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christopher columbus
Christopher Columbus: No Monuments for Murderers
The world is still sliced in two between the worthy — the owning classes, the corporate masters, the generals — and the nobodies. The invaded, the owned, the bombed, the poisoned, the silenced.
Oct 06, 2017
A New York Times article, following the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the murder of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer, described the growing calls to remove monuments that celebrate the Confederacy. The article went on to cite some who balk, however, when "the symbolism is far murkier, like Christopher Columbus."
But there is nothing murky about Columbus' legacy of slavery and terrorism in the Americas. The record is clear and overwhelming. The fact that The New York Times could report this with such confidence -- adding that "most Americans learn rather innocently, in 1492 [Columbus] sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World" -- means that educators and activists still have much work to do.
In fact, Christopher Columbus launched the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1494, when he sent back at least two dozen enslaved Tainos, including children, to Spain. In February of that year, Columbus dispatched 12 of his 17 ships from the Caribbean back to Spain with a letter to be delivered to the king and queen by Antonio de Torres, captain of the returning fleet. Columbus wrote:
There are being sent in these ships some Cannibals, men and women, boys and girls, which Your Highnesses can order placed in charge of persons from whom they may be able better to learn the language while being employed in forms of service, gradually ordering that greater care be given them than to other slaves.
Here, as in so much of world history, violence and exploitation is sprinkled with a perfume of benevolence. Later in the letter, Columbus explains to the king and queen that his plans for colonizing the lands he has "discovered" could be financed by slavery:
These things could be paid for in slaves taken from among these cannibals, who are so wild and well built and with a good understanding of things that we think they will be finer than any other slaves once they are freed from their inhumanity, which they will lose as soon as they leave their own lands.
A year later, in February 1495, Columbus initiated massive slave raids, ordering his men to round up 1,600 Tainos and to bring the captives to La Isabela, on the island of Hispaniola (today's Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where the "best" 500 (some accounts say 550) men and women could be shipped to Spain. One of the colonists, Michele de Cuneo, was an eyewitness to these crimes. "Of the rest who were left," wrote Cuneo, "the announcement went around that whoever wanted them could take as many as he pleased; and this was done."
It's worth pausing to reflect on the terror the Tainos must have experienced being torn from home and families, and packed on ships bound for an uncertain destination -- that is, those who survived Columbus' slavery free-for-all. Where are the monuments to these first victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade?
Gold. That was the essence of Columbus' "enterprise" -- la empresa -- as he called it. Wrote Columbus: "Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever owns it is lord of all he wants. With gold it is even possible to open for souls the way to paradise." Later in 1495, to effect this gold lust, Columbus initiated the policy of forcing Tainos throughout Hispaniola to deliver tributes of gold every three months.
The Tainos resisted, of course, but were brutally suppressed by the Columbus regime. The Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas wrote that to quell the resistance, Columbus ordered his men to "spread terror among the Indians to show them how strong and powerful the Christians were." In sickening detail, Las Casas described some of what it meant for the Spaniards to "spread terror" among the Tainos:
Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons and pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians as daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying, "Go now, spread the news to your chiefs." They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow. They burned or hanged captured chiefs.
No, there is nothing murky about Columbus' record of cruelty in the Caribbean. One can read the horrific details even in the biography of Columbus written by his own son Ferdinand. What's murky are any remaining rationales for failing to topple monuments to this brutal exploitation of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, for keeping the Columbus Day holiday, or for failing to address a curriculum that, as The New York Times describes, allows children to learn that Columbus "sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World."
Twenty-five years ago, I wrote an article, "Once Upon a Genocide," reviewing the major children's literature about Columbus. My conclusion was that these books teach young readers that colonialism and racism are normal. Consistently, the books presented Columbus coming ashore on the lands he "discovered," planting a flag, claiming it in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and naming the island San Salvador -- erasing the rights and humanity of the original inhabitants. No book I reviewed at that time asked children to reflect on who or what gave Columbus the authority to take over other people's land. These picture books were literary monuments to white European domination, and to the subordination of non-white Others.
