Human Rights Law

The National Disgrace Of Columbus Day

By jill

We've all been lied to about Christopher Columbus. Before Columbus sailed the Atlantic, he was a slave trader for the Portuguese, transporting West African people to Portugal to be sold as slaves. Columbus initiated the first Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Columbus, his brother, and his son all continued slave trading of indigenous peoples from the Americas to Europe and from Africa to the Caribbean.

Under his administration as viceroy and governor of the Caribbean Islands, 8 million people were killed, making his "contribution" to history the first mass genocide of indigenous peoples. The Columbus legacy is steeped in blood, violence, and death. Public holidays celebrating Columbus not only teach children to honor a cruel and brutal man, they encourage people in this society to ignore, look away, and even support racist practices embedded in today's economic, political and judicial systems.
So why isn't our country named "Columbia?" When a map maker was making a new map he decided to include the new world, and he decided to give it a name. He called it "America" in honor of Amerigo Vespucci. In reality, Columbus nor Vespucci discovered America. Because "to discover" means to see or learn or find something for the first time, the Native Americans are the true discoverers of America.

Five hundred and nine years ago, Christopher Columbus was discovered by Indians. In his journal, the explorer recounted the humble and godly way in which the Taino Natives greeted the conquistadores. They put their fingertips together as if in prayer, and bowed their heads, covering their faces with their hands. To Columbus, the Taino were acknowledging the superiority of the newly arrived Europeans. Appreciating their servility, Columbus wrote of them that there were "in all the world no better people."

A later Native American scholar saw things differently. The Taino, like other Native peoples, were scrupulously clean. They bathed in the warm waters of the Caribbean everyday. Fifteenth century Europeans, on the other hand, thought that exposing bare skin to water was a dangerously unhealthy habit. That philosophy was held by those with all the comforts of home. Sailors on a long ocean voyage would have had even lower standards of hygiene.

So it was likely that the Taino weren't demonstrating a customary greeting but were instead finding the politest possible way to block out the stench of Columbus and his men.

The Tainos lived on grassy plains and lowland rain forests. They inhabited the Northeastern coast of South America three thousand years ago. The natives were tall, handsome, and clean-shaven people. Their skin was olive-tan and many of them wore face and body paint.

The Tainos had to be surprised to see a large wooden boat land and strangely dressed men get out and kiss the ground. Columbus reported that the "Tainos liked a peaceful, unhurried life." (1) They built hammocks to sleep in and men smoked tobacco while women told stories. In the Taino culture, old people cared for the children and prepared meals. The young women cultivated the fields, while the young men hunted for snakes, turtles, and iguanas.

Columbus wanted to convert the Tainos to Christianity. Columbus forced six Tainos to be his guides as he toured the other islands. He took these captives back to Spain with him. (2)

Friendly relations between the two peoples did not last long. During another Spanish voyage, many Tainos were beaten and murdered. When the Spanish became hungry, they ransacked villages, leaving the Taino people helpless. Europeans brought diseases along with them that the Tainos lacked immunity to. The weapons that the Europeans had were no match to the Tainos. An estimated fifty thousand Tainos perished in the year 1494. (3)

There were also many Indian captives, so the Europeans decided to ship the Taino prisoners in bondage to Spain. Some sixteen hundred Tainos were taken to the port. Only five hundred and fifty captives could be jammed onto the boat. The rest were left behind to be slaves to the Spanish that stayed behind. Columbus issued a high tax on the Tainos. They were stuck. On one side if they refused to pay the tax, they faced death and on the other, they faced starvation. They were homeless in their own land. They were devastated by abuse, starvation, and disease. They were subjects of high taxes, and soon were forced to be subjects of the crown. (4)

Life was never the same for the Indians after that day in 1492.

By conservative accounts based on Spanish surveys, the Taino numbered as many as 8 million in 1493. [Source: Cook and Woodrow, Essays in Population History, Vol. 1, Chapter VI, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, cited in Churchill].

During Columbus' tenure as "viceroy and governor" of the Caribbean Islands and the American mainland from 1493 until 1500, he instituted policies of slavery (encomienda) and the systematic murder and rape of the Taino population. Dominican priest, Bartolode de Las Casas was the first European historian in the Americas. He was an eyewitness and wrote in painful detail of the tortures he witnessed.

In a survey conducted in 1496, he estimated that over 5 million people had been exterminated within the first three years of the Columbus rule. [Actual survey conducted in 1496 by Bartolome de Las Casas, cited in J.B. Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, Vol. 2 [Source: New York: Putnam Sons Publishers, 1903-1904), p. 348ff. cited in Churchill.]

By the time of Columbus' departure, only 100,000 Taino were left, and by 1542, only 200 were left. Within the entire Caribbean Islands, about 15 million indigenous people are estimated to have been exterminated within one generation of Columbus' arrival.

This is genocide, the wholesale killing of an entire race of people. These policies, established here, laid the foundation for extermination policies that Europeans used to justify the elimination of over 100 million native people throughout the Western Hemisphere. By any standards those numbers describe a Holocaust.

The violence of Columbus' extermination actions was widely debated in theological and academic circles within Europe. European legal and moral principles tended to favor the rights of indigenous peoples to be free from unjustified invasion, murder and pillage by Europeans. Francisco de Vitoria, professor at the University of Salamanca in the early 1500s and often considered the father of modern international law, wrote extensively on the rights of indigenous peoples.

Vitoria and others in Columbus' own lifetime rejected the view that popes and monarchs had the automatic right to enslave indigenous peoples and take their land. The rights of human beings were as much 15th Century issues then, as they are 21st Century issues today.

Columbus' actions set the foundation for legal and social policies -- still used today in United States, Mexico, Canada, South America and in many countries around the world. These policies justify the theft and destruction of indigenous peoples' lands and knowledge by corporate and government interests.

Just as apartheid was denounced by the international community as an unacceptable ideology of racial superiority in South Africa, so should Columbus Day and Columbus celebrations be condemned as the advancement of racial supremacy because they celebrate the destruction of indigenous peoples.

"The policy and acts of Columbus for which he alone was responsible began the depopulation of the terrestrial paradise that was Hispaniola in 1492?one third were killed off between 1494 and 1496."
  - Samuel Eliot Morrison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (NY: Little, Brown and Co, 1942). pp 492-493;

Columbus proceeded to establish a slave trade with the inhabitants of Hispaniola. And this after he had declared time and time again that the Tainos were the kindest, most peaceful and generous people in the world? But now [Columbus] resorted to the monstrous expedient of sending hundreds of the wretched creatures overseas to the slave mart of Seville."
  - Morrison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (see above), pp. 486-487;

"The Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against [the Indians]. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged, nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughterhouse. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword could split a man in two or could cut off his head? They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags. They made some low, wide gallows on which the hanged victim's feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims, in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive."

Bartolome de Las Cases The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, was originally published in 1547. Las Casas was a Dominican priest, the first European historian in the Americas.

From the Oath of Allegiance (To Spain and The Pope)
I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and Their Highnesses. We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as Their Highnesses may command. And we shall take your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him.

(5)

Columbus Day justifies, promotes, and extends genocidal sentiments and policies against indigenous peoples in the Americas and around the world.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on October 12, 2008 (boomark / email).