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- This week we take time out from our series on "the
meaning of sustainability" -- or perhaps merely extend it in a new
direction -- to celebrate Columbus Day (October 7). I use "celebrate"
in the dictionary sense of "to proclaim or broadcast for the attention
of a wide public." Examining the nation's heroes may tell us something
fundamental about our goals and values. Christopher Columbus has been a
genuine American hero since at least 1792 when the Society of St. Tammany
in New York City first held a dinner to honor the man and his deeds.
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- Columbus Day -- first observed as a U.S. national holiday
in 1892 and declared an annual day of national celebration in 1934 -- commemorates
the re-discovery of North America, by Christopher Columbus and his band
of 90 adventurers, who set out from Palos, Spain just before dawn on August
3, 1492 intending to find Asia by crossing the Atlantic Ocean in three
small ships.
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- Columbus made four voyages to the New World.[1] The initial
voyage reveals several important things about the man. First, he had genuine
courage because few ship's captains had ever pointed their prow toward
the open ocean, the complete unknown. Secondly, from numerous of his letters
and reports we learn that his overarching goal was to seize wealth that
belonged to others, even his own men, by whatever means necessary.
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- Columbus's royal sponsors (Ferdinand and Isabella) had
promised a lifetime pension to the first man who sighted land. A few hours
after midnight on October 12, 1492, Juan Rodriguez Bermeo, a lookout on
the Pinta, cried out -- in the bright moonlight, he had spied land ahead.
Most likely Bermeo was seeing the white beaches of Watling Island in the
Bahamas.
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- As they waited impatiently for dawn, Columbus let it
be known that he had spotted land several hours before Bermeo. According
to Columbus's journal of that voyage, his ships were, at the time, traveling
10 miles per hour. To have spotted land several hours before Bermeo, Columbus
would have had to see more than 30 miles over the horizon, a physical impossibility.
Nevertheless Columbus took the lifetime pension for himself.[1,2]
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- Columbus installed himself as Governor of the Caribbean
islands, with headquarters on Hispaniola (the large island now shared by
Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He described the people, the Arawaks
(called by some the Tainos) this way:
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- "The people of this island and of all the other
islands which I have found and seen, or have not seen, all go naked, men
and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one
place only with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton which they
make for that purpose. They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they
capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome
stature, because they are wondrous timid.... [T]hey are so artless and
free with all they possess, that no one would believe it without having
seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say
no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as
if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or
of small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of
whatever kind may be given to them."[3,pg.63;1,pg.118]
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- After Columbus had surveyed the Caribbean region, he
returned to Spain to prepare his invasion of the Americas. From accounts
of his second voyage, we can begin to understand what the New World represented
to Columbus and his men -- it offered them life without limits, unbridled
freedom. Columbus took the title Admiral of the Ocean Sea and proceeded
to unleash a reign of terror unlike anything seen before or since. When
he was finished, eight million Arawaks -- virtually the entire native population
of Hispaniola -- had been exterminated by torture, murder, forced labor,
starvation, disease and despair.[3,pg.x]
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- A Spanish missionary, Bartolome de las Casas, described
first-hand how the Spaniards terrorized the natives.[4] Las Casas gives
numerous eye-witness accounts of repeated mass murder and routine sadistic
torture. As Barry Lopez has accurately summarized it, "One day, in
front of Las Casas, the Spanish dismembered, beheaded, or raped 3000 people.
'Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight,' he says,
'as no age can parallel....' The Spanish cut off the legs of children who
ran from them. They poured people full of boiling soap. They made bets
as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in half. They
loosed dogs that 'devoured an Indian like a hog, at first sight, in less
than a moment.' They used nursing infants for dog food."[2,pg.4] This
was not occasional violence -- it was a systematic, prolonged campaign
of brutality and sadism, a policy of torture, mass murder, slavery and
forced labor that continued for CENTURIES. "The destruction of the
Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide
in the history of the world," writes historian David E. Stannard.[3,pg.x]
Eventually more than 100 million natives fell under European rule. Their
extermination would follow. As the natives died out, they were replaced
by slaves brought from Africa.
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- To make a long story short, Columbus established a pattern
that held for five centuries -- a "ruthless, angry search for wealth,"
as Barry Lopez describes it. "It set a tone in the Americas. The quest
for personal possessions was to be, from the outset, a series of raids,
irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to it -- the slaves,
the timber, the pearls, the fur, the precious ores, and, later, arable
land, coal, oil, and iron ore-- was never visible, in which an end to it
had no meaning." Indeed, there WAS no end to it, no limit.
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- As Hans Koning has observed, "There was no real
ending to the conquest of Latin America. It continued in remote forests
and on far mountainsides. It is still going on in our day when miners and
ranchers invade land belonging to the Amazon Indians and armed thugs occupy
Indian villages in the backwoods of Central America."[6,pg.46] As
recently as the 1980s under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush the
U.S. government knowingly gave direct aid to genocidal campaigns that killed
tens of thousands Mayan Indian people in Guatemala and elsewhere.[7] The
pattern holds.
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- Unfortunately, Columbus and the Spaniards were not unique.
