Helen Rand Parish

A friend of mine years ago gave me two valuable tips about reading newspaper articles.

One was to read all the way to the end, because often the best part is buried toward the end of the story.

The other was to pay attention to the obituaries.  No, not to be morbid.  But because the obituaries sometimes serve up some fascinating bits of history.

Like this one: Helen Rand Parish - writer by Jillian Guthrie San Francisco Chronicle 05/15/05.

She was, among other things a linguist.  She had lived in Berkeley since the 1930s, and recently passed away at age 92.  She had an identical twin sister, Olive.

In the late 1940s, she began to take an interest in Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566), one of the most fascinating of the early European visitors to the New World.  Las Casas came with the conquistadors as a Dominican missionary.  But he is remembered now for his impassioned criticisms of Spanish cruelty to the native inhabitants of the Western hemisphere.

One of his most famous works is Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias (Brief report on the destruction of the Indians) from 1542.  In his article on Las Cosas for the 2003 Encyclopedia Britannica, Enrique Dussel, a professor of ethics in the National Autonomous University of Mexico, writes - somewhat surprisingly for a professor of ethics, given the dramatic cruelties and killings he describes  - says of the Report that:

... the historical events described are in themselves of less importance than their theological interpretation: “The reason why the Christians have killed and destroyed such an infinite number of souls is that they have been movedby their wish for gold and their desire to enrich themselves in a very short time.”

Something tells me Las Cosas regarded the killing and destruction of "an infinite number of souls" (and bodies) through slavery, war and murder as more important than the theological judgments he passed.

But Las Cosas is an important reminder that one doesn't have to apply the standards of today to find major fault with the European conquest of the New World.  He wasn't some monk sitting cloistered in Spain writing about distant events.  He had extensive personal experience in the New World himself, primarily in the West Indies.  And he was respected enough that the Spanish Habsburg Emperor Charles V proclaimed new laws on the conduct of the Spanish toward the Indians in significant part because of Las Cosas' work.  (How well they were enforced is another story.)

He's also a reminder that it would have been possible and conceivable, working from the moral and religious standards of that time, to have developed the New World without slavery.  Las Cosas also stands as one of the earliest critics of the slavery system in the "new" hemisphere.

Guthrie writes of Parish:

Ms. Parish wrote a half-dozen seminal books on Las Casas and traveled the globe to lobby with other Las Casas scholars and followers for his elevation by the pope to sainthood.

Las Casas, known as the "Apostle to the Indians," spoke out against what he saw as the unconscionable persecution of Indians under Spanish rule. His writings were in part responsible for the repeal of Spanish law that allowed Indians to be used as slaves.

Ms. Parish knew that canonization can take centuries. In an interview in 1992, she said, "I have never asked to live to see the canonization, only to finish my work." She continued writing and speaking about Las Casas until her final days.

"Helen was just a very forceful person, was very didactic and had a strong sense of right and wrong," said her nephew Rick Tejada-Flores, a filmmaker in Berkeley. "She lived, breathed and ate her work. On the side, she liked saving the world. She got involved in Berkeley environmental politics and was a mentor to a lot of historians and younger scholars."

She published a biography of Las Cosas when she was in her seventies.  She is credited with definitively establishing the date of his birth.  And she wasn't just writing opinion,she was doing original historical research.  Guthrie quotes Professor Rolena Adorno of Yale:

"I met Helen when she was 76 years old," Adorno recalled. "I found her an inspiration. This is awoman who spent however many years going through archives in Spain, in the Vatican, doing things such as determining the correct birth date of Las Casas, which had been garbled since the very first biographers of the 16th century. Her name is a permanent fixture in responsible Las Casas scholarship."

I never met this woman.  In fact, I had never heard of her until I read this obituary.  But she sounds like my kind of person.

It will be a long time before my 70s come rolling around.  But spending your 70s going around Spain, digging through archives, haranguing the young'uns for being too stodgy and conservative - hey, sounds good to me!