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Oh don’t act so surprised. I’ve mentioned before how I feel about Columbus Day (not to mention Thanksgiving). I guess some folks might find something in it to celebrate, but I’m long, long past being able to do that.

I remember learning about Columbus and his “discovery” of America in school. (To quote Chris Rock “How the fuck do you discover something that’s already got people on it? That’s like me ‘discovering’ your car stereo.”) It wasn’t until years later that I got some idea of what his “discovery” meant for the folks who already happened to be sitting on that patch of ground. I kinda figured it didn’t go down to well for them, since there aren’t many of their descendants left around.

I didn’t get a full sense of it until I read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States : 1492 to Present , which I think ought to be required reading in every school in the country, and from which comes this excerpt (which I borrowed from Peter’s Cross Station).

The Indians, Columbus reported, “are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone….” He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage “as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask.” He was full of religious talk: “Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities.”

Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans’ intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the day they were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.” Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

By 1650,the population of Arawak Indians — estimated at some 3 million at the time of Columbus’ arrival — was zero. The first chapter in Zinn’s book gives an account of just how this entire population was erased from the earth because the land they occupied was “discovered” by Columbus.

Of course, it wasn’t just the Arawaks. Other indigenous people ended up being worse off for having been “discovered” on land someone else wanted. Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples gives a similar accounts of the fates of the Apache, the Tasmanians and the Herero people. King Leopold’s Ghost is a pretty chilling account of what happened to people of the Congo, after the western explorers showed up.

Suffice it to say that I don’t so much celebrate Columbus Day as I hope to help transform it somehow. I prefer to spend it thinking about the indigenous people for whom “discovery” invariably meant decimation. I’ll leave the celebrating to others who can find something to celebrate in that legacy.

Technorati Tags: current events, human rights, politics, race

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 10:16 am and is filed under Current Events, Human Rights, Politics, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.