The history of the indigenous Canarians has always been a puzzle with missing pieces. This is largely because only the testimony of the colonizers survived the passage of centuries, while from the first inhabitants of the archipelago, who came from North Africa, only fragments are known. To untangle the knot of the colonial gaze and make sense of the scattered grains of the archipelago's history, Canarian historian Laura González Carracedo has focused her doctoral thesis on analyzing how the colonizers imposed a sexual differentiation on indigenous Canarian women compared to men during the conquest of the archipelago.
When the expedition organized by Jean IV de Bethencourt to conquer the Canary Islands landed in Lanzarote, two Franciscan friars served as chroniclers. The campaign diary Le Canarien (1404-1420) became the first extensive document that allowed us to get an idea of what life was like for the Amazigh, the first inhabitants of the islands. However, it had a major drawback: it was a piece of the history of the Canary aborigines told by their colonizers and was inevitably going to be imbued with their perspective.
Currently, this doctor in History from the University of La Laguna has studied these chronicles written by men who were also colonizers, from a gender perspective, and her analysis has allowed her to learn more about how the indigenous Canarian women lived and how the settlers subjugated them through religion. On the occasion of her participation in the IV Cultural Conference, held in Haría, González Carracedo speaks to La Voz.
Indigenous people, animalized by the colonists
"We have captured and killed many men and we have held women and children, and the others are in such a state that they go hiding in caves without daring to approach anyone," recounted the chronicle Le Canarien during the conquest of Lanzarote in 1403. The colonists confessed that they put "all their effort" into "taking captives" among the local population, waiting for a ship to arrive from Spain or another country to "exchange people for provisions," that is, to sell the captured indigenous people as slaves.
The colonization of the islands was accompanied by strong evangelization, through the imposition of European Christianity. Religion became a steamroller to crush indigenous beliefs and identity. "The main vehicle, both to legitimize the conquest and to locate the Canarian populations, was the religious apparatus," explains the researcher. Through Christianity, colonization was justified, highlighting the differences between indigenous people and settlers.
In the diaries written during the colonization of the Canary Islands, the discourse used by the chroniclers was "clearly one of inferiorization" towards the indigenous people. The researcher explains that the Christian colonists held a late medieval stance, where women were already considered "inferior" simply for being women, but in the case of indigenous women, who did not know the god of Christianity, they were directly considered infidels and, therefore, were placed even lower on the hierarchy than Christian women. However, the colonists saw the possibility of "evangelizing them, because they were not infidel Muslim populations, but simply did not know Christianity," explains Laura González.
Some historians even speak of racism towards the islanders, although Carracedo explains that the differences pointed out were not so much racial or physical, but religious. In their discourse, the colonists described the Canary Islanders as animals. "They insisted that their customs were bestial, because they did not wear clothing or did not dress in the Christian manner," he exemplifies.
The Polygamy of Indigenous Lanzarote Women
The religious yoke was not only based on appearance, imposing concepts such as "modesty or honesty" on women, but also forced a change in their way of relating. In the case of Lanzarote, documents from the time indicate that polyandry existed among the Mahos, the aboriginal women of the island, meaning the indigenous women maintained sexual relationships with more than one man. The evangelization process of the indigenous Canary population went hand in hand with sexual imposition on women.
"In the French chronicle of the conquest, an evangelization primer appears and insists on marriage because in Lanzarote they observed that the populations had another way of relating sexually," the historian continues. "The only correct thing from the Christian perspective was these monogamous marital unions, which were neither the everyday ones nor those of the indigenous world itself," she adds.
Indigenous women from Lanzarote judged by the Christian canon
The evangelization process occurred through two avenues, one more violent, resorting to the rape of indigenous women and their sale in the slave market; and another of negotiation, where women were recruited to **serve as intermediaries** (or interpreters) between the colonists, who spoke French, and the natives, who spoke Guanche, or through marriage pacts between colonists and indigenous people.
This exposed indigenous women to an evangelizing gaze, introducing concepts that did not exist in the archipelago, such as "infidelity or sin". The image of the island women was questioned for not corresponding to the Christian ideal of beauty; their way of dressing, their nudity, and even their method of feeding their babies, which in Lanzarote was done by swallowing food, were all called into question.
Before the conquest, up to "thirteen documented expeditions" were carried out in the Canary Islands, during which the indigenous people were kidnapped, looted, and plundered. The abducted aborigines were sold in the markets of "Valencia, Mallorca, and Genoa," the researcher adds. In these markets, more was paid for young women than for men. González Carracedo and other researchers point out that women had more value among slaves, partly because they could exercise **sexual violence against them**.
Isabel 'the Canary', a Lanzarotean enslaved woman
One of the stories hinted at in the chronicle Le Canarien and investigated by González Carracedo is that of Isabel, the Canary Islander, an indigenous woman from Lanzarote captured as a slave by the conquerors. In her case, as also happened in the African colonies, she was taught French to serve as an intermediary between the island's natives and the settlers. This way, the settlers could communicate with the locals.
"Acts of harassment against them appear. There was a context of continuous violence against women," Carracedo adds. The conquest diary of Le Canarien narrates an episode in which Isabel, the Canarian woman, was thrown into the sea by the colonists from a ship, where she almost drowned.
Hate Speech and the Creation of the "Other"
The demythologization of the indigenous world did not occur until the Canary elites began to need a past identity linked to the aborigines. "Then other criteria began to be attributed to the indigenous world, and an assimilation of the Guanche, the Canarian, with the island identity itself began to be seen," he adds. However, this period was also marked by other stigmas, such as the idea of the noble savage, where he indicates that the Canary aborigines were associated with people connected to nature.
This researcher returns to the present day, where hate speech against the immigrant population from North Africa is flooding social media. "Currently, we are clearly operating within totally racist parameters, under a discourse in which not only religion is linked to hate speech, but also physical difference," indicates this historian.
"We are recovering previous discourses. Although different from those of the past, we are using a new discourse of otherness." To which he adds: "It is not a continuous discourse, because that makes us lose hope [of being able to fight it], but the way of differentiating the other is rescued all the time."