Through my work as curriculum editor with Rethinking Schools magazine, I have been in a number of elementary and middle schools over the past couple of years. Sadly, many of the same books I reviewed in the early 1990s still populate school libraries. The good news is that, these days, many more teachers approach the Columbus invasion from the standpoint of the Tainos. One needn't tell young children about people's hands being chopped off for them to realize that it is wrong for people to arrive at your home from far away, claim it as theirs, and demand you work for them.
In classrooms throughout the country, students are putting Columbus on trial -- along with the system of empire that animated his voyages. Instead of reading children's books and textbooks uncritically, teachers are asking students to read for the silences: What important information is missing, whose stories are not being told, whose lives are absent? In some schools, students are writing new children's books that tell a fuller, more accurate history of Columbus' arrival and the people who were here first. (Many of these activities are described at the Zinn Education Project, and in the book I co-edited, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years.)
And throughout the country, schools, school districts, and cities -- including Berkeley, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Albuquerque, and, most recently, Los Angeles -- have abandoned Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day.
Donald Trump may still -- for the moment -- be president, but he is not president of how we remember the past. Everywhere people of conscience are challenging the iconography of hate, exploitation, racism, and colonial domination. Slowly, we are toppling Confederate monuments -- and others celebrating more contemporary scoundrels like Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo.
When I lead workshops for educators critiquing how the traditional children's literature on Columbus celebrates white lives at the expense of people of color, how this literature endorses the bullying of little nations by big nations, how it teaches that there are two kinds of people in the world, the worthy and the unworthy, I end by asking participants: Why? Why is it that for such a long period of time these books have told a consistent story -- is there some publisher conspiracy to lie to children?
No doubt there are many possible explanations. But the one I find most compelling is that in fundamental ways, Columbus' world is not so different from the world we live in today. Big countries continue to dominate "lesser" nations. The quest for profit is still paramount. The world is still sliced in two between the worthy -- the owning classes, the corporate masters, the generals -- and those the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called los nadies -- the nobodies. The invaded, the owned, the bombed, the poisoned, the silenced.
So yes, let's pull down the monuments, let's make the holidays more inclusive, let's rewrite the textbooks and children's literature. But let's also challenge the fundamental structures of ownership, power, and privilege that have given us such a skewed constellation of heroes and holidays.
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Who Could Possibly Be in Favor of Columbus Day?
Oct 12, 2015
I never thought much about Christopher Columbus until I became writing partners with Russell Means in 1992. Russell had strong feelings about Columbus. He felt it was wrong to honor someone who oppressed Indians and who avoided catastrophe only by the dumb luck of colliding with an unknown continent.
Russell often went to Denver on Columbus Day to help lead a protest to shut down the Parade. Sometimes, he landed in jail, but Russell hoped that he would see the end of Columbus Day in the United States in his lifetime.
But Russell walked on in October 2012, and Columbus Day is still here. And people are still fighting about it. Why? Was Columbus a good guy or a bad guy? It's not that complicated. What exactly did he do? Is he truly an exceptional individual who deserves his national holiday?
We know certain facts about Columbus. If we look at what we know, it should be easy to agree whether this is someone we want to celebrate with a national holiday, parades, etc. Or not.
When I look at the video of the old protests, I see that both supporters and opponents of Columbus are passionate and vocal. I don't see how intelligent people, all having access to the same set of historical facts, can't calmly examine the facts together and come to a rational agreement. We know certain facts about Columbus. If we look at what we know, it should be easy to agree whether this is someone we want to celebrate with a national holiday, parades, etc. Or not.
Columbus Day is the only national holiday in the United States--apart from Christmas, named after Jesus--that is named after an individual. That's some elite company. Jesus and Columbus. Does Christopher Columbus deserve to be honored and exalted in this way?
What exactly is known about Columbus? He was a merchant sailor who became a ship captain and learned the limited navigation techniques known in Europe at the time. He also may have worked as a mapmaker. Not much is known for sure about his origins or early voyages. Wild rumors and theories abound, claiming he might have been the son of an exiled Polish or Lithuanian prince or the illegitimate offspring of a Portuguese nobleman. He reportedly sailed to England and along the northwest coast of Africa and may even have sailed to Iceland.
