What did the missions do to the people they reached?

In 1552 Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who as a priest in Cuba had sent the labourers allotted to him into the gold mines, published an account of the destruction of the Indies: a catalogue of massacres, enslavement and forced labour, addressed to the Spanish crown and written to stop it.

In 1537 the papal bull Sublimis Deus had already declared that "the Indians are truly men", that they were not to be deprived of their liberty or property "even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ", and that they should not "in any way" be enslaved.

The declaration was made, and the enslavement continued.

In Canada, and in about half of the United States system, church-run boarding schools were the instrument of a state policy of assimilation. Children were removed from their families, discouraged and often forbidden from speaking their languages, and held in institutions where hunger was common and death rates ran far above those of other children.

Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission gathered over 6,750 statements and left its records to a national centre, which runs a Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Initiative and a National Student Memorial Register for the children who did not come home. A United States federal investigation has compiled a comparable record for its own system, covering student deaths and burial sites.

The Canadian commission counted 3,201 reported deaths and says the full number is not likely ever to be known, because records were destroyed and deaths went unnamed or unreported. The American report confirms at least 973 children who died and at least 74 burial sites, and says the real numbers are greater.

These are official inquiries, one created under the settlement of the largest class action in Canadian history and one by a federal department, working from institutional records and testimony. They are not advocacy documents, and they are the strongest evidence in this question.

In March 2023 two Vatican dicasteries issued a joint statement on the doctrine of discovery, the legal concept by which European powers claimed a right to lands they reached.

It states that the doctrine is not part of Catholic teaching, that the fifteenth century bulls sometimes cited as its basis have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith, and that those documents did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples. It acknowledges that their contents were used to justify immoral acts carried out, at times, without opposition from church authorities, and asks for pardon.

It repudiates the doctrine, not the bulls. It does not withdraw them; it says colonial powers manipulated their contents for political purposes.

Conversion under conquest is not a category with clean edges. Some communities adopted Christianity and reshaped it; some were ordered to accept it on pain of war.

Historians once wrote of the conquered as traumatised victims and now more often write of pragmatic actors who adapted to the new order and sometimes turned it to their own ends. How far that agency reached, and what limited it, is still argued region by region.

For some languages the records made in mission contexts are among the oldest that survive. Two Konkani codices transliterated into Roman script in the early Catholic mission in Goa are among the oldest known literary texts in that language. Some scholars take them for copies of manuscripts in an Indian script; others read them as written records of oral narration from around 1600, which would make them an unusually full record of how an Indian language was actually spoken then.

That is a real debt, and it is owed to the same missionary tradition whose schools in Canada and the United States, three centuries later, punished children for speaking their own languages.

The population collapse in the Americas after 1492 was enormous. The review that gathers the regional estimates treats the epidemics as the main driver behind the majority of the deaths, and says in the same breath that warfare, enslavement and hunger after social collapse made the losses larger still. Disease would have arrived with or without missions. Separating its share from the rest is not something the sources allow with precision.

Nor do they fix the size. Published loss rates for the Americas run from 40 per cent to 95 per cent, and for Hispaniola alone, where most estimates rest on one eyewitness report, the population at contact is put at anything from sixty thousand people to eight million. Every percentage attributed to any cause inherits that.