They conquered Mexico and what is now the Southwestern U.S., with forays
into Florida, the Carolinas, even into Virginia. From Virginia northward,
the land had been taken by the English who, if anything, had even less
tolerance for the indigenous people. As Hans Koning says, "From the
beginning, the Spaniards saw the native Americans as natural slaves, beasts
of burden, part of the loot. When working them to death was more economical
than treating them somewhat humanely, they worked them to death. The English,
on the other hand, had no use for the native peoples. They saw them as
devil worshippers, savages who were beyond salvation by the church, and
exterminating them increasingly became accepted policy."[6,pg.14]
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- The British arrived in Jamestown in 1607. By 1610 the
intentional extermination of the native population was well along. As David
E. Stannard has written, "Hundreds of Indians were killed in skirmish
after skirmish. Other hundreds were killed in successful plots of mass
poisoning. They were hunted down by dogs, 'blood-Hounds to draw after them,
and Mastives [mastiffs] to seaze them.' Their canoes and fishing weirs
were smashed, their villages and agricultural fields burned to the ground.
Indian peace offers were accepted by the English only until their prisoners
were returned; then, having lulled the natives into false security, the
colonists returned to the attack. It was the colonists' expressed desire
that the Indians be exterminated, rooted 'out from being longer a people
uppon the face of the earth.' In a single raid the settlers destroyed corn
sufficient to feed four thousand people for a year. Starvation and the
massacre of non-combatants was becoming the preferred British approach
to dealing with the natives."[3,pg.106]
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- In Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey extermination
was officially promoted by a "scalp bounty" on dead Indians.
"Indeed, in many areas it [murdering Indians] became an outright business,"
writes historian Ward Churchill.[5,pg.182]
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- Indians were defined as subhumans, lower than animals.
George Washington compared them to wolves, "beasts of prey" and
called for their total destruction.[3,pgs.119-120] Andrew Jackson -- whose
portrait appears on the U.S. $20 bill today -- in 1814 "supervised
the mutilation of 800 or more Creek Indian corpses -- the bodies of men,
women and children that [his troops] had massacred -- cutting off their
noses to count and preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of
flesh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins."[5,pg.186]
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- The English policy of extermination -- another name for
genocide -- grew more insistent as settlers pushed westward. In 1851 the
Governor of California officially called for the extermination of the Indians
in his state.[3,pg.144] On March 24, 1863, the ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS in
Denver ran an editorial titled, "Exterminate Them." On April
2, 1863, the SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN advocated "extermination of the
Indians."[5,pg.228] In 1867, General William Tecumseh Sherman said,
"We must act with vindictive earnestness against the [Lakotas, known
to whites as the Sioux] even to their extermination, men, women and children."[5,pg.240]
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- In 1891, Frank L. Baum (gentle author of the WIZARD OF
OZ) wrote in the ABERDEEN (KANSAS) SATURDAY PIONEER that the army should
"finish the job" by the "total annihilation" of the
few remaining Indians. The U.S. did not follow through on Baum's macabre
demand for there really was no need. By then the native population had
been reduced to 2.5% of its original numbers and 97.5% of the aboriginal
land base had been expropriated and renamed the land of the free and the
home of the brave. Hundreds upon hundreds of native tribes with unique
languages, learning, customs, and cultures had simply been erased from
the face of the earth, most often without even the pretense of justice
or law.
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- Today we can see the remnant cultural arrogance of Christopher
Columbus and Captain John Smith shadowed in the cult of the "global
free market" which aims to eradicate indigenous cultures and traditions
world-wide, to force all peoples to adopt the ways of the U.S. Global
free trade is manifest destiny writ large.
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- But as Barry Lopez says, "This violent corruption
needn't define us.... We can say, yes, this happened, and we are ashamed.
We repudiate the greed. We recognize and condemn the evil. And we see how
the harm has been perpetuated. But, five hundred years later, we intend
to mean something else in the world." If we chose, we could set limits
on ourselves for once. We could declare enough is enough. So it is always
good to celebrate Columbus on his day.
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- ============== [1] J.M. Cohen, editor, THE FOUR VOYAGES
OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (London: Penguin Books, 1969). ISBN 0-14-044217-0.
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- [2] Barry Lopez, THE REDISCOVERY OF NORTH AMERICA (Lexington,
Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. ISBN 0-8131-1742-9.
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- [3] David E. Stannard, AMERICAN HOLOCAUST; COLUMBUS AND
THE CONQUEST OF THE NEW WORLD (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
ISBN 0-19-507581-1.
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- [4] Bartolome de las Casas, THE DEVASTATION OF THE INDIES:
A BRIEF ACCOUNT (translated by Herma Briffault) (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992). ISBN 0-8018-4430-4.
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- [5] Ward Churchill, A LITTLE MATTER OF GENOCIDE; HOLOCAUST
AND DENIAL IN THE AMERICAS, 1492 TO THE PRESENT (San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1997). ISBN 0-87286-323-9.
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- [6] Hans Koning, THE CONQUEST OF AMERICA; HOW THE INDIAN
NATIONS LOST THEIR CONTINENT (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), pg.
46. ISBN 0-85345-876-6.
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- [7] For example, see Mireya Navarro, "Guatemalan
Army Waged 'Genocide,' New Report Finds," NEW YORK TIMES February
26, 1999, pg. unknown. The TIMES described "torture, kidnapping and
execution of thousands of civilians" -- most of them Mayan Indians
-- a campaign to which the U.S. government contributed "money and
training." See http://www.nytimes.com/
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- Descriptor terms: columbus; native people, U.S.; genocide;
spain; england; indian policy;
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