For the first part of his maritime career, Columbus was based in Lisbon, Portugal, where he married a young woman from an impoverished family with a royal title, thereby buying his way into the royal class. Columbus made a lot of money as a seafarer, merchant, and slave trader before sailing to America; one-third of the money that financed his first voyage was his.
Columbus had quite a library of books, and as a seafarer and ship captain he had plenty of time for reading. Several of his books were heavily annotated, such as his copy of The Travels of Marco Polo. In this volume, he read about the "wondrous" or "marvelous" creatures that supposedly populated far-off lands, such as birds of prey so large they carried off elephants and dropped them onto rocks before swooping down to eat them. Columbus also owned a copy of a book called Imago Mundi and made almost 900 notes in the margins. This book theorized that Asia could be reached by sailing west from Europe. One of Columbus's notes alluded to a creature that could be found there--savages with grotesque dog faces who were voracious man-eaters. Columbus hoped to find and capture such a "monstrous creature" to prove that Asia had been reached.
Columbus became obsessed with sailing west to Asia perhaps as long as 10 years before setting sail in 1492. Why sail clear around Africa, as the Portuguese were attempting? Columbus's confidence in this scheme was based on gross underestimations he made about the size of the earth and gross overestimations of the distance from Europe across Asia to China--the farther the Asian landmass stretched around the globe to the east, the shorter the distance by sea heading west.
Columbus was convinced that the gold and spices of the East were tantalizingly near. While proving this theory, he planned to make himself fantastically rich, famous, and powerful, a viceroy ruling his realm across the ocean. And he would insist on an additional title, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea." (At this time, the Europeans, almost entirely ignorant of the earth beyond Europe's horizons, believed the world was girdled by one great ocean.)
It certainly took a semi-delusional visionary fanatic to think that any of this could happen and to bet his fortune and reputation on making it work. Though his calculations were all wrong, his plan fatally flawed, and his journey ended almost 9,000 miles from his intended destination, by the incredible luck of stumbling upon an unknown continent, Columbus almost surpassed his wildest dreams before crashing back to earth.
Somehow this merchant sea captain/chart maker/merchant/slave trader developed the connections to propose this plan to various European monarchs. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. People were making big money off trade. The Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French sent ships to seek treasure. It was a gold rush, but it also included other big-money items like spices, slaves, gems, and silver. This created a certain demand for seagoing entrepreneurs. Columbus proposed to do what everyone else was doing but by a different route—a shortcut to the East. Henry VII of England is sometimes put on the list of kings Columbus pitched, but Portugal and Spain are the two that everyone agrees on.
It's important to remember that this was a different world from ours, and people had much different beliefs from today. A lot of what sounds crazy to us would, to people of that time, sound normal.
In Lisbon, the king's navigators explained why Columbus's calculations were wrong and that the distance to China was too vast. Columbus's wife died about the same time that the Portuguese king turned down his plan to sail west. Within a year, Columbus had relocated to Spain, where he lived with a woman from a prominent family. He fathered a son but never married.
Immediately Columbus began working his contacts to get an audience with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to pitch them his get-rich scheme. Certain high-placed churchmen helped in this. Columbus was rejected twice, but he kept on going. Finally, his timing was right--he somehow got an audience with Ferdinand and Isabella just as their army drove the Moors out of Granada. After 500 years, the Moors were finally defeated, and the Christians in Spain saw the dawning of a new age.
The Church was on Columbus's side for several reasons. Profits from his journey could help finance a new Crusade to re-take the Holy Land, which shouldn't be hard now that they had the infidels on the run. Sailing west could also work as a pincer movement, circling to attack the Muslims from east and west simultaneously. Columbus was instructed to look for Prester John's Christian Kingdom, rumored to lie in lands east of the infidel. He was also given a letter of introduction from the king and queen to the "Great Khan of the Golden Horde," as they called the Emperor of China, who was rumored to be interested in Christianity.
It's important to remember that this was a different world from ours, and people had much different beliefs from today. A lot of what sounds crazy to us would, to people of that time, sound normal. For example, as prophesied in the Revelation to John, the Franciscan Order was preparing for the world's end. They believed that as soon as the Holy Land was conquered and a Christian Emperor established in the Holy Land, the whole human race would be converted to Christianity, and the stage would be set for the Last Judgment. Bring on the Rapture!
