Late last month, Douglas J. Lucia, the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Syracuse, expressed the hope that he might meet with the pope to discuss the 15th-century papal donation granting the Catholic powers the right to colonize the Americas. He wanted to obtain “a public acknowledgment from the Holy Father of the harm these [papal] bulls have done to the Indigenous population.”
Bishop Lucia’s announcement was greeted favorably. Doing away with the papal bulls would be an important symbolic gesture. But that’s all it is. The Catholic Church has destroyed the lives of millions of Indian people and justified the destruction of many, many more. Lucia’s action does not begin to address the historic and continuing damage his church has caused Indigenous peoples across the American continents, and across parts of seven different centuries.
Though significant, the papal bulls were hardly the worst crime committed by agents acting in the name of the Catholic Church, and we’re making too much of the resulting “Discovery Doctrine.” The French who settled what came to be known as Canada, after all, did not care what the Pope told the Iberians. The English, who described the Pope as the “Anti-Christ” and the “Scarlet Whore of Babylon,” could not have cared less what he told Spanish and Portuguese monarchs. The English, in fact, were remarkably unintellectual about colonization, a process they viewed as a fait accompli, the only justification needed that it might make them rich and provide an opportunity to stick it to their abundant Catholic enemies. The entire history of European colonization in the Americans involved Europeans ignoring each other’s New World claims. Were there no papal donation, there is little reason to believe that English and French colonization would have followed a different course. The most enlightened English colonizers believed that Indigenous peoples just might have the capacity to abandon their savagery and become like them. They were often shouted down by other colonists who saw Indigenous peoples as “errors of nature, of inhumane birth/ the very dregs, garbage, and spawne of the earth.” People with beliefs like that could kill Indians and dispossess them with a staggering brutality.
If we want to understand the Indigenous past, we should spend less time talking about what white people did or did not do and focus instead on the native peoples who confronted their would-be colonizers. What the pope said did not matter to them one bit, and let’s not underestimate the longevity of Indigenous power on this continent. The Jesuits who first attempted to plant a mission at Onondaga Lake in the 1650s, for example, despite their high hopes, realized too late that they served merely as hostages who insulated the Onondagas from French assault and attracted Catholic Wendats to enter the Longhouse through its smoke hole and settle under the Tree of Peace at Onondaga. When the Jesuits were no longer useful, they realized their lives were in danger. They constructed the boats they used to flee in the one place they knew Onondagas would never see them: inside of their church. Three centuries after the papal donation, Haudenosaunee peoples, including Onondagas, entered into a treaty at Canandaigua that recognized their right to the “free use and enjoyment” of their lands, over which the United States neither claimed or exercised any real power at all.
Though Chief Justice John Marshall’s racist opinion in Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823 made use of what has come to be known as the “discovery doctrine” in a flawed and lazy effort to bring some order to a chaotic process characterized by viciousness, avarice and deceit, and though his toxic ruling has had a devastating effect on the field of American Indian law since 1823, his sloppy historical work was a justification for dispossession, and not its cause.
And from the Pueblos sexually mutilated on the order of Franciscan priests in the seventeenth century, to those Indigenous Californians enslaved in missions founded by the sainted Father Junipero Serra, to the children who have died in the century past in Canadian residential schools, and the ongoing occupation of the sacred site at Mount Graham, the sins of the church in which I was raised are great.
Indigenous peoples have faced efforts to take their souls, steal their lands, burn their homes and eradicate their culture. Catholics and other Christians have for much of their history sanctioned and engaged in these genocidal policies. But native peoples always resisted. Maybe Bishop Lucia deserves praise for calling out the historic conduct of the Catholic Church. But for an adequate penance it is going to take much more than the empty symbolism of repealing an ineffective legal doctrine that nobody in early North America during the first three and a half centuries of European colonization cared about at all.
This essay appeared originally in the Syracuse.com on July 19, 2021.
The New York Times the day before yesterday published an article on Scott Dawson’s recent book, The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island. The book has generated a lot of attention because it purports to prove the location of the so-called “Lost Colonists” who attempted to settle Roanoke Island in 1587.
For those of you unfamiliar with the basic contours of the story, in 1584 Sir Walter Ralegh sent a reconnaissance voyage to scout the location for a new colony that he hoped would serve well the three principal ends of Elizabethan empire: profit, through discovery of valuable items or trade with indigenous peoples; religion, in the form of the expansion of Elizabethan Protestantism abroad; and security in the form of providing a base for privateering raids against the Catholic Spanish, the wicked tools, in English eyes, of the scarlet whore of Babylon. English colonists planted an outpost on Roanoke Island with the permission of the weroance Wingina in 1585, but it lasted only a year. English demands for food, outbreaks of disease, and violence made them unwelcome visitors. With a hurricane bearing down upon them, and after having murdered Wingina, the colonists returned home aboard the massive fleet Sir Francis Drake had used to terrorize Spanish holdings in the Caribbean. The English tried again in 1587, placing the colony under the charge of the artist John White. Hostilities with the Indians remaining from the previous year’s colony led to the immediate killing of one of White’s advisers. White led a retaliatory raid that struck the Croatoans rather than the Indians they intended to hit. This debacle was followed by the coward White’s return home to fetch more provisions. When he finally returned three years later, in 1590, the colony had disappeared. The only clue, we are so often told, was the word “Croatoan” carved into a post near the settlement on Roanoke. Croatoan was an Algonquian village that stood on today’s Hatteras Island.
