Colonial Suppression and Survival of Indigenous Philosophy

European colonization of the Americas, beginning with Columbus's 1492 voyage and accelerating through the Spanish conquests of the Aztec (1519–1521, under Hernán Cortés) and Inca (1532–1533, under Francisco Pizarro) empires, was accompanied by systematic campaigns to erase Indigenous religious and philosophical textual traditions, understood by colonial and ecclesiastical authorities as idolatrous obstacles to Christian evangelization. The most consequential single act of destruction in Mesoamerica occurred in July 1562, when the Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa organized an auto de fe at Maní, in the Yucatán, publicly burning a large number of Maya bark-paper books (codices) containing astronomical, calendrical, ritual, and historical knowledge; as a direct consequence, only four pre-Columbian Maya codices are known to survive today — the Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and (more contested) Grolier codices — a catastrophic loss for reconstructing pre-conquest Maya thought that later scholars, ironically, have had to partly counteract using Landa's own subsequent ethnographic account, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (composed c. 1566).