This week has found more and more regions in the U.S celebrating Indigenous People’s Day. However, many more know the federal holiday as Columbus Day. Over 500 years ago, a man named Christopher Columbus “got famous for something he never did, having never even set foot on the North American continent, much less having 'discovered' it.” Perhaps Columbus should be more notorious, and infamous rather than famous, for something he did do.
It’s remarkable the lopsided stories we tell in order to conveniently ignore or deny an uncomfortable reality. As we continue to celebrate the sepia-toned world of a false past, full of men and monsters and their colonial cruelties, as entire cultures, their languages, their knowledge, and their science were destroyed along the way.
After getting lost somewhere in the Bahamas, the friendly Arawak people Columbus met helped him, bringing food, water, and gifts. He even wrote of how kind they were. Columbus repaid their generosity by mocking their “ignorance” of things they had never seen before, forcing them to be his slaves, and demanding that they lead him to the source of the gold that their earrings had been crafted from. Columbus and his men proceeded to commit brutal acts, to destroy this peaceful population, thinking “nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” One of his associates, Bartolomé 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.” Bartolomé de las Casas promptly quit the world to become a priest.
Some historians argue that you can’t blame Christopher Columbus for being a product of his time, which is a nice, convenient story. Nevertheless, contemporary accounts of Columbus’s senseless cruelty, and his subsequent arrest for his behavior, suggests that even taking racist historical attitudes into account, this was unspeakably barbaric. Once you know the full stomach-churning story, it’s hard to imagine how such a person, who treated whole populations as less than human, could be celebrated.
We lose something very important when we lose indigenous knowledge.
Find out what it is over at JSTOR Daily.
(Image Credit: Kordspace/ Pixabay)
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http://news.limauais.com/walter-cronkite-dies-cause-of-cerebral-vascular-disease/
I heard on the radio and one of the hosts said that he wondered what he died of... "Old age" isnt good enough anymore?
I specifically remember my Grandad insisting we all shut our mouths when the CBS News came on, and Cronkite told us how it was. He was like the Sinatra/Brando of the news.
"don't look at me, Walt!!"
--
i met Mr. Cronkite once, and he was as nice as he seemed to be on television.
Cronkite was a journalist of the highest order who presided over both triumph and tragedy in equal parts. And more than anything sought the truth. He is a more accomplished and greater man than you will ever even see...and twenty times the man you could hope to become.
My grandpop did the same thing, and after that we watched Unsolved Mysteries for a couple of hours. This year has been so terrible. Now that the "greats" are all passing it really may be the time to turn off the radio. Godspeed, Walt.
$10 sez andy rooney is next LOL
What made his type of journalism different from what we are used to today would be to look at the ratio of important stories to fluff and filler. And that would put 21st century journalism at a disadvantage, because newscasts today have to fill 24 hours a day and several channels. In Cronkite's era of an hour of news per day max, there wasn't room for anything that wasn't important. In many ways, that made following the news easier for the viewer. But networks could expand coverage when needed, for big events like a political assassination or war or a moon landing. And those are the things we remember years later.
It's pretty funny the lengths trolls will go to.
When the US lost the Vietnam war, communist governments flourished in SE Asia and resulted in the murder of over one million civilians.
I feel that Cronkite's deceptive broadcasts played a huge part in allowing this to happen and sour the US public's desire to stop the killing fields of Cambodia.
PS please don't call me a troll for presenting a different opinion.
Otherwise, you would just be a flat-earth, truth-is-out-there, moon-landing-was-faked, no-plane-flew-into-the-Pentagon conspiracy nut.
He used the nightly news cast as his very own bully pulpit, telling America what he wanted them to hear and, consequently, getting them to believe what he wanted them to believe. That is not fine.
Cronkite's history was not stellar in the truth and accuracy department.
He didn't do America, or her servicemen, any favors by blatantly lying and editorializing about events in Vietnam. Conversely, Cronkite soured American public opinion while simultaneously encouraging the enemy to fight on a little longer. His words may not have been direct encouragement, but the result was the same.
It's amusing to me to see Neatorama commenters get themselves all lathered up over history and politics, subjects of which the knowledge here is obviously very limited.
People who know history and have a firm anchor in reality wouldn't be so quick to make public spectacles of themselves.
Did WC tell the truth to the American people regarding Tet?
Perhaps it will be released soon.
What Cronkite basically told his audience was just that. I believe the word was "stalemate." And he painted a grim portrait of the war to come, stimulating President Johnson to not seek re-election. I am clueless as to any lies that were told, and what damage was done.
"We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi's winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that -- negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could"