NPR this morning did a cute riff on Columbus' Italian heritage by lilting about the beauty of music and the Italian language. On the web, they listed some earlier explorations of America and concluded that Columbus' great contribution was to open up the Americas to European exploration.
I happen to be living on an Indian reservation, at a tribal college and the question of who discovered America is not very amusing here. For another thing, the genocide that took place for about three centuries subsequent to Columbus initiating enslavement, torture, and mass killing has never been fully explored in American consciousness. We seem to prefer a Disney version.
Some would say that Indians are not relevant and neither is Columbus.
But as we look at the war in Iraq, try to understand how we got there and think about the real roots of our predicament, we ought to be thinking in clear and honest terms about the historic and prevalent thinking that probably made Iraq inevitable, as well as Vietnam and other foreign policy blunders where brownish skinned foreign cultures were (and are) concerned. Doesn't Iraq have something in common with the way Custer approached relations with the Sioux? Doesn't that have ancestral roots in the way Columbus approached relations with the Arawaks? Should we support a continuation of the old colonialism into the 21st century?
Bartolome' de las Casas' "Tears of the Indians," published in the mid 1500s, is not pleasant reading. Apparently this is the reason for ignoring it or dismissing it as largely a work of propaganda, published in England to strengthen opposition to Spain.
This man was among Columbus' contingent of Spanish explorers and earned the gift of a plantation with slaves. He renounced this, became a priest, and spent much of the rest of his 90 plus years "turning state's evidence" against his compatriots, including Columbus.
He records in his memoirs that Columbus' first thoughts on seeing friendly Arawak people come on board the Santa Maria to offer gifts and welcome, was that these people were saps who would make great slaves, and since they appeared healthy and happy, they must have some wealth somewhere that could make him rich if he could confiscate it.
This was the time of the Spanish Inquisition, so they proceeded to torture, main and kill people by various gruesome methods in order to terrorize the Indians into submission and to doing their bidding. This meant mining gold, working Indians to death, even forcing individual Indians to carry Spanish men and their heavy objects such as cannon around piggyback.
Conditions were so horrible that great numbers of Indian people killed their own babies or committed suicide rather than continue. Seagoing navigators reportedly were able to find their way between points in the Caribean by judging bodies in the water, as slave ships cast off dying cargo.
The gruesome details are awful enough that it is hard to continue reading long enough to fully evaluate the description of how Columbus probably was responsible personally for the death of at least 3 million people, for establishing the cross Atlantic slave trade as big business, and for creating religious justifications for anything done in the name of God including greed, including invading other countries and seizing their resources, including mass murder.
These lines of thinking apparently infected Europe, since Spain and the other maritime countries enjoyed an infusion of wealth from looting the Americas through the 1500s, 1600s, and through the American Revolution.
This attitude towards the Indian peoples of this continent among the English was a little cautioned by the Spanish example, but not my much. The Pilgrims were actually responsible for massacres, and the noted preacher Cotton Mather rejoiced that "600 souls have been dispatched to Hell today" in response to one such occurence.
Custer's attitude toward the Sioux people who he attacked with cavalry, out of the dawn sun before they could wake up- men women, children, elderly and sick- wasn't exactly liberal. He saw them as vermin to be exterminated.
It could well be that we should be very concerned about how American race attitudes tend to get mixed up in our judgements as an "enlightened citizenry" about other nationalities and cultures. How did we understand Vietnam, except through this filter? Didn't this seep into policies towards Latin and South America through most of the 20th century? Didn't these tendencies to view brownish skinned people as not competent to handle their own affairs lead to the pronouncement (by Secretary of State Kennan in 1948) that "oil is too important to be left to the Arabs?" Didn't it lead to the presumption that caused us to use the CIA to overthrow the government of Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, etc. etc?
It would seem that the next President ought to be someone who can look at this history honestly and start to develop a new departure towards a progressive approach that can draw humanity together with America leading through its best vision, rather than to continue on this road to following the example set by Christopher Columbus.
Also, when Columbus Day rolls around (and probably around Thanksgiving as well,) we should take a new look at Indian people and support their calls and their need to have the US government take the sovereignty of Indian Nations seriously. The resources that exist on some indian lands continue to be exploited to the great disadvantage of Indian people, and they should have the benefit just like any other land owner with resources discovered underneath. The best way to help Indian people and reservations out of poverty would be to quit being tempted to seize what they have.
Russel Means, the American Indian Movement leader, called for Columbus to die. It seems to me that what he meant by that is to quit ignoring the reality of what Columbus really did and to therefore become capable of learning the lessons that could help us to overcome the perpetuation of injustice into the future that we keep falling victim to in situations like Iraq.