User:Bentsminger/Fray Adrian de Santo Tomás

Fray Adrian de Santo Tomás was a Dominican missionary from Flanders who worked both with the Guaymí and the Kuna in Panama during the first half of the 17th century. According to Philip Young, author of “Notes on the ethnohistorical evidence for structural continuity in Guaymí society,” Fray Adrian de Santo Tomás was also known as Fray Adrian de Ufeldre.

The background

During the Spanish conquest native populations were destroyed rapidly through the introduction of new diseases, violent invaders, infighting, enslavement and a loss of cultural identity. But not everyone in Spain supported what was going on at the time and a series of New Laws were passed in 1542 to help protect native populations. Richard Cooke, author of “The Native Peoples of Central America during Precolumbian and Colonial Times,” states that although these laws had good intentions, Spanish colonists often ignored them. Eventually the task of managing native populations began to be controlled mainly by friars from Dominican, Franciscan and Mercedarian orders. Fray Adrian de Santo Tomas was one of the most well known Franciscan friars to work in Panama.

The people

According to Cooke, Fray Adrian worked to “convince bands of warlike Guaymí and Kuna to leave their forested redoubts and follow the way of the Lord in savanna villages.” Fray Adrian visited the Kuna in the 1640s, which is approximately the time they began resisting the influence of the Spanish. The resistance continued and the Kuna signed a treaty with the Spanish in 1765. Fray Adrian’s work with the Guaymí is more well known. He lived with the group from 1622 to 1637 and chronicled their customs and culture. And, according to Young, Fray Adrian is "the most valuable source available for Guaymí ethnography of the early seventeenth century." In 1682 Fray Adrian wrote "Conquista de la provincia del Guaymí," an article that has been cited in a number of modern papers about the Guaymí people in the 17th century.

The area

Fray Adrian completed his research and mission work with the Guaymí in the province of Chiriquí, which is located in the southwestern corner of Panama. The area features both highlands and savannah plains. Fray Adrian was not the first missionary to work in the region and a number of towns had already been established in the savanna, although the Guaymí lived in the highlands. The two towns that served as bases for the Franciscan missionaries, including Fray Adrian, were Remedios and San Lorenzo. Remedios was the first town founded in the area and was founded in 1589. San Lorenzo was founded in 1623. Young states that the exact area Fray Adrian carried out most of his work is unknown, but suggests he worked with the Guaymí of the northern slopes. Fray Adrian declares in his own work that “the Province of Guaymí is twenty-four or twenty-six leagues distant from the city of Nuestra Senora de los Remedios.” Although the town of Remedios may have served as a base, Fray Adrian was very much submerged in the culture of the Guaymí. It would have been a long journey to travel back and forth between the land the Guaymí occupied and the towns the Spanish founded. Young also suggests that Fray Adrian would have been familiar with the Guaymí of the southern slopes, even if the area was not where the majority of his research was undertaken, because he would have traveled past the southern slopes when he did make the journey from Remedios to the Chiriqui province.

His research

Fray Adrian’s writings provide information about the settlement patterns of the Guaymí; including household makeup, marriage and relationships among family members. According to Mikael John Haller, author of “The emergence and development of chiefly societies in the Río Parita Valley, Panama,” Fray Adrian’s writings also detail a ceremony known as the balsería, which a modern Guaymí group still practices today. The ceremony involves three days of ritualized warfare, the drinking of chicha and the exchange of crafts. After spending 15 years living with the Guaymí, Fray Adrian would have had the opportunity to truly understand the group’s customs and way of life. He would have experienced aspects of their culture that an outsider would have most likely never have seen.

His mission

In a thesis written for St. Francis Xavier University under the direction of Haller and Adam Menzie of the University of Pittsburgh, MacKenzie K. Jessome mentions that Fray Adrian’s work did contain a religious bias. In his 1682 essay he referred to the balsería as “ye beastly customs of ye savage.” Although he chronicled their customs, he was also there as a missionary and was working to convert the Guaymí to Christianity. Fray Adrian was not the only missionary to work with the Guaymí. The main goal of the missionaries who worked with the Indians living in the Chiriqui province was to “resettle them into towns in order to facilitate their conversion and control.” But this was no easy task because many groups living in the area already had an established way of life and system of beliefs. According to Young, Fray Adrian provided the second account of an attempt to convert the Guaymí. Young also suggests that Fray Adrian may have founded a second town called San Lorenzo, in which 200 houses of Indians were located, but the town has since disappeared. Overall, conversion attempts were not incredibly successful. Young states that many Guaymí resisted the conversion and a group of 9,000 Guaymí even burned their new homes to the ground and returned to their original land. Others simply left their new homes behind. Although they turned away from Christianity, many Guaymí brought what they had learned during their time in the towns back and incorporated it into their own religion and culture, creating a kind of “folk Christianity.”

His impact

Fray Adrian played a small role in the attempt to evangelize the native peoples of Central America. But his accounts from the 15 years he spent living with the Guaymí provide a detailed look into what their lives were like during the 17th century. His attempts at evangelization may not have been successful, but scholars are still referencing his research today.