From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: INTRODICTMENT: Campaign for a Post-Columbian World
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 14:03:03 GMT

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NLNS  Packet 2.11  -  July/August, 1992
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INTRODICTMENT: Campaign for a Post-Columbian World
Campaign for a Post-Columbian World

(NLNS)--1492:  Cristobal Colon--who has never before commanded a
ship--sails the ocean blue in search of a passage to India and
accidentally lands in the Caribbean.  He steals the reward for first
sight of land from a member of his crew.  On arrival, his scribe
draws up a document stating that this land (now the Bahamas)
belongs to Spain, although it is inhabited by naked people "with
handsome bodies and very good faces. . . the best people in the
world and the gentles. . . they love their neighbors as themselves."
(Nevertheless, two days after landing, Colon is seeking a place to
build a fortress.)  Not understanding the natives' language, Colon
says they "did not speak."
	This moment has been immortalized by Admiral Samuel
Morison:
 ". . . the New World gracefully yielded her virginity to the
conquering Castilians."  Although others have been there before him,
Colon's officially sponsored expedition makes public the discovery
of a "New World," unleashing the age of modern colonialism.
Norsemen found North America and settled in Newfoundland in the
10th and 11th centuries, but Colon's mandate from the Spanish
crown was to "discoverey and acquire."  "My desire," he writes, "was
to pass by no singled island without taking possession of it."  On his
first voyage, Colon sees three mermaids with the faces of men.  Alas,
no artists are included in Colon's expeditionary forces.  In fact, writes
Kirkpatrick Sale, "Apparently not once in all of Spain's history of
discovery did it send out an artist of any sort."
	Through negligence, Colon's flagship, the Santa Maria, is
wrecked off "Espanola" (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), but
Guacanagari, the local Taino leader, saves all its people and cargo
and helps them set up the first colony.  (He will later flee to the
mountains, and dies "a wanderer, ruined and deprived of his state.")
When Colon sails back to Spain, he kidnaps several "Indians," who
are to be given to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and exhibited
in "Europe along with plants, birds, and some gold.  In 1493 (partly
financed by wealth stolen from the Spanish Jews, who were expelled
from Spain, like the Moors, in 1492), Columbus returns to the
Caribbean with 17 ships, 1200 men, 20 purebred dogs, cows,
chickens, pigs and alien seeds.  Environmental destruction begins in
earnest.  (Colon will later notice that the loss of forests results in less
mist and rain.)  This time he stays for three years searching for gold.
Each 'Indian" over the age of fourteen is obliged to deliver a certain
amount of gold.  Those failing to meet their quotas are punished by
mutilation (hands and limbs cut off) and rebels are burned at the
stake.  Since there is a very little gold, people flee or are killed.
	Although Colon finds "many statues in the shape of women
and many mask-like heads very well made," he decides that "these
people have no religious beliefs, nor are they idolaters.  They are
very gentle and do not know what evil is; nor do they kill others,
nor steal; and they are without weapons. . . aware that there is a
God in the heaven. . ."  Yet it is not long before Colon is advising his
men to attack native people; he is "pleased because now the Indians
would fear the Christians."  Good "Indians" are called Tainos and
bad "Indians" are called Caribs, who are purportedly cannibals, but
Colon remarks that "since they were armed they must be people of
intelligence."  He sends his hunting dogs, who are said to be able to
distinguish "pagan" from Christian tracks, to hunt down Native
people.  He collects slaves to pay  back his debt.
	On February 17, 1495, Colon rounds up 1600 people and
takes 550 healthy males and females onto the caravels; the rest are
divided up among the colonists remaining on land.  Over 200
'Indians" die en route to Europe.  (Of the possibly 3 million people
living in the area in 1492, only 200 will remain in 1542.)
	In 1498, Colon's Third Voyage is manned by pardoned
criminals.  (Meanwhile, the Portuguese Vasco de Gama has found
the route to the real Indies.)  Colon finds the mouth of the Orinoco
and guesses that Latin America is a continent.  He has begun to call
his domain the "West Indies. . . 1500, 340 gallows are installed on
