It’s so cool to have smart, educated people round here.
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That’s just because Minnesota was settled by Swedes and not Italians. Columbus Day has almost nothing to do with Columbus the man but with Italian-Americans who were once looked down upon much like Mexican-Americans are today. But Minnesota is hardly innocent in this historical whitewashing. The Vikings were evil thugs who raped and murdered thousands. So why honor them with a sports team?
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This may be an aside for you, but per “That’s a nice idea,… not Europeans who thought better of the unconscionable, no matter how thoroughly they repented.” Well, there are a lot of us who are Native American and choose not to identify ourselves at all. People always assume I am 100% Caucasian, and perhaps that is a safe bet except for me it isn’t since, being 1/4 Creek, I am in fact Native American as recognized by the US Government and my tribe. There are a great deal of us who look white, and gasp, we talk and act like the rest of the country. And there are some of us who are less then 1/4 and yet have Native American ancestors, like my husband. So, gusuks are perhaps okay in taking this stand but we need to realize that we are all sons and daughters of both the oppressor and oppressed.
And, in Alaska, where indigenous people enjoy a higher ratio, Columbus day is not celebrated at all because the dude was so offensive. Alaskans choose to ignore the day entirely. In South Dakota it is Native American Day, which I think is hilarious as some of my white ancestors homesteaded in holy lands there (funny as in makes my skin crawl). Just some thoughts. There are other pedophiles we have “celebrated”, the founder of Metlkatla is one (Pastor Duncun) - the red heads are part of the population as a wink wink nudge nudge offspring.
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But he also made the worst Harry Potter movies, so screw 'im.
I don’t deny that Jefferson and Washington owned slaves, but they were genuine architects of modern democracy, and most rich white guys owned slaves in that period. There was a least some evidence that they had some measure of moral fortitude. Columbus was a dumb as fuck gold hunter, arguably the FATHER of the slave trade, a brutal murderer and torturer, who forced children into sexual slavery. He would be judged harshly even by the standards of his own day. It’s not “incredibly easy to take him down using today’s social standards,” it’s incredibly easy to take him down by any day’s standard.
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I think those people were at least captured in wars. In Europe you only had to make the nobility mad to have that an much worse done to you.
Hi Cory, et. al. Matthew Inman constructively proposed Barolome de las Casas as an alternative to Columbus. Rather than “maybe the right people to celebrate are the indigenous heroes and victims of Europeans”, it would be more constructive to proactively suggest a specific alternative, as Inman did. He did some heavy lifting, there. I know you all are up to the challenge. Godspeed.
Probably because there were more Italian than Spanish immigrants in the US at the time, especially in areas with a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment. Although the founder of the K of C was Irish…
Exploration’s still worth celebrating, though. Maybe keep the day, get rid of Columbus, and just call it “Discoverers’ Day” like they do in Hawaii- roll in Leif Erikson, Las Casas and maybe Lewis and Clark as well…
The myth of de las Casas as a founder of Universal Human Rights is incredibly problematic. The man advocated for a more humane treatment of the Native Americans for the express purpose that the Spanish colonies would have subjects to govern in the first place, in the sense that the more rapacious Conquistadors were wiping them out at an exponential rate, aided by infectious disease and other factors. De las Casas was also of the opinion that brutalized subjects made for bad subjects, more likely to resist and disobey the laws of the Spanish crown. He cared not only about natives’ bodies but their souls as well, i.e., a dead native cannot be converted and will not make a humble, docile subject of God and the King of Spain. De las Casas preached a “hearts and minds” doctrine, if you will, not so much for the natives themselves, but for Spain and its imperial ambitions.
I Frier Bartholomeas de las Casas or Casaus of the Order of St. Dominick, who through the mercy of God am Arriv'd at the Spanish Court, Cordially wishing the expulsion of Hell or these Hellish Acts out of the Indies; fearing least those Souls redeemed by the pretious Blood of Christ, should perish eternally, but heartily desiring that they may acknowledge their Creator and be saved; as also for the care and compassion that I ever had for my Native Countrey Castile, dreading least God should destroy it for the many sins committed by the Natives her Children, against Faith, Honour and their Neighbours.
Not exactly someone interested in the natives qua natives, but as potential Christians ad majorem dei gloriam. De las Casas has some incredibly moving things to say about humans being humans, but he means this squarely in a Christian context, i.e., all souls are Christian, so let’s not kill potential Christians, because unchristian.
For all the peoples of the world are men, and the definition of all men, collectively
and severally, is one: that they are rational beings. All possess understanding and volition, being formed in the image and likeness of God; all have the five exterior senses and the four interior senses, and are moved by the objects of these; all have natural capacity or faculties to understand and master the knowledge that they do not have; and this is true not only of those that are inclined toward good but those that by reason of their depraved customs are bad; all take pleasure in goodness and in happy and pleasant things and all abhor evil and reject what offends or grieves them… Thus all mankind is one, and all men are alike in what concerns their creation and all natural things, and no one is born enlightened. From this it follows that all of us must be guided and aided at first by those who were born before us. And the savage peoples of the earth may be compared to uncultivated soil that readily brings forth weeds and useless thorns, but has within itself such natural virtue that by labor and cultivation it may be made to yield sound and healthful fruits.
