Mourning Columbus Day

Why is the great explorer, or great exploiter, smiling? 

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS is revered as the man who claims to have "discovered" America, even though he really thought it was India; even though millions of native people were already living here for eons minding their own business before the Italian navigator stumbled his way into the New World.

Depending on your point of view, today - Oct. 9 - as Post Offices, banks, some schools and federal offices close, 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 here first; the beginning of our great United States of America.

Or ... 

From the journals of Christopher Columbus.

It is the end of a way of life, the end of the civilizations that were thriving on the edge of greatness 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 of the Western Hemisphere.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE: Christopher Columbus: hero or villain?