They are, but that's beside the point. In his book, 'Conquest of America' Todorov writes a dedication on the inside cover and while dedications are usually to loved ones or close friends, he writes his to an anonymous Mayan woman who was killed and thrown to the dogs when she refused to sleep with one of the Spanish soldiers. This curious dedication is best seen not as an actual homage to a nameless, faceless woman who was killed by some jerk, but instead as a representative of all those who would die and suffer horrible fates from the coming colonization of America. What happened to that Mayan woman was the bell weather of things to come, she was the vanguard of the millions who would be slaughtered by the coming waves of Europeans.
The Mayan woman was heroic, in Todorov's eyes, because she resisted her would be rapists. Unlike Montezuma who fiddled while his Empire burned, she was brave. She kept her promise to her husband and stood on principal, even if that principal got her killed in horrifying fashion. The coming centuries of slaughter and brutalization were perfectly encapsulated in the episode of the nameless Mayan woman. He seeks to immortalize her story as a example of the dangers of violent cultural conflict in the absence of knowing and understanding the other. Millions died because of colonialism and millions upon millions have died as a result of not knowing the other. There are millions of stories of men and women being killed and raped and they must all be remembered as a cautionary tale, if one so oft unheeded. As he writes on p 247, "I am writing this book to prevent this story [Mayan woman] and a thousand others like it from being forgotten. ... My hope is not that Mayan woman will now have European men thrown to the dogs (an absurd supposition, obviously), but that we remember what can happen if we do not succeed in discovering the other."
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