Native American accounts of visiting Europe?

by dk6563

I am looking for accounts from the perspective of Native North or South Americans of visits to Europe. We have lots of the reverse, Europeans describing the Americas, are there any historical records of the other way round?

drylaw

There were cases of native Americans from British America and Brazil who traveled to Europe, though this is outside my field (Anthony Pagden has short discussions of this in European Encounters with the New World).
Unfortunately I'm not aware of any such indigenous accounts for colonial Spanish America. There's not that much information on the very first native Americans in Europe, and the focus tends to be much more on the first Europeans overseas. It's partly due to a focus on European authors and partly due to scarcity of sources - after all, native authors were very rarely published until the 19th c.

I've written on this here before, with more references:

  • This one on probably the first people brought over: a small group of 7 TaĆ­no brought in 1493 by Columbus to Spain "as proof of his findings". We don't know their own perspective unfortunately, but know that most of them returned to the Caribbean in order to aid in Christianization there.

  • After this, large numbers of native slaves were forcibly brought to work in Spain from the early 16th c. This practice was outlawed in 1542 and eventually petered out by the 17th century. In addition, we know of some exceptional cases of native elites who went in diplomatic missions or live in Spain: incl. a descendant of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma, and a famous writer descended from the Inca (Inca Garcilaso de la Vega). In case you're interested, I've also written an answer on these later migrations.

Hope this helps!

Iphikrates

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