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Monday marked the 75th anniversary of a national holiday purported to celebrate the unofficial beginning of the American empire. Many places of business, and even more schools, close on Columbus Day to recognize our supposed debt to the "discoverer" of America.
My favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., noted, "People had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat and kill them."
The story of Columbus's discovery of the Americas is a feel-good story of justification for Europe's descendants living in the U.S. today, and we ought to reject it as part of our national narrative.
Our nation was founded on the stolen land of the Native Americans. Far from being an outrageous claim, this statement is fully supported by the annals of history. Think about it this way: there were millions of people living free when the Europeans arrived, but a mere century later the small percentage remaining were under the yoke of colonialism.
We own the land; European culture dominates. How could this have possibly come to be without European imperialism combined with overwhelming force?
Columbus and the European colonizers who followed him were responsible for the genocide and mass enslavement of millions of people living in the Caribbean, and eventually, those on the mainland.
For example, estimates of the native Haitian population in 1492, before Columbus landed, put the population at about eight million. By 1516, only 12,000 Haitians remained, thanks to the Indian slave trade and forced labor policies that made the population toil in mines rather than tend to their traditional agrarian lifestyles.
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Columbus himself sent the first slaves across the Atlantic and probably sent more slaves to Europe than any other individual, according to the enlightening book "Lies My Teacher Told Me," written by James Loewen.
European treatment of Native Americans during colonization has been described as the "original sin" of America by anthropologist Sol Tax. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population, which consider the epidemics to have been caused by contact with Europeans, report around 100 million Native Americans.
By 1880, the native population had been reduced to 250,000. Historian David Horowitz notes that for 200 years "almost continuous warfare raged on the American continent." War against the Native Americans, whether defensive or offensive in nature, absorbed 80 percent of the federal budget during the first presidency. This war included killing men, women and children and systematically raping women. The Cherokee Trail of Tears is just one example of forcible removal of entire populations from their ancestral homeland, motivated only by the greed of our ancestors.
Driven by their own desire for material resources, many Europeans tricked Native Americans into deals that effectively boiled down to stealing. The pretty-beads-for-an-island story isn't far from the truth, given that they generally had a different conception of property rights than their colonizers. To many of them, one couldn't own the land, and thus signing it away was nonsensical. The imposition of European notions of property rights essentially took advantage of the Native Americans.
I implore you to cease subscribing to the myth of America's "discovery" and its early history. Since I'm unable to give the full account here, I highly recommend "Lies My Teacher Told Me" as a starting point. The book provides a more accurate account of American history, with hundreds of references for further study.
Far from being a cause for celebration, Columbus Day marks the beginning of the stealing, cheating and killing of the millions of Native Americans who lived full, engaging lives on this continent before our ancestors arrived.
-Beth Mendenhall is a senior in political science and philosophy. Please send comments to opinion@spub.ksu.edu.
I would give thousand pelts
To sleep with Pocahontas
And find out how she felt
In the mornin'
on the fields of green
In the homeland
we've never seen.
said very eloquently and without hate- like your point
Would be nice if you could get your comments out of the gutter.
Grow up.
I submit that if you truly wanted to learn from Columbus Day, you would recognize that America has changed. You should also recognize that your writing and your research have an unforgivable liberal bias. I encourage you to take a week off from writing and spend that time educating yourself on something meaningful, like the Senate’s Health Care Reform Bill.Respectfully,r3cipr0c1ty
"New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become." That's from the same book quoted in the article (Breakfast of Champions). so what is it, preserve the savage lifestyle content with conflicting mythical revelations and limited knowledge of the natural environment or the ushering in of freedom and progress by way of the European discovery of the Western hemisphere? Europeans were typical savages by today's standards. But the result of their discovery was significant. and the benefits are all around you.