As is typical, on Columbus Day, I reconsider the meaning of this holiday. To put it mildly, although accomplished, Christopher Columbus was not a nice man. As not only an Italian-American, but a Genoese-American, I think that our community can nominate a much better representative than Columbus, who sailed for Spanish monarchs four centuries before Italy existed as a nation... and I'm not the only Italian-American to reconsider this representation. I wouldn't object to renaming the day Antonio Del Monaco Day- he was a handsome guy and he recorded one of the great Italian standards:
Of course, the holiday itself should be kept- when I got home from work after 2AM, I only found a parking space close to home because the alternate side parking rules were suspended. Che miracolo!
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This shit is utterly ludicrous.
I'm not sure what we think Columbus should have been, but he was a hard-charging fifteenth century navigator. He did his job, and until you want to try to live that life (I sure don't) you kind of need to recognize the world and the times in which he lived.
We really should be smarter and more capable of analyzing our own history than this....
I sometimes pause to realize my body would not exist if colonialism didn't. I've got some kind of Native background somewhere in the mix, but as I explained to my spouse, there is no village on any map I can point to and say "This is where my ancestors are from". I can't empathize with genocide or conversion at sword point or slavery--but I'm the product of all of that--and at sea as to which of my ancestors did what to whom.
I guess that's why Columbus Day isn't a thing for me so much as Independence Day is. So many explorers, so much colonialism--but the impetus for getting the ball rolling to Anti? I'm really cool with being anti. Am I anti-Columbus--eh? Someone was bound to discover Hispaniola and all that. He was awful at it. But he also didn't know where exactly he was. The blinkered-ass founding fathers which comprised some of my asshole ancestors knew a little better where they were, and a little more what they were about.
The real discovery of America remains aspirational--although some of my ancestors probably knew it very well. I am okay with this discovery still being ongoing. I am okay with being disillusioned with some of the heroes we were told to respect. I hope we do better ourselves and teach younger generations how to make what the Founders thought in the abstract, more nearer our reality.
Just so Mikey and Vixen's comments stand in stark relief and contrast to atrocious behavior of Lord Admiral and his men found in the linked references
4. Rape! Columbus was such a mensch, he would let his men do whatever they wanted with the natives they captured. One of his men and a childhood friend of Columbus, Michele da Cuneo, describes in a letter how he raped a native woman:
While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral 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. But—to cut a long story short—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 that she had been brought up in a school for whores.
5. Not so Christian. But the anecdote captured above was not some isolated incident of cruelty. Ironically, but in no way surprisingly, the Spanish who came to save the “heathens” from their idolatry, weren’t very Christ-like in their behavior. In his book The Devastation of the Indies. Bartolome de las Casas, the priest who accompanied Columbus on his conquest of Cuba, detailed the abuse and murder of the native population:
Endless testimonies . .. prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…. But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy…
And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them head first against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!” Other infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby. They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim’s feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive. To others they attached straw or wrapped their whole bodies in straw and set them afire. With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim’s neck, saying, “Go now, carry the message,” meaning, Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains. They usually dealt with the chieftains and nobles in the following way: they made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them….
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