Christopher Columbus has long had his detractors, muting the celebration of Columbus Day and shaping how his voyage and "discovery" are taught in schools. But Saturday’s protests in Denver, which disrupted a holiday parade and resulted in 83 arrests, will give the Columbus question more prominence. So should the lobbying by students of Haskell Indian Nations University for the Lawrence City Commission to rename Columbus Day as "Indigenous Peoples Day." Lawrence’s mayor suggested it was a decision for the Legislature, but it’s really one for the country.
It was President Franklin Roosevelt, at the urging of the Knights of Columbus, who proclaimed Oct. 12 to be the federal holiday of Columbus Day in 1937. The federal holiday was designated as the second Monday in October in 1971. Regrettably, any full debate about Columbus’ proper place in history will end up pitting Italian-Americans against Native Americans.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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31 Comments
Every race of people on Earth has had some degree of historical mistake or over-reaching.
Columbus changed world history. Can we give him credit for that?
Columbus was courageous, can we give him credit for that?
When Columbus first “discovered” America, the American Indians were living, largely, a stone age existance.
That is not an insult, it is a fact.
American Indians, as a group, had not even discovered bronze, let alone steel. American Indians did not use the wheel. That is the very definition of “stone age.”
No, that does not make it OK to mistreat them.
However, historical perspective requires that we admit something:
American Indians treated THEMSELVES terribly!
The Carrib Indians, “discovered” by Coronado, were Cannibals who captured the children of their enemies, fattened them like cattle, and ATE them!
The Southwestern Indians frequently placed their enemies in buffalo skin and cooked them alive, as punishment and torture.
The barbarism of American Indian Tribe against American Indian Tribe is horrible.
And, the way the White Man broke our treaties with the various tribes in shameful.
Holding Columbus responsible for any of this is ridiculous.
Columbus thought he was going to INDIA, hence the name “Indians”.
Can we appreciate his courage?
Don’t forget, MOST great discoveries happen by accident.
Full and fair disclosure: I am a Proud member of the Knights of Columbus, an organizaton founded to help stop discrimation against Catholics.
At the time of the Founding, the Knights provided life insuranc benefits to Catholics.
Most Life Insurance Companies, at the time of our founding, excluded Catholics from coverage.
We have a long history of standing against discrimination in all forms.
We support several American Indian missions, even today.
We also support charities that help children with mental disabilities.
Please buy a “tootsie roll” if you see any of us trying to sell you one. That is where the money goes.
Let’s all judge the past by today’s standards: some indian tribes used other tribes captives for slaves. Bad. Some african tribes captured and sold other tribes people into slavery. Bad. Religious leaders in spain tortured people for their beliefs. Bad.
Columbus was a product of his time. Good/bad, angel/evil, he did what he did. Get over it.
Barring unseen developments, I predict little activity for this thread.
I’ll help.
I need to ask my son what they teach about this these days. Even 30 years ago when I was a kid they were getting it all wrong. We were taught that Columbus was this visionary guy going around proclaiming “The world shes a round!”
A few years ago a teacher friend of ours asked me to dress up like Christopher Columbus and do a presentation for her second grade class. What a hoot!
I studied for that little presentation for three days! I took a map of the world and folded it so that the western hemisphere was absent. I explained to the children that it represented the known world in the 1400s. Then as I plotted the voyage of Columbus I popped the map open and showed them the ‘new world’.
There were about 60 students and many teachers present. I could answer most of their questions but they stumped me on a few of them. All in all a very enjoyable morning.
Hank
How about this? Teach who Columbus really was and what he did: the good, the bad, and the ugly (sorry, Clint). A little historical context couldn’t hurt.
Best semi-related quote on the subject: “My forefathers didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.” Will Rogers
Agreed Rage – and maybe they said “there goes the neighborhood”
When Columbus first “discovered” America, the American Indians were living, largely, a stone age existance.
That is not an insult, it is a fact.
*****There are many myths perpetrated by our powderizing and deodorizing of our messy European Empire.
Hardly anyone was so benighted (both European and Amer-Indian) to believe the earth was flat. People knew it was round.
Columbus’s own journals show that he knew he had discovered new territory, not the East Indies.
The Caribs were fierce, but probably not cannibals. This was the story the Lucayans told Columbus.
English settlers starving to death at Jamestown DID resort to cannibalism however–one future Republican had his wife’s body hanging up in the smoke house and he’d go out and carve off a hunk for lunch.
Here’s something else the textbooks “forget” to you:
“When Columbus and his men returned to Haiti in 1493, they demanded food, gold, spun cotten–whatever the Indians had that they wanted, [Funny how they had no knowledge of metals but they had gold and silver and copper . . . ]
Including sex with their women.
To ensure cooperation, C. used punishment by example. When an Indian committed even a minor offense, the Spanish cut off his ears or nose. Disfigured, the person was sent back to his village as living evidence of the brutality the Spaniards were capable of.
“After a while, the Indians had had enough. Af first their resistance was mostly passive. They refused to plant food for the Spanish to take. They abandoned towns near the Spanish settlements. Finally, the Arawaks fought back. . .
Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father [states]: “The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dog to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and captured others who were also killed.”
Nowadays, we call it genocide. In the history books they call it “progress.”
BTW, that picture of Columbus above?
It wasn’t painted during his lifetime, so nobody today knows precisely how he looked . . .
