Happy *Rape, Murder, Pillage, Enslave* Indigenous People's Day!

The need to celebrate Columbus Day seems to hinge somewhat precariously on your (emotional/physical/spiritual) proximity to Italian-American culture. Not surprisingly, San Francisco has the oldest Columbus Day celebration and New York City has the biggest.  Once I read what he actually did -- from his own journals, no less! -- I had no more of an urge to celebrate Columbus' life or "accomplishments" than Adolph Hitler. 

If you think that Columbus deserves a holiday, then so does Stalin. So does Atilla the Hun.  Can you imagine? A parade and a paid day off to celebrate Hitler?

Here's some must read stuff. 

• 7 Myths and Atrocities of Christopher Columbus That Will Make You Cringe
  Here's the one that freaked me out: After several voyages and raping and pillaging, Columbus and his men grew increasingly depraved. When he was replaced as governor of Hispaniola and recalled back to Spain in 1500, he wrote in a casual tone of how he provided sex slaves to his men, some of whom were small children as young as 9, for a high price. Death and Taxes called Columbus “the pimp of the New World.”
  
  
• How badly did Christopher Columbus mistreat the indigenous people he encountered in The New World?
  Here's yet another great reason why Columbus shouldn't be celebrated: Widespread rapes of both women and girls.
  
  Spanish accounts describe how they preferred raping the 10 year olds because they were "tighter."
  
  Women and girls to rape were handed out as rewards to soldiers for a job well done. Columbus also ordered the rape of females in front of family members, daughters in front of the father for example, to break resistance and spread trauma.
  
  Columbus in his own accounts described how he personally raped a "cannibal girl." In his accounts, he convinced himself the girl enjoyed being raped.
  
  
• You Are Still Being Lied To: Howard Zinn's "Columbus and Western Civilization"
  Here's an exerpt: In the standard accounts of Columbus what is emphasized again and again is his religious feeling, his desire to convert the natives to Christianity, his reverence for the Bible. Yes, he was concerned about God. But more about Gold. Just one additional letter. His was a limited alphabet. Yes, all over the island of Hispaniola, where he, his brothers, his men, spent most of their time, he erected crosses. But also, all over the island, they built gallows—340 of them by the year 1500. Crosses and gallows—that deadly historic juxtaposition. 

Here's the good news: there are 16 states and counting!) that don't celebrate Columbus Day unofficially. The states Hawaii, Alaska, Oregon, Vermont and South Dakota do not celebrate it at all. Iowa and Nebraska proclaim the day but don't celebrate it as an official holiday (paid day off, post office closed).

Eventually, this holiday will be phased out, state by state -- and just as it took years to create a national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr, it will be way too easy to look back and see who will remain forever on on the wrong side of history. 

Happy Indigenous People's Day!

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that everyone in the Americas celebrates Columbus Day.  America has its hotspots -- there'll be a big parade in New York City and San Francisco likes to celebrate in the streets, thanks to the large Italian-American populace there -- and so does South America but for the most part, acknowledging what this day encompasses means having to embrace the enormity of what Christopher Columbus really did. 

The 6 million dead because of Hitler is a constant reminder in the media, in movies, in museums and memorials all over the world -- and yet as overwhelming as that loss is, it is dwarfed by the 100 million dead at the hands of Columbus.  The Europeans conquered through disease, not warfare.  Smallpox obliterated the nation.  Smallpox! And that wasn't the only disease, either.  Think of it: at least 90% of the Native American population, gone. In comparison, The Black Plague wiped out 30% to 60% of Europe.

And that's just one of the things Columbus did.

I can't believe Italian-Americans can't come up with another hero to celebrate. What about Amerigo Vespucci, the explorer that disproved Columbus' claim that Brazil and the West Indies were Asian outposts?  South America was initially called America because of him. What about a saint or a priest? San Gennaro, anyone?  Whatever.  With each passing year, throwing that parade up 5th Avenue becomes more and more ridiculous.  Everyone will eventually move on without you.

Actually, everyone is moving on without you.  Seattle and Minneapolis are the latest cities to celebrate Indigenous People's Day, amongst others -- but it should be noted that South Dakota has celebrated Native Americans Day for the past 23 years.  (Freakin' yay.)

So call it what you will --  Dia de la Raza, Native Americans Day, Indigenous Resistance Day or even Indigenous People's Day. But please don't call it Columbus Day.

To touch and review last year's Indigenous People's Day blog post, please click here.

This 1992 poster was created by Seth Tobocman to counter 500th anniversary celebrations of Columbus first arriving in the Americas and to celebrate 500 years of resistance.

Happy Columbus Day? Really?

Why anyone would openly celebrate Cristopher Columbus -- a money-grubbing pedophile, a rapist and the absolute definition of a genocidal maniac -- is beyond me.  So much misinformation has been dumped into the our educational DNA about him for so long that his "accomplishments" are some of the first bits of history that are collectively learned by rote (kind of like George Washington and that cherry tree) and hardly ever considered.  And then one day, you open a well-researched biography and are shocked beyond reason that Columbus is anyone's hero.

How can our leaders think that this country embodies freedom and justice and anything that's good when genocide is openly celebrated?  I know, I know -- there's a bad side to every historical figure. But this is pure evil. 