The last part is a fairer indication as to de las Casas’s project than the writing of this twentieth- and twenty-first-century champions-apologists. The paternalism, Christocentrism, and Eurocentrism of this–and the implications therefrom–must not be lost for us moderns. It’s not a statement of human rights: it’s a prospectus for a better, fairer, juster, and hence better-working, empire-building, and a Christian syllogism: all men have souls, thus all men are potential Christians, so let’s go get those souls. The downplaying of native identities as so many “weeds and useless thorns” should raise more than a few hackles among my BB colleagues.
Remember that the right to self-determination is a cornerstone of any contemporary or even recent view of what constitutes human rights. De las Casas’s efforts to humanize the Spanish conquest were indeed heroic, but please try to understand his efforts in light of their historical context, and not according to the fantasies of our present day. Remember too that we have another figure of the heroic colonialist arguing for a more just and humane treatment of the colonized Other: Conrad’s Mister Kurtz. And I think we know how that story ends.
Re: finding one’s “humanity” in the experience of the Other: it’s a mawkish, tone-deaf ending to the Oatmeal comic for anyone who’s spent time reading and de-coding these incredibly racist, privileged, gross stories of how Others exist as foils for the Great-Hearted European On Tour. Bugdor much, Oatmeal?
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Maggie, I’d also recommend Hidden Cities: the Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization as a companion piece. It’s tragic to lose that many people; it’s also tragic that 90% of their surviving earthworks were destroyed in the last 150 years. Differing scales of tragedy.
Because American football is a brutal, thugish sport?
True, but we are talking imaginary role reversal here. If the Americas was where expansionist thought and technological advancement was in play instead of the old world, I imagine they would have had the same disease incubating cities that the old world had.
That might be a little uncharitable, given the fact that the account was written from a friar to the standing Spanish king, and therefore had a specific purpose that might not have been achieved with a purely humanistic argument. It would be similar to addressing government about the dangers of drilling for oil in an environmentally fragile area - you might want to focus on the danger to the bottom line and future elections in addition to dire warnings about risks to the environment in a location the leaders have never visited and might not care too much about. There’s also the fact that he would consider the natives’ souls as an accepted fact rather than a purely religious issue.
A smaller point is that he was comparing the natives to unprepared soil and the weeds to their works. Essentially, they were untrained people with the same potential as Spaniards, but the disadvantage of not being exposed to good teaching. This obviously demonstrates his assumption of the superiority of an ideal form of Christian teaching, but I think the main thrust of his argument was similar to the Declaration of Independence - “all men are created equal”. You can take the created part out without doing too much damage to the rest of the argument.
I’m a little puzzled as to why the Oatmeal considered him worthy of ‘deification’ though, considering how much a child of his time he was.
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I am envious of your ability to read the original, being a typical American single-language dolt. I was deeply impressed by the translation I read years ago, and made a point of investigating the history at that time (I have a close friend who has some professional expertise in the area).
Your post was definitely not “giving Colombus a pass”, and I will humbly accept your admonition that we shouldn’t ignore real data; you’re quite right. At the same time, in the context I read your post, it seemed to me to be casting doubt on the accuracy of de la Casas’ work in general, by highlighting problematic points without also stressing that de la Casas reported atrocities that are well substantiated.
I would love to read some of the scholarly work you mentioned regarding the inaccuracies; is it available in English?
How about Deganawida Day? People don’t seem to remember how democracy was alive here long before Europeans arrived.
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Here in Argentina, President Cristina Fernandez just changed the name of the holiday to Cultural Diversity Day, since we still want to sleep in, but trying to decide on a new person would be difficult I suppose. In Venezuela and Nicaragua, they upped the ante a little and renamed it Indigenous Resistance Day, which gotta tell you, makes me feel kinda good, a rare thing on a public holiday, a rare thing indeed . . .
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Fair enough… however, I would say that maybe we are thinking of technology deterministically? That advanced technology means things are going to look a certain way, like they did in Europe in the 16th century. Do you think that technology shapes environment, or that we determine the shape of technology?
Plus, plenty of historians argue that the technological leap between Europe and the rest of Eurasia did not really emerged until the 19th century (see Frank and Pomeranz for that rather convincing argument). That’s not to say that Eurasia was not more “technologically advanced” than the Americas, of course, but if some sort of advanced technologies had developed in the Americas, instead of Eurasia, it might not have looked the same or taken on the same characteristics of conquest as they did in Europe. If the rest of Eurasia was on par (or as Frank/Pomeranz argue) or ahead of Europe until the 19th century, before the industrial revolution and violent colonialism and state sponsoring of markets, had a decisive impact, why did they not take to conquering in the same way, and instead focus on trade and interactions? I don’t think advanced technology is the same as a conquering culture.
Does that make some sense?
I realize that all things California and particularly Berkeley have the inherent potential to induce fatal bouts of eye rolling, but why do we need to celebrate another European when we could recognize Indigenous People’s Day?
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