In the novel “A Land so Strange”, Reséndez tells the story of Cabeza de Vaca and the three other survivors of the Narváez expedition. In following the story of a group of Spanish conquistadors, at times Reséndez seems to justify the actions of the Spanish colonists and conquistadors in the new world. Occasionally, Reséndez appears to sympathize with the natives, but he does this, almost exclusively, in scenarios when he can avoid directly criticizing the Spaniards. Ironically, Reséndez makes one of his biggest concessions about the flaws of the surviving explorers while discussing the miracles that they performed and the fact that they were revered as gods by the natives. After discussing the way that a particular tribe of native peoples revered the travelers, Reséndez states “The healers may have been humane, but they were also sixteenth-century Christians. They believed that the throngs of Indians that showed so much reverence and devotion toward them would be indefinitely better off as Catholics under Spanish rule (203).” Here Reséndez seems to admit that despite the fact that the travelers had learned from their experiences in the new world, they still sought to effectively destroy the native’s way of life. This concession is a big one that is almost refreshing in this novel that often seems to support the negative actions of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions. This quote was also important because it helped connect the reader to the reality of the time period in which the novel takes place.

Today in most texts, Native Americans during colonial times are often either described as savages or innocent defenseless creatures who get slaughtered by the evil colonizers. In “A Land so Strange”, Résendez seems to argue that neither of these binaries accurately represents the native peoples through his analyses of the topic of hospitality of the native tribes. At first, De Vaca and his companions have very little contact with the natives. Sometimes the contact is positive and the natives exhibit lots of respect for the Spaniards, showing them nothing but hospitality. During other encounters the natives show no hospitality and openly attack the Spaniards. Later on in the novel, De Vaca joins a few different native tribes that exhibit varying levels of hospitality. It was also interesting that arguably the most hospitable tribe quickly became the least hospitable tribe. Through Résendez’s narration, the reader learns the motives behind the Native’s actions. Often the hospitable tribes had never seen white men before and had plenty to share while often the violent tribes had less to share or had had some form of contact with white men in the past. This narration shows the reader that “the natives” neither exhibited lots of hospitality toward the Spaniards nor none at all because you can’t speak about “the natives” as a cohesive group, it is different for different tribes.

While it is not directly stated, Résendez summarizes multiple encounters with native peoples that give the Spaniards a closer look at native cultures and compares those cultures to the Spaniards cultures. Through this comparison of cultures we learn that while the native cultures were very different from the Spanish culture, some similarities existed. The most important example of a similarity between the native culture and the Spanish culture is slavery. Social hierarchies existed in native cultures and those hierarchies varied from clan to clan but no matter what culture you look at, slaves were at the bottom of the social pyramid.

Though I concede that native cultures had their faults and that some native clans were very aggressive towards the Spaniards, I still insist that the fault always lay with Spaniards. The Spaniards came into a new land that they knew nothing about where other people had been living for thousands of years, declared that the land was theirs and that all of the native inhabitants were savages and lesser beings. I think that to an extent Résendez acknowledged this, but his descriptions of aggression of native tribes almost seemed to justify the actions of the colonizers which I do not condone.

Estevanico was an amazing, resilient person who lived a difficult life and is deserving of coverage on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, his Wikipedia page is not fantastic. The first problem I noticed was a problem with the sourcing. The Wikipedia page has a good amount of important information but unfortunately the majority of that information comes from a few sources while the majority of the sources are only there to provide citation for a single sentence or detail. As I continued to read, I was distracted by the short but necessary tangent about Juan Garrido. Next, I couldn’t help but feel that the article did not focus on Estevanico, it seemed to focus on the group of four men from the Narvaez expedition. I understand that because Estevanico was a slave, there is less information about him but if the vast majority of the article focuses on the group of four that survived the Narvaez expedition, then the article should not pretend to be about Estevanico. The final thing that I noticed while reading the Wikipedia page on Estevanico was that the author of the page had poor grammar that didn’t seem appropriate for academic writing.