Can you imagine Germans celebrating Adolph Hitler with parades and festivals and whatnot? Unthinkable, right? Yet I've had conversations with Germans who have declared privately that Adolph wasn't all bad. He fixed the economy which was in ruins after World War I, he rebuilt the military, he united a nation, he built the Autobahn...

But I digress.

I don't think they're going to cancel on Columbus Day because it's a federal holiday and that would involve way too much hoopla and paperwork and whatnot.  I mean, have they ever undone a federal holiday? Is there a precedent for that?  If they did pull it off, it would go over like a lead balloon. Columbus Day is celebrated in South America, too. I wonder how Columbus Day celebrations are going in the Dominican Republic right about now.

Should Cortez the Killer have his own holiday, too?

I'm hopeful that in time, it'll turn into a holiday with no absolutely no participants. No parade attendees. No celebrations.  We'll all take the day off and stay in and watch Fellini movies. And Italians can throw themselves a party over something else.

In the meantime, get thee to a bookstore or a library if you're really broke (no excuses, folks) and dig into something on this reading list:

1. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America by Ivan van Sertima That's right, Italian white folks -- Africans were here way before the Vikings. (Ka-BOOM.)
2. 1493: Uncovering The New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann
3. A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (This one is a basic.)
4. A People's History of American Empire by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle (This is a very accessible, beautiful and ultracool graphic novel, an absolute must-read.)
5. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

...and in the spirit of a perpetual visual education for all, here's a video from howcast that sums up the Columbus Controversy neatly and a comic from The Oatmeal that breaks Columbus all the way down to some ugly truths.

Reconsider Columbus Day

They lied to you in school. Christopher Columbus was an obsessively cruel religious zealot, a genocidal maniac responsible for slaughtering millions of natives in the Americas in the most violent ways imaginable and initiating the slave trade. Oh -- and he was also a heroin addict. No one knows what he actually looks like. Most historians aren't even sure what his real name is. He may not even be Italian.

It's no small wonder that many Americans would prefer not to celebrate Columbus Day. There is a growing movement to reconsider this holiday, see it for what it is and deconstruct it entirely for a day that honors people of color. The state of South Dakota has officially changed Columbus Day to Native American Day. Meanwhile, 22 states refuse to recognize this holiday.

Now, that's the kind of stuff that makes me proud to be an American. If you agree, you can sign the online petition to create a national holiday for Native Americans.



Here's a few fun facts about Christopher Columbus that will probably blow your hair back, if you've got any. How much of this did you learn in school?

1. Columbus was a fervent Catholic who believed God had chosen him for a great destiny -- but his folks may have been "conversos" -- converted Spanish Jews!
   
2. Christopher Columbus’ real name is not Christopher Columbus, although interestingly, that's the name that he chose for himself. His name varies from country to country. In Genoa (his birthplace, supposedly) it's Chrisoffa Corombo. Some historians claim that Columbus was in reality a Portuguese Jew whose real name was Salvador Fernandes Zarco.
3. Columbus wrote in Spanish -- not Italian or Latin! -- his entire life. (See #1 and #2.)
   
4. Columbus began sailing at the age of 14.
5. Columbus never wanted to prove the Earth was round because everyone already knew it. His goal was to find an overseas trade route to India and China. Thanks to their proximity to the Mediterranean Sea, Italy controlled trade to the East -- so they weren't all that excited about him looking for a new route.
   
6. It was Columbus' younger brother Bartholomew’s idea to sail across the ocean -- not his.
7. Contrary to popular myth, Spain's Queen Isabella never sold her jewelry to pay for Columbus's voyage. She and King Ferdinand financed the trip partly through investors -- Italian investors! (See #5.)
   
8. Columbus made four trips west but he never actually set foot on U.S. soil. Initially, he landed on an island in the Bahamas.
9. Columbus always insisted -- in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary -- that the land he "discovered" was a part of the Asian continent, as described by Marco Polo and other European explorers.
   
10. Columbus is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent men, women, children and infants in The New World. He's the one who opened the door for Cortez the Killer and many other European explorers to sail to the west and decimate the indigenous people of the Americas. He all but wiped out the Tainos, the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, and the northern Lesser Antilles. They were beaten, tortured, raped, enslaved and murdered. According to Ward Churchill, former professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado: By 1496, the Taino population had been reduced from as many as eight million to around three million. In 1514, a census showed only 22,000 Taino remained alive. By 1542 there were only 200 remaining and after that, they were considered extinct, as was becoming more and more the case throughout the Caribbean basin. The Taino are NOT extinct, by the way.
11. Columbus was the new world's first slave trader. Failing at finding enough gold to pay investors in in his second voyage, Columbus returned to Spain with 500 Arawaks (Tainos) of which 300 survived to be sold “naked as the day they were born.”
12. Columbus reintroduced horses to the West. YES, there were horses here some 12,ooo years before the Spaniards showed up with Mustangs that went feral and ran wild across the plains. Scientific evidence shows that although the horse (equues ferus) originated in North America and thrived here for over 57 million years, they died out after the Pleistocene era. There are interesting theories as to what may have happened.
    
13. Columbus was an opium addict -- the same drug used in producing modern-day heroin. (This wasn't unusual in the 1400s. The King and Queen of Spain were hooked, too.)
    
14. Paintings depicting Columbus are not based on his actual looks. He is said to have light eyes, freckles and red hair.