On Monday, banks will be closed. Sears and J.C. Penney’s will throw 20 to 30 percent sales. Grade schools everywhere will put on school plays and programs featuring three prop ships and little sailor, Indians and possibly pilgrims.
You guessed it. Columbus Day.
We’ve all grown up with the holiday looming over us like a bad history lesson. “In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” Does anyone remember past that?
What did we learn in history class? We certainly learned that Columbus was a man who posed for paintings well. Every history book features a painting of Columbus in a heroic pose, which he is still able to pull off wearing tights, with some bedraggled men and three ships in the background. Occasionally we see him kindly offering some beads or blankets to some natives in nice neat boxes, with the natives bowing submissively.
If we actually read the text in the history books, we learn that Columbus was a dreamer who wanted to find a path to India and wanted to prove that the world was round. People laughed at him, and Portugal wouldn’t fund him, so he had to go to Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella funded him and sent him off to find India. The crew almost mutinied, but he remained steadfast. Finally, they landed in the West Indies, thus (and we can all say this together) discovering America.
I can hear all the history majors and professors crying in dismay.
Columbus Day is a holiday that must be discontinued. We celebrate it without understanding what sort of man we are celebrating.
Columbus was not looking for India. He probably did know about a land mass to the west of Europe. Certainly he would have known about the Norse expeditions to Greenland and Iceland. And he was not original in thinking that the world was round. That was a commonly-held belief at the time, and had been for centuries.
But I am not here to call attention to historical inaccuracies in what is commonly known and taught about Columbus. Rather, I wish to point out the near omissions in the teaching of history.
Columbus went to the West Indies to find gold. When he didn’t find it, he took what he could find to validate his expedition, much as a researcher would bend research to support his or her thesis just to validate a grant.
But what Columbus did was more harmful. He took land and resources from the natives. He took their labor, both in plundering their own islands and in the beginning of the American slave trade. He committed genocide.
So that is the man that we teach children to look up to. A capitalist, a thief and a murderer.
You may wonder if this is all true. You don’t have to look any further than Columbus’ own journal entries and letters. He wrote to the Spanish monarchs, “we can send from here all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold.” He also wrote plainly and without apology about his use of force to put down rebellions when the Arawaks got sick of the European invaders and their demands.
If you don’t believe Columbus, there’s always his critic during his own time, Bartolome de Las Casas. This man was an early Spanish settler and plantation owner. However, prompted by the sight of Columbus’ atrocities against the Arawak people, Las Casas freed his slaves and became a priest and a 16th century advocate for human rights. He was a man that modern society would make a hero.
Yet who does American society idolize? Columbus: the capitalist and imperialist who began the annihilation of an entire native people.
Las Casas himself condemned Columbus and the Spanish conquest, including his early slave ownership, by saying, “What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade [of slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil and cruel among them.”
But we don’t learn about that in school. We don’t remember the seedy details of America’s early history. We dress our children up as Indians and settlers and sing nursery rhymes to drive away the unsavory truth.
We need to remember Columbus, but not as a hero. We need to remember while we’re overcoming the racism and exploitation that he helped introduce in the Americas. And we need to remember him as an example of what not to do.
Angela Adair is an English major. She can be reached at [email protected].