Making the Indigenous Speak. The Jesuit Missionary Diego de Rosales in Colonial Chile, 17th Century

To say that the Jesuits’ text made the Indigenous “speak” may sound like a terrible provocation. It is like stating that the Jesuit writers had ventriloqual powers, powers displayed in their texts produced in the Spanish Colonies, full of dialogues between Jesuits and Indigenous. These dialogues continually came after acts of violence, after some characters disapproved of the process of Christianisation, or after some Indigenous people accepted Christianity thus producing a defence of its goodness. There they are. All of the characters, sometimes individualised with their names, restate or counter the discourse of the missionaries.