In most American history classrooms, children are taught that in
1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and “discovered
America.” In this narrative, Columbus is portrayed as an adventurous
explorer and a national hero. It is a narrative that is profoundly
romanticized and even mythical, yet despite the historical records and
accounts of Columbus’s heinous crimes against indigenous peoples, he is
still glorified and honored in American history and culture.
Heroificiation, as defined by author James W. Loewen,
is a “degenerative process” that distorts reality and transforms
“flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without
conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest.” Christopher Columbus
represents but one example in human history where an individual
responsible for some of the most dreadful atrocities in our human
history is molded into a savior-like figure and commemorated with a
national holiday. It is disturbing how most American schoolchildren
learn from history teachers and textbooks to not only venerate Columbus,
but also to recite poems, sing songs, and perform in romanticized
reenactments about his arrival to the Americas. These praises,
accompanied with “Columbus Day” celebrations and parades, grossly gloss
over the horrors of American Indian genocide initiated by Columbus’s
expeditions.
American public schools rarely discuss Columbus’s atrocities. As Corine Fairbanks points out:
Recently, Roberta Weighill, Chumash, shared that her third grade son disagreed with his teacher about the Columbus discovery story and added that he knew Columbus to be responsible for the deaths of many Native people. The public teacher corrected him: “No. Columbus was just a slave trader.” Hmmm, just a slave trader? Oh! Is that all?
American history textbooks paint Columbus as a hero by treating his
voyages into the “oceanic unknown” as exceptional and unique, as if he
was the only explorer who ever journeyed to the Americas. Aside from
the fact that indigenous peoples already lived in the land we now call
the United States and weren’t waiting to be “discovered,” Columbus was
not the first to set sail to the Americas. In his book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,”
Loewen provides a chronological list of expeditions that reached the
Americas prior to Columbus, including explorers from Siberia, Indonesia,
Japan, Afro-Phoenicia, Portugal, among other countries. Most of the
eighteen high school history textbooks surveyed by Loewen omit the
factors that prompted Columbus’s voyage in the first place: social
change in Europe, advancement in military technology, use of the
printing press – which allowed information to travel faster and further
into Europe – and the ideological and theological rationalization for
conquering new land. For example, Columbus’s greed and pursuit of gold
in Haiti is either extremely downplayed or absent in textbooks.
Columbus himself aligned amassing wealth with salvation, writing:
“Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it
does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to
Paradise.” Accompanying Columbus on his 1494 expedition to Haiti was
Michele de Cuneo, who wrote the following account:
After we had rested for several days in our settlement it seemed to the Lord Admiral that it was time to put into execution his desire to search for gold, which was the main reason he had started on so great a voyage full of so many dangers.
In elementary school, I remember learning that Columbus was peaceful
to the indigenous people, who were in turn friendly and welcoming of the
Spaniards. If anything was mentioned about war, it was always
presented as, “There were good people and bad people on both sides.”
Such an explanation shamelessly ignores the fact that “over 95 million indigenous peoples
throughout the Western hemisphere were enslaved, mutilated and
massacred.” The myth that Native Americans and Europeans were equally
responsible for gruesome brutality was also reinforced in Disney’s
animated feature, “Pocahontas.” The film placed Native American
resistance and European violence on the same plane, i.e. the extremists
on “both sides” made it bad for those who wanted peace, and colonialist
domination and power was not a contributing factor to any form of
resistance from the Natives. This distortion of history often likes to
behave as sympathetic to Native Americans, but what it actually does is
consistently depict them as “inferior” and “backwards,” while lionizing
European colonizers and settlers, as well as constructing a history that
is complimentary to the nationalism and pro-Americanism preached in
most American schools.
I don’t think I would have learned about what Columbus really did if I
didn’t start reading about Islamic history, which, too, was either
ignored or vilified (especially during lessons on the Crusades) in my
history classes. 1492, the same year Columbus sailed to the Americas,
was also the year of the Spanish Inquisition, when Jews and Muslims were forced to convert or leave the country. The Catholic reconquest of Spain – the Reconquista
– by King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella heightened interest in
expanding European Christian domination, which led to their eventual
agreement to sponsor Columbus’s voyage.
Upon his arrival to the Bahamas, Columbus and his sailors were greeted by Arawak men and women. Columbus wrote of them in his log:
They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned… They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. 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.
Worth noting is how Columbus’s description of the Arawak correlates
with his sense of European entitlement and superiority. In several
accounts, he praised the Arawak and other indigenous tribes for being
hospitable, handsome, and intelligent, but not without saying they would
make “fine servants.” When Columbus justified enslavement and his wars
against the Natives, he vilified them as “cruel,” “stupid,” and “a
people warlike and numerous, whose customs and religion are very
different from ours.”