Columbus's proposed journey fits in perfectly with this scheme. As a bonus, he argued that sailing west gave him a real shot at finding the Holy Grail since those who had searched by traveling east had all failed, and nobody would expect him to be coming around from the other side.
The king and queen liked the plan enough to invest real money in it. They expected big profits and a huge return on their investment. The Portuguese made serious progress in duplicating the ancient Phoenician feat of circumnavigating Africa. Spain's only chance of reaching China might be Columbus's off-the-wall scheme to reach the East by sailing west.
Columbus's first actions upon finding land in the Americas does not bode well for his campaign to keep his national holiday. This incident occurred before he encountered any Indians. The land was first sighted by a sailor named Rodrigo, but because a reward had been offered to the first man who saw the land, Columbus claimed he had seen the land before Rodrigo. Columbus took the reward, apparently more interested in the money than his reputation or personal honor. This even though Columbus's deal with the Spanish crown gave him 10% of all the gold and treasure obtained in any lands he found, plus titles of "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" and Viceroy ("vice-king") of the lands he claimed for Spain. Viceroy was a hereditary royal title to be passed on to his sons.
Columbus's sailors didn't respect a captain who would cheat a seaman out of a reward, and the threat of mutiny was constant. One ship captain in his flotilla deserted Columbus and sailed off to explore. His fellow colonizers had no respect for Columbus and rebelled, throwing him out of power at the first opportunity and appealing to Ferdinand and Isabella for a royal investigation.
At every landfall, the Indians greeted Columbus with friendship or fled into the jungle. The Spanish were never attacked or treated with hostility. In his journal, Columbus describes the Indians as "generous to a fault."
On his first day in the New World, Columbus ordered seven Taino Indians to be captured because he believed they would make good slaves. Nobody disputes that Columbus enslaved and killed friendly Indians. He sailed around from island to island, looking for gold and enslaving Indians when he couldn't get his hands on enough gold to pay back his investors.
What was Columbus's impression of the Indians? He described them as "well-built, with good bodies and handsome features... They would make fine servants... With fifty men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." And the Indians 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...they are good to be ordered about, to work and to sow, and do all that may be necessary..."
At every landfall, the Indians greeted Columbus with friendship or fled into the jungle. The Spanish were never attacked or treated with hostility. In his journal, Columbus describes the Indians as "generous to a fault."
He repaid this hospitality by demanding gold and taking slaves. Columbus gave his men gifts of slave girls--ages 9 or 10 were preferred--to rape and use as sex slaves. Given these facts, is Columbus someone we really want to celebrate with a national holiday?
Columbus's first voyage ended when the "Great Navigator" wrecked his flagship, the Santa Maria, running aground off the coast of Hispaniola (the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic). With Nina and Pinta incapable of transporting all his sailors and captured slaves back to Europe, Columbus had his men use wood from the wrecked ship to build a fort and left 39 Spaniards behind when he sailed home.
Columbus observed that some of the Taino Indians on Hispaniola wore jewelry with traces of gold ornamentation. Convinced that rich gold mines were not far off, he returned to Spain for reinforcements. The Spaniards he left at the fort ran amok, meanwhile, roaming the island looking for gold, capturing slaves, and raping and slaughtering Indians. Finally, the locals retaliated. By the time Columbus returned the next year with 17 ships and 1,500 men, the fort was burned and its garrison wiped out.
Columbus, as governor of the new lands, instituted a quota system that required every Indian over the age of 14 to deliver a certain amount of gold every 3 months or have their hands cut off. As he sailed around the Caribbean for more riches, he allowed his Spanish subjects to treat the Indians however they liked. Spaniards wagered among themselves whether they could slice natives in half with one stroke of their sword. They tested their blades' sharpness by decapitating Indians. They hunted Indians down as a food supply for their attack dogs, as the flesh of Indians was the Spaniards' primary source of dog food. Witnesses describe seeing live Indian babies being fed to dogs--sometimes in front of their parents. Things got so bad that Indians began committing suicide en masse. Within 60 years of Columbus's arrival, the Indian population of Hispaniola--1,100,000 according to the first Spanish census in 1496, which only counted adults and was estimated by some historians to be as high as 8,000,000 in 1492--was completely wiped out. Other Caribbean islands fared the same. The scale of genocide was unprecedented in history.