Espanola, and Colon himself is returned to Spain in chains for greed
and bad government.  Eventually exonerated, he leaves again in
1052--badly crippled--for his fourth voyage of exploration.  All four
of his ships are lost and he is marooned on Jamaica for a year.  He
sails near the coats of Honduras and Panama, and is only 200 miles
from the Yucatan, but the mainland eludes him.  Colon returns to
Spain in 1504 and dies in May 1506, claiming to be ruined but in fact
leaving a fortune.
	In 1505 African slavery begins in the Caribbean since not
enough "Indians" remain to work the colonies.
	The Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas, who comes to
Espanola in 1502, is relatively sympathetic to the native people and
maintains, unlike many, that they have souls.  He writes that "the
Spaniards made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off
his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels.  They tore the
babes from their mothers' breasts by the feet and dashed their heads
against the rocks.  [They burned thirteen Indians alive] in honor and
reverence of our Redeemer and the Twelve Apostles."
	In 1511, Hatuey, cacique of the Guahaba region of Cuba, is
offered glory and eternal rest if he agrees to be baptized before
being burned alive.  Hatuey asks:  "Are there Christians in that
heaven?"  "Yes" is the reply.  Hatuey chooses hell, and the fire is lit.
	The enslavement of Native peoples continues in North
America, with Corte Real, Verrazano, Gomes and Frobisher
kidnaping mothers, babies, and men through the 16th century,
although European public opinion eventually turns against the
practice.
	By 1538 the hemisphere is being called the Americas after
Amerigo Vespucci.  Only Las Casas protests that the "new" continents
should be called Columba.
	1570:  A Spanish mission in what will become tidewater
Virginia is wiped out by "Indians."
	1607:  The second successful invasion of the Americas is
begun by the British in Jamestown.  Columbus Day is celebrated in
the U.S. in 1792 (and again in 1892), but no statue is erected to
Colon in Spain until 350 years after his death.  His reputation
aggrandizes slowly in the New World and then spreads to the Old.
Las [???? illegible???]. . . compatible with the American myth of the
Frontier--begins in earnest.
	In 1866, the Vatican begins beatification proceedings for
Cristobal Colon.  The process is halted when it is acknowledged that
the putative saint had a mistress and introduced slavery into the
Americas.  It is only in 1971 (after a law passed in 1968) that
Columbus Day is established as a legal federal holiday in the U.S.A.,
although various presidential proclamations and local statutes date
from 1907, 1912, 1920 and 1934.
	1992:  Despite the fact that for native people, the celebration
of Columbus (and the trail of murder, theft, and broken treaties that
followed his "discovery") is akin to celebrating Hitler's ascendance or
the bombing of Hiroshima, 1992 is marked by official fanfare,
exhibitions, events; replicas of the first three ships are sailing in from
various points abroad; three solar-powered "space caravels are racing
to Mars.  Anything named Columbus is a focus of attention."
	The story of Columbus being told in 1992 features the arrival
of "civilization" (European) in a land "unowned" by the hundreds of
"primitive" Native nations living there, and thus ripe of the inevitable
"March of Progress."  The obliteration of 98 percent of the original
population of the hemisphere by massacre, warfare, starvation, and
imported disease is pictured as an unfortunate side effect.  The
official story ignores the gross injustices and incredible suffering that
occurred along this march--first of all to the indigenous peoples of
the hemisphere, but also to an Africa still mourning the loss of her
abducted and enslaved populations, and to the nations of Europe
and Asia affected by the industrial revolution's habit of driving
people off the land and onto boats.
	The Columbus Quincentennial raises a matrix of complex
issues relating to the environment, racism, intervention, access to
freedom of expression, sovereignty, autonomy, land rights and
cultural rights.  This booklet offers some alternative ways in which
cultural workers can combat the official story.  Our focus is not just
on Colon-bashing and countering the widespread misinformation
about this "hero," but on re-viewing the 500 years of colonialism
which he symbolizes, and opening up more hopeful vistas for a
Post-Columbian era.

>From Alliance for Cultural Democracy's organizer's guide, in March
1992 Z (150 W. Canton St., Boston, MA 02118; (617) 236-5878).

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