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- From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
- Subject: INTRODICTMENT: Campaign for a Post-Columbian World
- Message-ID: <1992Aug17.140303.19594@mont.cs.missouri.edu>
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- Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 14:03:03 GMT
- Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Lines: 183
-
- From: nlns@igc.org (New Liberation News Service)
-
- Included below is an article from the New Liberation News Service
- (NLNS) Packet 2.11 -- our autoposter is posting one
- article at a time from this 168K file.
-
- To find out more about NLNS, use GET (explained below) on NLNS BROCHURE.
-
- To find out more about the PROG-PUBS (Progressive Publications) email
- mailing list, use GET on CAMPUS PROGPUBS, or contact RJ Hinde at
- rjh1@midway.uchicago.edu
- --Harel B.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- NLNS Packet 2.11 - July/August, 1992
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
- 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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