Columbus: Hero or Villain?

What is Christopher Columbus smiling about?

AHH! SEATTLE. Love that city. Seattle is named after a Duwamish chieftain so its no surprise that instead of celebrating Christopher Columbus, they dubbed the second Monday of October as Indigenous People's Day. 

Seattle joins Berkeley and Minneapolis in switching from Columbus Day to celebrating the original  inhabitants of this continent. South Dakota marks the day as Native American Day. 

Columbus is revered as the man who claims to have "discovered" America, even though he really thought it was India; even though Vikings landed on North America 500 years earlier; even though millions of people were already living here for eons minding their own business before the Italian navigator set foot in Hispaniola and claimed it for Spain.

Depending on your point of view, Columbus Day marks the beginning, or the end. 

The beginning of an era of European conquest, the beginning of the exploitation of the land and resources; the beginning of the extermination of civilizations and enslavement of peoples; the beginning of lies and broken treaties that took the lands away from people who were living there first; the beginning of our great United States of America.

Or ... It is the end of a way of life, the end of the civilizations that were taking root in Peru, the Yucatan, Mexico and the Confederacies of Indian tribes on the Eastern Seaboard; the end of great forests of North America that spanned from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, the end of the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains, the end of the hunter-gatherer people of the West;

Or ... You can sum it all up to say it was the beginning of the end of the great native peoples.

I remember the history taught in school: "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue ..."

that painted the Italian explorer as the great navigator, the savior of the "savages," who brought Christianity to these shores; brought riches of gold and silver back to Spain. It wasn't until college did I realize those history books told only half the story.

Some cities still have parades and it has become a day of pride among Italian Americans, even though it was Spain that allowed and financed the expedition that changed the way the world was viewed and challenged the perspective of man's place in the Universe.

In "The Population of the Americas in 1492" by William M. Denevan, he writes: "The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world." Pre-Colombus population estimates by scholars runs from eight million to 112 million. In any case, by 1650 the native population was down to less than six million. That's a wide range, but no matter which number you choose, the decimation of the native people can be called nothing less than a holocaust.

That was the sad beginning and it got worse from there. Cities were ransacked, villages burned, temples destroyed, people enslaved, and treaties were broken time and time again. On top of all that, European diseases, against which the native population had no defense, took a tremendous toll.

"The Trail of Tears" as painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942. 

Their traditional land stolen from them, native Americans were forced to move to desolate reservations that couldn't support their farms or provide them any game to hunt. So they became wards of the state, forced to live off government handouts.

In one of the most egregious examples, through the Indian Removal Act of 1838, the "Five Civilized Tribes" of Cherokees, Choctaw, Chicasaw, Seminole and Creeks were forced from their traditional homes in the southeast U.S. so cotton growers could have their land. The native Americans then had to undertake the long trek to Oklahoma, Thousands died on the "Trail of Tears."

Is it any wonder that they don't do a champagne toast to Columbus?

If we were taught the truth in those grade-school history texts, people wouldn't be so shocked at Seattle's action.