October 7, 2018

Who discovered America? The correct answer is NOBODY! It’s estimated that there were 10 million people living in North America in 1492. They knew they existed. When Columbus first arrived in the Bahamas, the local Arawak didn’t the think, “Holy crap, we’ve been discovered! Now we really can start living!” More likely they thought it was the apocalypse and for them it was. The indigenous population of the Americas was virtually erased in the next 300 years.

I still find it shocking that we celebrate Columbus Day knowing what we know. But then again, in this country with President Pussy Grabber and Supreme Court Justice Kavanbro, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised we exalt the father of rape culture. My hope is that the year-old #Metoo movement will take on this genocidal maniac that made Harvey Weinstein look like Al Franken. (I’ll admit that is a weird joke, but you get the idea.)

Over two million people have read Howard Zinn’s earth-shattering book, A People’s History of the United States of America (first published in 1980). I’m guessing it’s a lot more than two million. That book gets passed around like a rap mix tape. I was first handed a copy in my freshman dorm by a sophomore who just said, “Start reading.” The first chapter, “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” forever ended my Eurocentric mythologizing of the little Italian that could. The brutality of the invaders to the Americas made me wretch. Local people who would not engage in the white man’s obsessive search for gold had their ears, noses, and hands hacked off or were ripped to shreds by the explorers attack dogs. And it just gets worst from there.

Columbus was the world’s first slave master. On his first voyage, he recognized the bountiful supply of free labor among the unarmed Arawaks, needed to replenish the slave supply on the Canary Islands, writing, “We could subjugate them all.” He sent 500 captives back to Spain and another 600 enslaved were to serve the Spanish men remaining island. Those that fought back or escaped to what is now Cuba were slaughtered or chased and the inhabitants of the next island experienced the same fate. Those that weren’t murdered by the European invaders, were killed by the diseases they brought, or committed suicide rather than live under the brutal subjugation of the white Christians. By the time of his fourth voyage to the region in 1502, there were barely any indigenous people left.

The savagery of Columbus includes documented widespread rape of local women and girls. Columbus routinely “gifted” women to his men, whose rapes produced the first mestizos of the Americas. One such rape was recorded by Michele de Cuneo on Columbus’s second expedition. 

While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful woman, whom the Lord Admiral (Columbus) gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked — as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores.

Because of the growing problem of sexually transmitted disease, Columbus and his men began the sex trafficking of younger and younger girls. This great American hero wrote to a friend in 1500, “A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.” This pimp is upheld to school children as our first great hero.

This fall I’m having my students read Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) by James W. Loewen. His chapter on Columbus asks a provocative question – If Columbus is the true discoverer of America (and Loewen details all the travelers who arrived before Columbus, including Africans and Vikings), then why don’t Latin American countries celebrate Columbus Day? The answer is these countries don’t identify with the European conqueror but the indigenous conquered. They include the millions of mestizos who are the result of the raping and pillaging of the Columbus and the subsequent waves of European invaders. In the United States, we identify with the conquering rapists.

I’m waiting for President Pussy Grabber to tell us what a “very fine man” Christopher Columbus was and promising to make it safe to say “Happy Columbus Day” again. In the meantime, the truth is out about Columbus. As our nation becomes more brown, the white-washing of history is falling apart. Already five states, Alaska, South Dakota, Vermont, Hawaii and my own Oregon, have ended the celebration and many cities have renamed the occasion Indigenous Peoples Day. Columbus Day has only been on the books since 1937, so we should be able to rid ourselves of this shameful observance long before it hits 100.

Now if we could just do the same with the rape culture that defends it.