SOURCE: A foreword to In Defense of the Indians, edited and translated by Stafford Poole, Northern Illinois University Press, 1992, pp. xiii-xvii.

In the excerpt below, Marty discusses the experience of the modern reader encountering Las Casas 's writings.

Half a millennium after the event, historians and the general public have learned to say not that Columbus discovered America but that with his voyages he encountered a world that was new to Europeans. It also should long ago have been noticed that Columbus never really did "discover" the Native Americans whom he called Indians. The adventurer brought stereotypes into which these people had to fit: we Europeans, he deduced, might both "save" them and "enslave" them.

Bartolome de Las Casas, a Dominican priest, might more properly have been described all along as the one who discovered these Americans. Now we might also change that to say he encountered them...