Happy Colombus day?
When we think about Columbus we think well, "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. . . and discovered America." According to Professor James W. Loewen, how could the Americas have been discovered if someone was already living there (Lowewen 1)? In the island that Columbus "discovered" were inhabited by more than just some-one, they were inhabited by an estimated "fourteen million indians (2)." Apparently, Columbus was the 14,000,001 person to discover the Americas. Columbus even "wrote that the Americas were 'filled with innumerabel people.' (2)"
Another common conception is that Columbus brought Civilization! to these primitive peoples. The Arawaks, a people who no longer exist which I will explain later, had games, dances, and songs (a means for tracking their history). They had a culture. They were hunters and gathers too (4). However, they were unlike the Europeans. From a Eurocentric point of view, they were uncivilized.
Besides not bringing civilization to the Americas here are some things that Columbus brought to these native peoples:
1. Plague. Specifically smallpox. It enabled the Spaniard to "conquer and populate America (7)." 2. Armored attack dogs. According to Bartolome De Las Casas, the Spaniards would "take these dogs along with thme in all their expeditions, carring alos diverse Indians in chains for them to eat (7)." 3. "Columbus Beg[an] the slave trade" (23). He had "his men round up fifteen hundren Arawaks . . . to send back to Spain as slaves." According to a "Spanish eyewitness [. . .] among them were many women who had infants at the breast [who] in order to escape left their infants anywhere on the ground and started to flee like desperate people" (27). 4. Columbus also brought ruling through brutality. He "established the rule that for each Spaniard the Indians slew, the Spanish would kill one hundred indians." He made the indian s pay tribute every three months in the form of gold or cotton. Even children as young as fourteen had to do this, and if they did not meet the quota their hand were cut off" (23).
Among these sort of "gifts" to the Indians, Columbus demanded things like "sex with women (22). Here's a little translated excerpt from a letter Columbus had written. In this letter he stated that "'a hundred castellanoes [,a form of currency at the time,] 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 are now in demand'" (24). As an alternative to Columbus some of the natives aborted their fetuses and commited suicide. Some even killed their own newborns so as not to raise another generation of suffering gold miners (24). But, within five years, the Arawaks were wiped out anyway (24).
In a nutshell, this is what Columbus was really like. I suppose that it would not be a mistake to question other facts that we so often take for granted. See you next week.
Loewen, James W. The Truth About Columbus: A Subversively True Poster Book for a Dubiously Celebratory Occasion. New York: New York, 1992