Cristóbal de Cañas (16801740) was a Jesuit missionary in New Spain.
Cañas was born in 1680 in Cádiz, Spain; entered the Society of Jesus on May 19, 1697; was ordained in 1706 in Oaxaca, Mexico; and served his tertianship in 1707. From 1710 to 1718, he taught philosophy at the College of Santa Cruz de Querétaro, taking his final vows on February 2, 1715.[1]
In 1720, Cañas was assigned to Mission Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Arizpe, and by 1722 he was Father Visitor of the Jesuits in Sonora.[2] [3] Other Jesuits frequently consulted Cañas as a legal expert. Cañas clashed with Captain Gregorio Álvarez Tuñón y Quirós for a decade leading up to the latter's death in 1728.
By 1730, Cañas was serving at Mission San Pedro Aconchi. There, he warned about Spanish; Castilian: [[curanderos]], writing that "the devil talks to [them] in the form of a jaguar, puma, dog, or, most commonly, in the form of a snake."[4] In 1735, he was appointed rector of the Jesuit College in Durango.
Accounts by Carlos de Roxas, another Jesuit missionary, describe Cañas as tormented by "unnatural" suffering under the spell of a shaman for the last two years of his life.[5] Cañas died on May 9, 1740.