Enslaving Indians didn't work out so well. More labor was needed as Indians died off from smallpox, malnutrition, overwork, murder and mayhem, and despair. Columbus solved the problem by creating the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, importing slaves from Africa. Columbus was not only the first but also possibly the largest slave trader in history, bringing in over 5,000 Africans to work gold mines and plantations.
Many Columbus apologists try to excuse his crimes by saying he was a product of his times; that his values and ethics were no different from anyone else's. This is nonsense. Several of his contemporaries condemned his actions then, disgusted by his cruelty. The Spanish Crown, during some of the darkest days of the Inquisition, was so disgusted by Columbus's actions in the New World that they publicly condemned his brutality toward Indians. (the Crown also censured Cortes for excessive cruelty.)
Another Spaniard, Bartolome de Las Casas, came to America as a conquistador but was so appalled by the treatment of Indians that he became a priest and lifelong advocate for Indian people. Las Casas wrote, "I saw here cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see."
When Columbus's second voyage failed to produce enough gold to make a profit, he returned shiploads of slaves instead. Most died en route. Five hundred choice slaves were his gift to Queen Isabella. She was horrified and sent them back--she was operating under the delusion that natives in the found lands would become Spanish subjects and Catholics. To enslave fellow Christians--even recently converted ones--was punishable by immediate excommunication since 1435.
However, Isabella didn't have any problem enslaving natives who were cannibals. European scholars at this time firmly believed that far-away lands such as Asia were populated with "monstrous races," including breeds of cannibalistic men with heads of dogs. Discovery of such freaks would be proof that Asia had been reached. Columbus had to admit that he hadn't seen any such monstrous races. Still, he did dutifully report hearing from the Taino Indians about dog-faced men and men with one eye resembling the Cyclops, who were cannibals who tore off the heads of their victims, drank their blood, and cut off their genitals. How this was communicated, with no common language and no interpreter, is a mystery.
Neither Columbus nor any of his men had ever seen an Indian of the Carib Nation, but this didn't stop him from classifying them as man-eaters. Their mispronounced name became the root of the word "cannibal." Columbus argued vehemently that the "Caniba," as he called them, must be the people of the Great Khan and that the treasures of the exotic East were very near.
Now that Columbus assured them that it was cannibals the Spaniards were dealing with, enslavement, carnage, and all atrocities were justified. The monstrous heathens had to be saved from themselves. Not by conversion to Christianity, for they would be worth nothing to the conquerors. They were saved by death or enslavement. Neither Columbus nor any of his men ever produced any evidence of cannibalism among the Indians of the Caribbean.
At this time, the Spanish remained confused about what lands they were pillaging. Ferdinand and Isabella gave Columbus instructions on how to behave toward Vasco da Gama if they happened to run into each other while snooping around the coast of "Asia." Columbus was convinced that Hispaniola was the Biblical land of Sheba and that Cuba was the mainland of China. On his 2nd voyage, he made his sailors swear an affidavit to this "fact"--while threatening to cut out the tongue of any man who later disagreed that Cuba was Asia.
Columbus can lay claim to being the first heavily armed European to invade, loot and plunder new lands in the Americas. He created a blueprint. Arrive uninvited. Pretend friendship. Take over. Enslave all natives who aren't slaughtered. Make money shipping slaves overseas. Keep some slaves to dig for gold and treasure.
With disappointing returns from the first two voyages, Columbus was given only six ships for his 3rd voyage. He explored farther south, across South America, but was disappointed not to find the rich gold mines of King Solomon, which were said to be at a similar latitude. Meanwhile, Spanish colonists on Hispaniola rebelled against his cruel and inept administration, and Columbus restored order upon his return by hanging several. Complaints to the king and queen resulted in an official investigation, and Columbus was disposed of as governor and "vice-king" of the new lands. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea was arrested and taken back to Spain in chains.
