TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112690/1126630.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                IDEAS, Page 79

Good Guy or Dirty Word?


Revisionists see Christopher Columbus as a precursor of
ecological despoliation and Indian genocide

By JOHN ELSON -- With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami and Michael
P. Harris/Washington


    "No man has done more to change the course of human history
than Christopher Columbus." That was the conclusion of Edward
Channing's 1905 classic, History of the United States. To
generations of American schoolchildren, Columbus has been the
all-time heroic figure portrayed by Channing and, more
romantically, by Washington Irving in 1828: "a man of great and
inventive genius" whose "ambition was lofty and noble." No
wonder that Pope Pius IX wanted to make the discoverer of
America a saint, or that more places in the English-speaking
world are named for the Admiral of the Ocean Sea than for any
other historical personage except Queen Victoria.

    How the pendulum has swung. In some quarters nowadays, the
name of the man who sailed the ocean blue in 1492 is a
downright dirty word. Russell Means, the Native American
activist, says the explorer "makes Hitler look like a juvenile
delinquent." In a new revisionist biography, The Conquest of
Paradise (Knopf; $24.95), author and environmentalist
Kirkpatrick Sale portrays Cristobal Colon (to name Columbus
correctly) as a grasping fortune hunter, a mediocre sailor and
an incompetent governor of Spain's New World colonies, whose
legacy to the Indians he "discovered" was rapine, servitude and
death.

    In the U.S. and Latin America, the 500th anniversary of
Columbus' first voyage to the New World is still two years
away, but already it is marred by snappish and divisive
quarrels over the meaning of the event. Native American zealots
like Means see Columbus as a precursor of exploitation and
conquest. Hispanic Americans want to use the quincentenary to
stress the glories of Spanish culture in the New World.
Environmentalists see the anniversary as a reminder that the
arrival of Europeans meant the despoliation of the New World and
as a potential inspiration to modern-day Americans to save
what is left of the hemisphere's threatened landscape.

    The Columbus anniversary has also sparked religious battles.
In May the governing board of the predominantly Protestant
National Council of Churches resolved that the quincentenary
should be a time for penitence rather than jubilation. "For the
descendants of the survivors of the subsequent invasion,
genocide, slavery, `ecocide' and exploitation of the wealth of
the land," read the resolution, "a celebration is not an
appropriate observance of this anniversary." Mario Paredes,
executive director of the Northeast Hispanic Catholic Center,
called the council's statement a "racist depreciation of the
heritages of most of today's American peoples, especially
Hispanic."

    At its annual meeting in Washington last week the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops also joined the Columbus fray,
in a pastoral letter on the evangelization of the Americas. The
text acknowledged that indigenous Americans' encounter with
Europeans was "harsh and painful." Nonetheless, the bishops
went on, "the effort to portray the history of the encounter
as a totally negative experience in which only violence and
exploitation of the native peoples were present is not an
accurate interpretation of the past."

    If anything, the Columbus controversy is more intense in
Latin America and the Caribbean. Fidel Castro has renounced his
own Hispanic background to declare himself an Indian and
denounce the conquerors for raping and enslaving "our people"
-- the ultimate, perhaps, in expropriation. Conservative
prelates of the Latin American Catholic bishops' conference
(CELAM), which will meet in Santo Domingo in 1992, are pushing
for an anniversary declaration that stresses the heroism of
missionaries who tried to defend the Indians from
conquistadorial cruelty. But CELAM will also sponsor a
"people's tribunal" of minority representatives and leftist
adherents of liberation theology, who propose to pass judgment
on 500 years of European conquest.

    In truth, there is much to censure and correct in the record
that begins with Columbus. U.S. textbooks are just beginning
to give proper emphasis to pre-Columbian cultures. Sale's
iconoclastic biography is as one-sided as a lawyer's brief, but
the evidence of European disdain for the conquered Eden and its
inhabitants is hard to challenge. Between 1492 and 1514, as a
result of disease and accumulated atrocities, the native Taino
population on the island of Hispaniola shrank from an estimated
8 million to 28,000. By 1560 the Taino were extinct.

    But good history calls for careful distinctions. In the
Jesuit weekly America, Rutgers Professor James Muldoon has
argued that the National Council of Churches' resolution is
unhistorical. The council blamed Europeans for introducing
slavery into the various new worlds they encountered, ignoring
evidence that the Aztec and Inca empires were also based on
forced servitude. The resolution virtually ignores a reality
highlighted by the Catholic bishops' pastoral: that the evils
condemned by the council were first noted, in angry detail, by
early Spanish defenders of Indian rights like the Dominican
friar Bartoleme de Las Casas.

    Stripped of its pious rhetoric, Muldoon argues, the
council's resolution amounts to a "condemnation of the entire
history of the modern world." As such, it represents a peculiar
form of intellectual masochism, selectively judging the past
by the imperfect standards of the present. Moreover, even
sweeping apologies for historical sins are unlikely to satisfy
the angry advocates of belated justice for Native Americans,
some of whom would settle for nothing less than canceling the
festivals entirely.