When I finished reading the Wikipedia article, I moved on to look at the sources. It was difficult for me to evaluate many of the sources because many of them were print and, at the moment, I do not have the time or the energy to track down those print sources to find information on Estevanico. That being said, none of the sources appeared to be blatantly biased and all seemed to be reliable enough to provide the information used on the Wikipedia page. All of the online sources that I could evaluate were good sources except for one. The fifth source in the bibliography was actually a pdf of a copyrighted source which is illegal and should not be on Wikipedia unless the copyright has expired. The last thing I looked at when evaluating this article was the talk page. There was not a ton of activity on the talk page but it did look like multiple people had contributed to the page, updating it, formatting it, and adding sources but unfortunately there was no banner from a Wikipedia reviewer.  Overall, this was a fine article but maybe should be edited to focus more on Estevanico and to fix the gramar.

In the intro to “A Land so Strange”, Résendez attempts to argue the importance of the journey of Cabeza de Vaca on the exploration and colonization of the new world. In this introduction, Résendez summarizes the long journey of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions and discusses the larger impact of their journey in terms of Spanish understanding of the Native Americans. The main point of the introduction of “A Land so Strange” was to tell the reader that Cabeza de Vaca’s journey was one of a kind. Never before had a white man, let alone a Spaniard explored the new world so intimately in a way that did not disrupt and destroy native culture. Cabeza de Vaca came to understand the Native Americans as people and attempted to convince the colonizing Spaniards to treat them as such. Fortunately, Résendez uses very strong language, bold imagery, and interesting anecdotes to ensure that his argument is not only interesting, but also persuasive. I felt that Résendez’s argument was very persuasive because he provided multiple viewpoints and referenced multiple first hand accounts and resources to provide evidence for his point. Résendez also strengthened his summary by supplementing it with interesting specifics that kept the reader engaged. I enjoyed the intro and am excited to read more about the fascinating journey of Cabeza de Vaca!

In his article “Creolization in America”, Buisseret analyzes the history of the term “The New World” and when the New World really came into being. Buisseret begins his article by discussing the term acculturation and then follows the transition from sociological acceptance the theory of acculturation to the theory of creolization. After analyzing the ideas of multiple sociologists he moves on to analyze different kinds of evidence of creolization and finally discusses the stages of creolization in an attempt to pinpoint the origin of the New World. Buisseret’s main argument is that the formation of the New World was not instantaneous, it took time and formed through the blending of multiple unique cultures which he referred to as creolization.  While I found the article informative, I think there was a lot of merit to Buisseret’s argument, and definitely agree with what he said, I couldn’t help but feel that he got caught up in too much summary and did not offer enough of his own opinion. I also felt that the specific examples were very helpful but there were just too many examples when he was discussing examples of creolization. I think that if there was a little less summary, the article would have been more clear and convincing.

In his short article “Only Connect…” William Cronon evaluates the true meaning of the term “liberal education”. William Cronon wrote the article to respond to everyone who uses the term “liberal education” because he feels that the term has lost its meaning. Cronon argues that many colleges and universities use the term “liberal education” but when you look at how they define it their definitions are vague and confusing. Cronon points out that they, the colleges and universities, say that a “liberal education” is defined by curriculum requirements but “forget that their purpose is to nurture human freedom and growth”.

Cronon’s main argument in his article “Only Connect…” is that a “liberal education” should be defined not by the curriculum, but by the qualities that liberally educated students should embody. To argue this point, Cronon begins by talking about the flaws with the historical definition of “liberal education” and compares that to how many modern schools define a “liberal education”. Cronon then moves on to discuss the traits that he thinks a “liberal education” should teach. Cronon recommends ten traits that he believes all liberally educated students should embody, he elaborates on each trait, and describes what that would mean for a student in the modern world.

I found the article “Only Connect…” very persuasive. I think that Cronon made some very important and compelling points that made me think about my own education and whether or not I have learned some of the important skills that he mentioned.  While I did find the article convincing I was left wondering how his suggestions could possibly be implemented. The traits he described were vague and they were all subjective. While this was intentional, I was left wondering how a school could set those as standards if they are so subjective and impossible to measure. I also feel that many schools today use their current standards, however confusing they may be, to produce thoughtful students who embody the traits described by Cronon. The success of many schools today tells me that while Cronon’s definition of a “liberal education” is interesting, it is not the only one that can effectively produce students who embody the important traits he described. To make a clear distinction between Cronon’s points and my own, I used first person statements and separated my beliefs from his by evaluating his work in a separate paragraph.