Columbus talked his way back into royal favor with an argument that seems bizarre today but must have been convincing at the time. On his 3rd voyage, he observed unexpected movement or decline in the North Star. This happens because the North Star isn't exactly above the North Pole. But this fact wasn't known at the time. Columbus's explanation for the polestar's movement as he sailed westward was that the ocean he was sailing must be ascending or sloping upward. Why this slope in the ocean didn't result in a strong current pushing his ships back is not explained.
Columbus hypothesized that his ship was gaining altitude, and the only "reasonable" explanation was that he was approaching the outer regions of the "Earthly Paradise." At that time, it was a common belief among Europeans that Europeans commonly believed to be an actual place on Earth, physically entered through the Gatoneof Paradise to Heaven itself, without having to die first.
He mistook the Orinoco River for the Rivers of Paradise flowing into the sea. This must mean that he was near the realms of gold known to lie near Paradise. Though he hadn't yet found the gold, Columbus knew where it was and, with one more try, was sure to find it.
It was unacceptable for the Spanish Crown to let someone else stumble upon Paradise first, and since Columbus had a good idea of where it was located, they gave him one more chance. On his 4th voyage, commanding a flotilla of just four leaking worm-eaten ships, Columbus was forbidden to visit Hispaniola because his erratic method of governing there had caused nothing but dissension and revolt.
He stopped anyway, but the new governor refused to let him land, so he sailed on to Central America, where two of his ships sank. With the remaining two leaking badly, Columbus made a run for Hispaniola but turned north too soon and ended up shipwrecked on the coast of Jamaica. Two of his ship captains crossed 450 miles of open water in a small boat, taking news of the shipwrecked admiral and his crew back to the Spanish authorities. Because of the contempt felt for Columbus throughout the Spanish colonies, nobody bothered picking him up for over a year. Having lost all his ships, he sailed back to Spain as a passenger.
Columbus could have come in peace. History would be much different. He was greeted peacefully, time after time. The Indians had never encountered anyone like the bloodthirsty Europeans crazed for gold and treasure. They never imagined men could behave with such sadistic cruelty. Columbus called them "naive" for being so kind and generous. The Indians had no idea that across the ocean lay a savage, overcrowded land filled with misery, slaves, disease, poverty, ignorance, and greed--a land where gold or wealth could buy anything: "royal" status (whatever that means), respect, concubines...even honor. By this point in history, all this could have been bought if you had enough gold.
Knowing the facts of Columbus's life, it seems astonishing that he is still treated with honor in many places. Columbus Day was declared a national holiday in the U.S. in 1934 when the Knights of Columbus lobbied for a holiday named after a Catholic. Was he elevated to hero status because nobody knew the real story about Columbus's inhumanity, his atrocities, his delusions, his failures? Or does history consider his crimes insignificant because his victims were mostly Indians?
Christopher Columbus can't lay claim to being the first European in recorded history who came to the Americas and killed Indians. He wasn't. Thorvald Erikson, son of Eric the Red and brother of Leif, murdered the first 8 Indians he met in cold blood, half a millennium before Columbus.
But Columbus can lay claim to being the first heavily armed European to invade, loot and plunder new lands in the Americas. He created a blueprint. Arrive uninvited. Pretend friendship. Take over. Enslave all natives who aren't slaughtered. Make money shipping slaves overseas. Keep some slaves to dig for gold and treasure.
This happened again and again, following the protocol Columbus invented. This was the real discovery of Columbus--how Europe could pillage and get rich off the Americas and the rest of the world.
It's worth looking at the claim that Columbus was a brilliant navigator. This is an example of how history is often distorted by describing so-called great men as the opposite of what they truly were.
As a final note, it's worth looking at the claim that Columbus was a brilliant navigator. This is an example of how history is often distorted by describing so-called great men as the opposite of what they truly were. How could anyone support the claim that Columbus was a great navigator? Where's the proof?