It is also important to understand the genocide of indigenous people
could not have been possible without racism and sexual violence.
Cherokee scholar and feminist-activist Andrea Smith cites
Ann Stoler’s analysis of racism to illustrate the relationship between
sexual violence and colonialism: “Racism is not an effect but a tactic
in the internal fission of society into binary opposition, a means of
creating ‘biologized’ internal enemies, against whom society must defend
itself.” Racism marks the “other” as “inherently dirty,” and
subsequently “inherently rapable.” For this reason, Smith argues that
sexual violence is a weapon of patriarchy and colonialism, as opposed to
being a separate issue altogether:
Because Indian bodies are “dirty,” they are considered sexually violable and “rapable,” and the rape of bodies that are considered inherently impure or dirty simply does not count. For instance, prostitutes are almost never believed when they say they have been raped because the dominant society considers the bodies of sex workers undeserving of integrity and violable at all times. Similarly, the history of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes it clear that Indian people are not entitled to bodily integrity.
Sexual violence and degradation of Native bodies is evident in how Columbus used Taino women as sex slaves and
sexual rewards for his men. Columbus profited off of sex-slave trade
by exporting them to other parts of the world. In fact, most of his
income came from slavery. In 1500, he wrote to a friend: ”A hundred castellanoes
(a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and
it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking
for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand.”
During an online conversation, some defended Columbus by arguing he
was only carrying out the “norms of his time.” Justifying Columbus’s
actions by the “standards” of his time, or through historical moral
relativism, is problematic, not only because it dismisses genocide, sex
slavery, and land theft, but also because it suggests there are overall
honorable traits about Columbus and that he should be commemorated. For
instance, Bartolome de Las Casas,
the Spanish-born Dominican Bishop of Chiapas, witnessed and documented
the horrors of Columbus’s subjugation, enslavement, and massacre of
indigenous people. He is often quoted for writing:
What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and humankind and this trade [in American Indian slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them.
De Las Casas was absolutely mortified by the brutality he witnessed. In numerous accounts,
he reports about Columbus commanding his men to cut off the legs of
children who would run away; about Spaniards hunting and killing Natives
for sport; about colonialists testing the sharpness of their blades on
living, breathing Native bodies; about Columbus’s men placing bets
on who would cut a person in half in a single sweep of their swords.
De Las Casas wrote: “Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in
my sight as no age can parallel. My eyes have seen these acts so
foreign to human nature that now I tremble as I write.”
Although De Las Casas was strongly opposed to Columbus’s enslavement
and dehumanization of Native peoples, his advocacy of indigenous rights
and ending slavery was motivated by his desire to “convert and baptize
the ‘heathen’ Indians.” In his debate with Juan Gines de Supulveda,
who argued that the Natives were “barbarians” and predisposed to
slavery, De Las Casas argued that they were intelligent and capable of
attaining salvation in Christianity without coercion.
The point of mentioning De Las Casas is to show that, despite his
missionary agenda, he was among Columbus’s contemporaries who were
outraged and disgusted by his treatment of indigenous peoples. In other
words, if the argument is that Columbus shouldn’t be judged by “today’s
standards,” then we ought to judge him based on De Las Casas’ account.
However, it is also quite unsettling that De Las Casas’ needs to be
used in this manner – what does it say about the voices of Native
Americans who live today and reflect on the genocide of their
ancestors? Are their voices and accounts of Columbus’s atrocities not
credible enough?
Also, what are “today’s standards”? Inherit in the romantic
mythology of Columbus’s heroism is the white supremacist
heteropatriarchal imperialism that colonizes, exploits, and unleashes
massacres and sexual violence upon people in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Palestine, and in parts of the world like Pakistan where war eerily
operates as if there is no war, despite US military presence, airbases,
drone assaults, political intervention, etc. Entire peoples are being
vilified, demonized; their histories distorted, omitted; and Native
Americans continue to resist and struggle against ongoing genocide that
seeks to exterminate them. In fact, it is the logic of genocide, as
Smith reminds us, that insists Native peoples must fade into
nonexistence. War criminals are still glorified; war crimes are still
justified; inhumane practices against humanity are still occurring in
secrecy.
The Reconsider Columbus Day
effort challenges the status quo, not just for the sake of restoring
dignity and honesty to human history, but also for eradicating tyranny,
colonialism, and imperialism that exists in the present. When American
schoolchildren are taught to identify with Columbus, they are aligning
themselves with an oppressor and making a racial distinction between
“us” and “them.” The point of dismantling the way we celebrate and
honor Columbus goes beyond exposing Columbus’s personality, it’s about
taking responsibility for the ways we are complicit in reinforcing the
logic of genocide. It’s about decolonizing ourselves in order to bring
about radical, revolutionary change to society.
Decolonize for the sake of today, and for the sake of tomorrow.
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