Columbus Day

Christopher Columbus is one of the major reasons we decided to homeschool our children. Seriously. I could not stand the thought that they would go to school and be taught that this man was a "brave explorer" and that he "discovered America" or was the first to think the world was round. He was a monster in search of slaves and gold, mediocre in every respect except his avarice, and in the pursuit of his greed he decimated entire populations. There were perhaps 3 million Arawaks living on Hispaniola when Columbus arrived (estimates range from 1 to 8 million). By 1508 there were only 60,000 left. Shortly thereafter there were none.

Ask anyone who discovered America, and they'll probably say Columbus. Never mind if others discovered it first, people from Siberia, Indonesia, Japan, the British Isles, West Africa. Never mind if at least 20 million people were living in North America in 1492, people with trade routes and treaties, crops and medicine, history, religion, culture, and art. Some people defend the absurdity of Columbus's "discovery" by saying "Well, we just mean that he was the first European to discover the Americas." Uh-huh. Because, you know, the Europeans are the ones who count, so it's okay if theirs is the only perspective we get.

Much of what is taught about Columbus in US history textbooks is literally pulled out of thin air, written in for dramatic flair, added to the story completely gratuitously. It is our national creation myth, and they've made it a right good tale. A one-month crossing in good weather with plenty of supplies turns into three months of violent seas, starvation and fear, near mutiny, and then a joyous cry of "Land! Land!" It's like Chapter One was crafted by someone who used to write Made-for-TV movies based loosely on actual events.

The truth is more like this, from James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me (p.62-63):

In the words of Hans Koning, "There now began a reign of terror on Hispaniola." Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food. Columbus, upset because he could not locate the gold he was certain was on the island, set up a tribute system. Ferdinand Columbus described how it worked: "[The Indians] all promised to pay tribute to the Catholic Sovereigns every three months, as follows: In the Cibao, where the gold mines were, every person of 14 years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk's bell of gold dust; all others were each to pay 25 pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his neck as proof that he had made his payment. Any Indian found without such a token was to be punished." . . . Columbus's son neglected to mention how the Spaniards punished those whose tokens had expired: they cut off their hands.

. . .

On Haiti the colonists made the Indians mine gold for them, raise Spanish food, and even carry them everywhere they went. The Indians couldn't stand it. Pedro de Cordoba wrote in a letter to King Ferdinand in 1517, "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth.... Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery."

Priest Bartolome de las Casas detailed other atrocities: Spaniards cutting into natives' flesh to test the sharpness of their knives or beheading natives for no apparent reason. Some of Las Casas's descriptions are thought to be exaggerated:

And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, "Boil there, you offspring of the devil!" Other infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby.

This goes on, mind you, for another paragraph or so, and details burnings at the stake, amputations, rape, and so on. I would like to think it is exaggerated. But much of what Las Casas wrote is confirmed by other letter-writers or Columbus's own accounts. For instance, Columbus wrote complacently to friends about the sexual slave trade, noting that "...there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand."

The precise degree of cruelty may be arguable, and I realize that many thousands died because of small pox and other diseases the Europeans brought. But the native Americans in what is now the United States also died from these diseases, yet they did not disappear in a matter of a few decades. It is undeniable that Columbus and his men, along with successors like his son or younger officers, committed genocide. Millions were living on Hispaniola, Haiti, Cuba, and smaller islands in 1492; by the mid 1500's, none were left. We might as well have Hitler Day as have Columbus Day.

Obviously there is a gigantic discrepancy between primary historical sources and the guff invented for school textbooks. (One textbook has Columbus dying unappreciated and penniless, not knowing he had discovered a new continent. Just for the hell of it, I guess-- sounds better that way. Never mind that it's contradicted by Columbus's own journals.) But this particular discrepancy, as hideous as it is, is pretty much par for the course. We learn about the brave and noble early colonists, but not that they gave small pox-laden blankets to the native Americans; nor that some early colonies were successfully overthrown by slaves, who then maintained peaceful and mutually beneficial relations with native Americans; nor that some of those captured by natives refused to go back when 'rescued' by fellow colonists.

I think that our creation myths are fictionalized and dramatized in proportion to the evils we committed, and the evils were considerable. A friend once said I seemed determined to demonize the Europeans, but this reaction simply points out the huge difference between historical data and what's in the textbooks. From her perspective, I'd gone off the deep end and was choosing an insupportable interpretation; from my perspective, the textbooks have jaw-dropping audacity in manufacturing a false and rosy history. I really have no desire to paint the Europeans as evil. I think stealing an entire continent through genocide more or less speaks for itself.

I could no more allow Anya and Tristan to be taught the Fantastic Fake History of Our Superior Nation than I could allow them to be taught that the Holocaust never happened. History is not a single, objectively "true" narrative, and yes, many viewpoints can be argued, but some interpretations are bunk. American History in most public schools is way over the line.