On the whole Columbus/genocide/smallpox/holidays thing

Last week I suggested that we need to find a better reason to get Monday off from work than genocide and smallpox, and that there are plenty more worthy holidays to celebrate than Columbus Day, such as National Coming Out Day (though ideally I think we'd also have days of mourning for the American Indian Holocaust and African American Holocaust). In response I received the following email from Joshua Day, who respectfully disagrees:

The historic facts behind Columbus' trip and the slavery he encouraged cannot be disputed or put aside in any way. I concur that slavery certainly is deplorable. Yet, to say or imply that Columbus intentionally brought smallpox upon the population of the peoples or North America is revisionist hindsight. Bear in mind that the medical community in 1492 was very barbaric... . Columbus was not aware of how smallpox was spread or how it could be treated or prevented. It would not make sense for him to intentionally decimate the group of people that he intended to enslave.

Certainly it wouldn't make sense, but it hardly makes him seem like a nicer guy! And when the Indians didn't produce enough gold or prove to be docile enough slaves, he had no compunctions about torture or slaughter. In his essay "Columbus and Western Civilization", historian Howard Zinn writes:

In his quest for gold, Columbus, seeing bits of gold among the Indians, concluded there were huge amounts of it. He ordered the natives to find a certain amount of gold within a certain period of time. And if they did not meet their quota, their arms were hacked off... .Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian who was Columbus’ admiring biographer, acknowledged this. He wrote: "Whoever thought up this ghastly system, Columbus was responsible for it, as the only means of producing gold for export.... Those who fled to the mountains were hunted with hounds, and those who escaped, starvation and disease took toll...

Morison continues: “So the policy and acts of Columbus for which he alone was responsible began the depopulation of the terrestrial paradise that was Hispaniola in 1492. Of the original natives, estimated by modern ethnologist at 300,000 in number, one-third were killed off between 1494 and 1496. By 1508, an enumeration showed only 60,000 alive...in 1548 Oviedo [the official Spanish historian of conquest] doubted whether 500 Indians remained.

... .What the Spaniards did to the Indians is told in horrifying detail by [Dominican Priest] Bartolome de las Casas, whose writing give the most thorough account of the Spanish-Indian encounter... . [He] saw soldier stabbing Indians for sport, dashing babies’ heads on rocks. And when the Indians resisted, the Spaniards hunted them down, equipped for killings with horses, armor plate, lances, pikes, rifles, crossbows, and vicious dogs. Indians who took things belonging to Spaniards--they were not accustomed to the concept of private ownership and gave freely of their own possessions--were beheaded, or burned at the stake.

But although many Indians died from forced labor, starvation or outright murder, Zinn notes that the majority were killed by diseases to which they had no immunity, such as smallpox and typhoid fever. Personally, whether or not Columbus deliberately intended to kill the people of Hispaniola with smallpox seems somewhat irrelevant in view of his general conduct, as I don't feel any more inclined to celebrate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Indians just because not all of them were intentional.

Further, even if Columbus didn't deliberately use smallpox as a weapon against the Indians, others who followed him in his colonization of the "New World" certainly didn't hesitate to. For example, the town of Amherst, Massachusetts is named for the Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who is believed to have deliberately given smallpox-infected blankets to Indians as an early form of germ warfare (see documentation) during the French-Indian War.

But to return to Joshua's email, he says that he wouldn't march in a gay pride celebration: I do not judge homosexuals bisexuals, or transsexuals for their way of life. I know a few and I count them among my friends even though I am the farthest thing from homosexual that there could be. However you would never find me supporting a gay pride/ coming out parade...

Now, I'm not exactly sure what it means to be "the farthest thing from homosexual that there could be." But I do understand that not everyone wants to march in a gay pride parade (though I personally feel that people who don't are missing out). And I have no illusions that Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender & Supporters Day would ever become an official federal holiday in the current political climate. My point was that I would rather see a world in which America celebrated gay rights instead of genocide. But to allow Joshua to conclude:

To acknowledge the fact that Columbus discovered the country in which we live, which established the government which enables people to go on gay pride parades (under current moral standards, whether that was the intention of our Founding Fathers or not) does not celebrate every aspect of who he was or what he did. We cannot whitewash history and pretend that he was not who he was. To make it quaint or acceptable is atrocious; but it should be acknowledged that as far as history is concerned, whether there were Indians or Vikings there first, Columbus has a valid and important place in our history. George Washington owned slaves, yet we celebrate his birthday. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, yet we all acknowledge his giant contributions to freedom. Abraham Lincoln may have freed the slaves but is on record as saying that freeing slaves was a secondary objective to preserving The Union..yet we celebrate his birthday. Therefore, we should also observe Columbus Day.

I certainly agree that we shouldn't whitewash history and make things seem nicer than they are. But Columbus Day is NOT a day on which America pauses and candidly examines its own tangled history. It's a day for big parades and a week's worth of lessons in elementary schools about the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, and how Columbus "discovered" America (how you "discover" an already-populated hemisphere is of course never quite explained).

Honestly, I'm pretty ambivalent about slave-owners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as well (as important as they are to US history), and I don't smile or cheer or buy cars on President's Day. I understand it's not a very popular position. But for me personally, celebrating Columbus Day would be like dancing on the graves of millions of Indians, whether they were killed by bullets or bacteria.

But instead of ending with my ranting I thought I'd switch things around and end with a poem. The following quote comes from "Inside Dachau," a poem by brilliant writer/filmmaker Sherman Alexie (if you don't know who Sherman Alexie is, go find out, you'll be glad you did):

4. the american indian holocaust museum

What do we indigenous people want from our country?
We stand over mass graves. Our collective grief makes us numb.
We are waiting for the construction of our museum.

We too could stack the shoes of our dead and fill a city
to its thirteenth floor. What did you expect us to become?
What do we indigenous people want from our country?
We are waiting for the construction of our museum.

We are the great-grandchildren of Sand Creek and Wounded Knee.
We are the veterans of the Indian wars. We are the sons
and daughters of the walking dead. We have lost everyone.
What do we indigenous people want from our country?
We stand over mass graves. Our collective grief makes us numb.
We are waiting for the construction of our museum.