Is Columbus a great navigator because he stumbled on America? It is nearly impossible to sail west from Europe and not run into America. The truly competent navigators of his time rejected Columbus's plan of reaching Asia by sailing west. Not because they believed the world was flat--it was the American writer Washington Irving who created the myth that people of Columbus's time thought the earth was flat. No educated person has believed in flat earth since the 3rd century BC. The competent navigators he consulted knew that the distances were too vast. Columbus's calculations were way off. He had China plotted at just east of San Diego. He couldn't do the math.
The truly astonishing thing about the "Great Navigator" is that he was farther from his intended destination at the end of his voyage than at the start. Spain is 5,400 miles from China, whereas Hispaniola and China are separated by 8,600 miles. So when the "Great Navigator" declared he had successfully reached China, he was 3,200 miles farther away from China than when he started his voyage. "Great Navigator?"
Columbus went to his grave believing he had sailed to Asia. The "Great Navigator" was lost and remained nearly halfway around the globe from where he thought he was. Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue, but the waters of America have run red with Indian blood ever since. Is there any opposition to eliminating the travesty of "Columbus Day"? Who could be in favor of it, given the facts? Is Columbus really deserving to be honored with a national holiday?
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As Cities Give Columbus the Boot, Indigenous Peoples Day Spreads Across US
'Knowing the facts of Columbus’s life, it seems astonishing that he is still treated with honor in many places.'
Oct 12, 2015
While the annual celebration of Christopher Columbus has fueled years of outrage, satire, and resistance, this year, an alternative holiday recognizing the original inhabitants of the United States appears to have reached the mainstream.
In the past two months alone, eight major municipalities--including Albuquerque, New Mexico; Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota; Bexar County, Texas; Anadarko, Oklahoma; Alpena, Michigan; Lawrence, Kansas; Carrboro, North Carolina; and Olympia, Washington--have opted to pay homage to the history and culture of the country's true native people by celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day on the second Monday in October. This wave follows recent moves in Seattle and Minneapolis, among others.
"For the Native community here, Indigenous Peoples Day means a lot," Nick Estes, who helped coordinate the city celebration after Albuquerque city council issued a declaration on the matter, told the Associated Press. "We actually have something. We understand it's just a proclamation, but at the same time, we also understand this is the beginning of something greater."
In Los Angeles on Sunday, native activists and supporters marched in protest of the holiday while a growing number of teachers are moving away from the traditional, Euro-centric curriculum on America's so-called "discovery."
The movement dates back to 1990 when South Dakota became the first state to address the controversy over Columbus Day when they renamed the holiday Native American Day. Two years later, Berkeley, California, introduced the first Indigenous Peoples Day. And while workers in 23 U.S. states enjoyed a paid day off in his honor, people across the country rallied online under the banner of #IndigenousPeoplesDay to call attention to the atrocities committed by and in the spirit of Christopher Columbus.
"Knowing the facts of Columbus's life, it seems astonishing that he is still treated with honor in many places," writer and film producer Bayard Johnson wrote in a column on Monday. "Was he elevated to hero status because nobody knew the real story about Columbus's inhumanity, his atrocities, his delusions, his failures? Or does history consider his crimes insignificant because his victims were mostly Indians?"
Detailing his many voyages and exploits, Johnson notes that while Columbus may not have "discovered the New World," he did lay the groundwork for generations of Europeans to "loot and plunder."
"He created a blueprint," Johnson continues. "Arrive uninvited. Pretend friendship. Take over. Enslave all natives who aren't slaughtered. Make money shipping slaves overseas. Keep some slaves to dig for gold and treasure. This happened again and again, following the protocol Columbus invented. This was the real discovery of Columbus--how Europe could pillage and get rich off the Americas and the rest of the world."
This legacy of colonialism, argues The Intercept's Jon Schwarz, has influenced everything from global trade deals to Israel's occupation of Palestine. "We shouldn't celebrate it," Schwarz writes. "But if we want to comprehend the world--and we should, since our lives depend on it--we have to understand it."
As Bill Bigelow, educator, curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools, and the co-director of the Zinn Education Project, wrote at Common Dreams last week, "If Indigenous peoples' lives mattered in our society, and if Black people's lives mattered in our society, it would be inconceivable that we would honor the father of the slave trade with a national holiday."
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