In Cabeza De Vaca’s account of his journey from Florida to the Pacific, between the years of. 1528 and 1536, he tells how the Indians came to him and his companion asking them to cure their sick. The two white men were themselves half-starved, lost and filled with blank despair. Yet, the Indians felt that they, being white men, had super-human power. De Vaca felt that they had no such power. “But we had to heal them or die,” he wrote. Now listen to De Vaca:

“So we prayed for strength. We prayed on bended knees and in an agony of hunger.” Then they laid their hands on and blessed each ailing Indian and saw that the sick were actually being healed. “Truly it was to our amazement,” he wrote, “the ailing said they were well. Being Europeans, we thought we had given away to doctors and priest …