America jumps at the chance to stroke its ego and tends to disregard the people it’s exploited to make it’s country prosperous (slavery, sweatshop labor, farm workers, prison labor), so it makes sense why it would celebrate it’s discoverer, Christopher Columbus, regardless of what he did to America's indigenous people.
Every second Monday in Oct., Columbus Day is recognized in the United States as a national holiday. As Americans we celebrate Columbus, “a merchant clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver and expert sailor” who discovered the Americas on Oct. 12, 1492, in search of India’s rich spices and gold, wrote Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States.”
The heroic adventure of Columbus is written in history books and believed to be a great day in history.
Of course, being way off course from India and discovering a whole new continent would definitely be an accomplishment for anyone. Especially if Spain’s royalty were giving you 10 percent of the profits, governorship over discovered land and the title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea, according to Zinn.
But is it really necessary to celebrate a day that created progress and money for a small rich class and members of royalty in Spain, when millions of indigenous people were killed, their cultures destroyed and their land taken?
To celebrate Columbus through a holiday is like celebrating the day we began slavery in the United States.
The slavery holiday would celebrate the decades the United States took Africans from their homeland and enslaved them to benefit plantation owners.
Columbus, similar to the United States, enslaved and shipped various indigenous people across the Americas starting with the Arawaks of the Bahama Islands.
The Arawaks lived in communes, ate corn, yams and cassava and didn’t use animals for work. They wore gold ornaments in their ears, which led Columbus to believe that gold was nearby, according to Zinn.
The Arawaks were peaceful people and didn’t bear arms, “they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance... Their spears are made of cane...They would make fine servants...with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want,” wrote Columbus to Spain according to Zinn.
Columbus viewed the indigenous people as things he could exploit and have to bring back to Spain.
According to Zinn, Columbus wrote in a letter to Spain: “As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.”
On Columbus’s second expedition he took the Arawaks by force- 15,000 women, men and children to be exact-and picked 500 of the best to be shipped to Spain; 200 of them died before reaching Spain, according to Zinn.
In Haiti, Columbus believed fields of gold existed so he ordered every Arawak over the age of fourteen to collect a certain amount of gold each day. If the amount was reached a Arawak was given a copper token to wear on their neck. “Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death,” Zinn wrote.
The Arawaks knowing there was no large amounts of gold fled to build a resistance; which didn’t stand a chance against the Spaniard’s armor, muskets, swords and horses, Zinn wrote.
The Arawaks in desperation killed themselves including their infants with cassava poison in mass suicides.
“In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead... By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred,” Zinn wrote.
Columbus raped, killed, enslaved, shipped and hunted indigenous people not only in the United States but Hispaniola (present day Dominican Republic and Haiti), Cuba, Mexico, and Hawaii.
It’s appalling to think that the killing of indigenous people has no significance in the way we celebrate Columbus Day, or why we would even celebrate such a person.
Columbus doesn’t just represent the discovery of the Americas. He represents colonialism and the destruction of indigenous people in the Americas.
3 comments:
Interesting take on Columbus...
Two months ago I would have agreed with you completely. But as I am learning by reading and studying the letters that Columbus wrote to the King and Queen of Spain while in the “new world”, we often give Columbus WAY more credit- both positive and negative- than he really deserves.
I agree that he should not be credited with having “discovered” America. It had already been discovered by the hundreds of indigenous groups already inhabiting it for centuries. But can we really say that he represents the “destruction of indigenous people in the Americas who are still suffering today from him?” Sure, he led the crew, but he obviously didn’t show up in present-day Central America with the plan of steeling land, killing people and turning the indigenous people into slaves. He happened upon the islands in an attempt to get to India.
I suppose my point is this: those of us who have grown up learning the Americanized form of world history have not always been given the real story. Of course, all history is subjective to those present, those with power and those with a way to pass it on.
But many of the things that we are taught about the Spanish conquests are not as black and white as we have been taught.
1. We are taught that Columbus came to the Americas to exploit the native people. Period. But when reading his letters, it is obvious that Columbus, a recent convert to Catholicism (he either had to convert from Judaism or be banished from the country) was trying to do everything possible to prove his newfound faith to the people who were paying his way. So when he writes that the natives were docile, he does so to show how easily they, too, could be converted... not simply to show how easily they could be taken advantage of...
2. We are taught that in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Cortés killed Moctezuma, the reining leader of the Aztecs. But, in fact, it was Moctezuma’s own men who killed him by hitting him with stones in the head, arm and leg. And as Moctezuma died, the “evil” conquistador Cortés and his men cried.
So while we may not need to celebrate the guy who accidentally stumbled upon some already-inhabited islands, it is much too severe for us to blame him for the all the injustices that indigenous people have endured since his arrival.
Oh, and if we are going to reprimand him because “he represents colonialism…” then perhaps we shouldn’t celebrate George Washington’s birthday either. He did, after all, help establish a country on land that was already rightfully inhabited by hundreds of indigenous groups… Just something to think about…
The real beef I have with Columbus is the whole subliminal messaging of his heroification.
We were taught in school the story about how his crew thought they were going to sail off the edge of the world (farce, Euros knew the Earth was round for a lot longer than Columbus was alive) and due to fear they were planning to overthrow him, but he managed to maintain control and "discovered" the new world.
We are presented here with the working class (the ship's crew) as scheming, traitorous, cowards and the owning/boss class (Columbus) as the rightous leader who, if it wasn't for his motivation and bravery, wouldn't have "discovered" the "New" World.
Check out Loewen if you need a book to read, "Lies My Teacher Told Me"
I think the column is powerfully written, but risks pushing too hard if it is meant to be persuasive.
Also, while the book cited in interesting, the voyages and fallout of Christopher Columbus have been the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of well-researched articles since, well, 1492.
Perhaps a better approach might have been to focus more on what actually happens on Columbus Day now, using examples from historical accounts as to why our celebrations are off the mark.
History is subject to wildly different interpretations - look at what we have found out about the treatment of Native Americans.
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