.
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