The authors term of moral epistemology of imperialism is the original thinking that justified colonizing the Americas originally. The major historians of the time and for a great amount of time after were European. This made it easy to write books and shape history to make it look like they were doing the right thing. They were colonizing knowledge but putting their spin on it, people would only learn what the white scholars of the time wanted people to learn. Epistemic violence was forcing the European epistemology on the rest of the world, in this case the Native Americans.
The Spanish used a combination of military force along with disease and the cruelest forms of death to completely cripple the Native American empires. After some time, the Natives just stopped fighting back because they were mentally broken (as well as physically). The author says, When there were among prisoners some women who had recently given birth, if the newborn babes happen to cry, they seized them by the legs and hurled them against the rocks or flung them into the jungle so they would be certain to die there and also says, In the face of utter hopelessness, the