Chapters 16-19, North America's Inca Historian, Intellectual Mining, Mixed-Blood Nation, The White Roots of Peace Summary and Analysis

Chapter 16 is the story of El Inca Garcilaso, a half-Incan historian of the Americans in the late 16th century. El Inca, the name he took for himself, grew up as the Old World of the Incan Empire was collapsing at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors. El Inca witnessed atrocities by both sides and arguably grew up thinking that European influence on his society was a disaster. When he set out to write his histories of South and North America, however, he was unique and important for not rendering value judgments but instead displaying an attempt at historical neutrality. He recorded Spanish and Native American atrocities bit by bit. While El Inca could...