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.
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