But wait, there’s more–
When Columbus and his men had succeeded in establishing a reign of terror on Hispanola, Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and fed their bodies to the dogs.
Every man over 14 had to submit a “a large hawk’s bell” of gold dust or 25 pounds of cotton every three months. If they didn’t, they had their hands cut off . . .
The Spaniards demanded that AmerIndians grow their food, mine gold, grow cotton, and even submit to CARRY THEM wherever they went.
Pedro de Cordoba wrote to King Ferdinand in 1517 that ‘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. Women . . . after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.’”
CapnAnd the Mayan culture of the time?
And I would say that you are completely wrong about the Caribs, they WERE cannibals, as were some of the Texas Gulf Coast Indians.
As posted previously, Columbus was a product of his time.
More to the point:
Was Columbus personally responsible for the bad acts of the Spaniards, which you describe?
Columbus spotted an UFO according to the History Channel…
Columbus helped enslave natives for Spain’s barbaric system of slavery, a system that practically wiped out a people. A product of his times, yes. Does that excuse those actions, no. You could say his impulse to explore and expand trading routes was also a product of his time. Yet we praise him for those traits. You can not cherry pick, you have to take the man as a whole.
On pre columbian indian culture:
Responsible for methods of farming that bewildered Europeans, rotating crops in a way that did not destroy the soil, responsible for engineering Maize, a crop that has no close native cousin.
When Spaniards arrived in the new world they abandoned their heavy useless armor in many cases and adapted native garb that was thickly spun cloth that provided more protection and was lighter and easier to wear.
European explorers noted that the homes that many north american natives lived in were warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than european construction.
South American cultures created masonry structures that Europeans had no comprehension of.
Native cultures evolved on their own time line, different than that in Europe, but recent discoveries have uncovered evidence that they weren’t so much behind Europeans as we may have once thought. They had just explored different paths than Europeans.
Oh, and they were unluck enough to have no immunity to european sicknesses, and died en mass from plauge.
I agree with Rage. Lets stop the silly happy stories that we were told in our youth about how good things were. Lets teach more reality.
But…I am against changing the name.
My point, which is sometimes hard to make:We are all human!
I do not understand the desire people have to tear down historical figures.
The Spanish were “awful” — of course, until the Americans went to war with them!
Get my point maybe?
“Blame America First” or “Blame Western Culture First” — Humans have made lots of human mistakes.
We ALL share in those mistakes.
We are ALL human.
“”"The barbarism of American Indian Tribe against American Indian Tribe is horrible.”"”
I will not dispute this statement but you need to dig deeper into history. There were “warrior tribes” such as the Apaches and the Souix that did in fact lots of killing and bloodletting. But I would point out that there were also “farmer tribes” such as the Cherokee that farmed land and lived much as the white man lived. And the white man stole all their lands and sent them to Oklahoma and then stole Oklahoma too! And the white people have yet to atone for the crimes against them or the blacks. So things like Columbus Day and the Confederate Battle Flag are often used by whites to rub salt in the wounds of those wronged.
Without the buffalo,I’m just an Indian.Free and clear.
We know and you know who was here first. Continue to celebrate your your arrival for the occupation.
But also celebrate the life of those who went before you. But it is also a celebration of the land and air we live in.
Perhaps there will one day be a George Bush day celebration in Iraq.
Or an Al Gore day in rememberence of his invention of the internet.
Or a Monica Day, to remind us that a BJ is not sex.
“Indigenous peoples day…” heh..
Yeah, well, if I remember correctly …they lost. end of story.
Now put on your Columbus hat and smile for the kiddies.
If you believe the land bridge theory, Asians became Native Americans.
BTW, whatever happened to that Caucasian they dug up that was supposable several thousand years old?
er in North American…
supposable?
Supposably
Mozilla spell checker tricked me. :)
Try supposedly LOL
Perhaps the most notable contribution of Columbus and early European explorers is the one that they can’t be held accountable for (at least maliciously)- spreading European disease in the new world. That was what really wiped out the Indian culture and knocked it back to the stone age that Econ101 talked about.
So will the protesters get upset because of Christmas since missionaries spreading Christianity often spread disease throughout the land? Nobody is confusing Columbus Day with Kill the Natives day. Some people just need to learn to relax. Are their lives so dull they have to get in an uproar about the discovery of America?
Doug, yea people should probably chill out a little, but I don’t think we should sugar coat history. Because progress is learning from the past, (mistakes).I could really care less about Columbus Day, yea its nice for the people that get the day off work. But its kind of funny, how can you discover America when people already live there. It’s already been discovered. Secondly, it was North America, Columbus found, really central America, not the united states, so its really just a broad holiday. Now, I don’t know everything about Columbus so I don’t know if his merits outweighed his bitter doings. Would we have been better off without Columbus is the question.
Watched a History show last night.
Probably because of this thread.
Apparently, a member of Columbus’s crew did discover something:
Syphillus! Contracted in Haiti, I believe.
So they all traded diseases back and forth.
Econ–
The question of whether syphilis travelled from the New World to the Old or vice-versa is full of contradictory data and will probably never be confirmed.
That European diseases of measels and small pox wiped out a majority of AmerIndians is not debated.
How come so many Native American tribes want casinos with games and a culture that originated from Europe? If everything about Columbus is so evil, then why use the things that the Europeans have had anyway?