There is no more fitting epigraph to the life of Bartolomé de las Casas. It is from the apostle Paul’s letter to his young associate Timothy, written towards the end of Paul’s life. It speaks eloquently to faithfulness, a quality which Las Casas demonstrated his entire life to the cause of justice and truth as he saw it. Las Casas always thought of himself as the shepherd to the Indians of the New World, while his detractors viewed him as the enemy of everything that was good and noble in the Spanish character, a paranoic obsessed with his passion to the exclusion of fact and reason.

Over his long life, Las Casas achieved one extraordinary goal: lifting the American Indian before the Spanish, and European, conscience. He sought to give voice to those conquered, to lift them before the highest tribunals in the land and render justice. It is fashionable today to seek out the “other” voices in history, those voices of the downtrodden, the illiterate, men and women who left no written or documentary record to remember them by. But, long before modern scholars, Las Casas discovered and advocated on behalf of the “other” voice in the Conquest of the Indies. He did so with passion and conviction, lifting his voice to the level of kings and emperors, seeking redress for the wrongs and sins committed by several generations of his countrymen.