Dawson, working with the archaeologist Mark Horton, has argued that the Lost Colonists did not disappear (an argument that almost nobody actually makes–all agree they went somewhere). Just as that carved post might lead one to believe, they left Roanoke and settled under the protection of the Croatoan Indians. Manteo, a Croatoan who had worked with the English since 1584 and been baptized into Christianity in 1587, would have eased in the resettlement. A large quantity of archaeological evidence has been found at the sight, Dawson says, and some of it is quite promising. There are also bits and pieces of historical evidence–a traveler’s account, for instance, from the early eighteenth century indicating that he saw blue-eyed Indians living in coastal Carolina.
Dawson told the Times that he was “trying to get the Croatoans’ history back from the depths of mystery.” The Croatoan Indians, he continued, “played a huge role in American history.” The Croatoans took the colonists in and sheltered them, while “in school you’re taught that no one knows what Croatoan means.”
I have yet to read Dawson’s book. I have seen enough to be deeply disappointed by all the attention it has received. There are, from what I have observed, a number of significant problems with the argument Dawson presents.
First, there is absolutely nothing new about the argument that the colonists relocated to Croatoan Island. Every book written on the subject, including mine, considers the possibility. Most of us approach the Croatoan prospect with interest, but leave unpersuaded. It is a small island. The first things Croatoans did when they encountered the English in 1587 was ask them not to take any of their food, as they had little to spare. Perhaps a small party went there to look for White’s return, a possibility suggested by numerous historians because of the route English ships likely would have taken on their return to Roanoke. But the reasons not to go there were powerful (you can read about those reasons in my book The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand). Indeed, recent archaeological work by Nick Lucketti and his associates from the First Colony Foundation offers suggestive evidence that the colonists headed inland toward the head of Albemarle Sound. There is documentary evidence supporting this hypothesis as well. The only reason to think that Dawson’s interpretation about Hatteras might be innovative and interesting is because of the archaeological evidence upon which it seems to rest.
And this brings us to the second problem. Horton’s discoveries are exciting and they are worth looking at more closely. Horton has been talking about his discoveries for several years, however, and students of the Roanoke ventures remain skeptical. That is because he has not published any of his findings and subjected his research to scholarly peer review. There is a history of grandiose claims made on the basis of archaeological discoveries on Hatteras. You might remember the gold signet ring uncovered by archaeologist David Sutton Phelps some years ago. Something interesting is found, and it leads to large leaps of faith to establish a connection to the Lost Colony.
Dawson certainly seems guilty of this. For instance, in a story written about Dawson’s book by James Hampton of The Virginian Pilot, “a lead tablet and pencil found at the dig could have belonged to White himself, Dawson said.” Hampton continues
White also was part of the 1585 group, working as an artist who drew natives and wildlife . . . He likely used the newly discovered tablet or a similar one.
That seems like quite a stretch. But here’s the kicker.
“The uncovered tablet has an impression of an Englishman shooting a native in the back . . . Wingina, chief of the Secotans, was shot twice in the back by an Englishman in 1586 at a village near what is now Mann’s Harbor, Dawson said. The Croatoans assisted the English in the ambush, Dawson said.”
There are problems with this claim. A huge leap is made from an artifact to the colonists. John White did indeed accompany the 1585 expedition and his famous paintings are justly revered by scholars for their depiction of Algonquian cultures and the flora and fauna of the Outer Banks. But White did not remain with the 1585 colonists. He returned home on August 25th, 1585, so he certainly never witnessed the 1586 attack (in which one Croatoan assisted). The English did visit Croatoan for a short period on July 30-31, 1587, to look for food and friends for colonists who had neither, but it is not precisely clear that White was with them. “The Governour,” as he referred to himself, is not mentioned. After leading an attack on the 22nd of August to avenge the killing of a colonist that fell by mistake upon the friendly but frightened Croatoans, White at the colonists’ command returned to England. Dawson would thus have us believe that a tablet used by White to draw an event he did not see ended up at the Algonquian village we have no evidence he ever visited.
Furthermore, the 1586 English attack on the village of Dasemunkepeuc was a traumatic and dramatic event. The English killed and then beheaded the weroance Wingina (who by that time had taken the name “Pemisapan”). There were some Croatoans in the village when the English fell upon it. They witnessed the treacherous attack. Is it unreasonable to think that a Croatoan may have etched a picture of the attack on a tablet acquired through trade? Native peoples in the coastal Carolina region wanted to obtain English goods. Indigenous peoples could draw. They could make use of European goods. They could raise English livestock. Dawson looks for ways to connect the English goods he and Horton found on Hatteras to the Lost Colonists so badly that they seem to overlook that native peoples themselves could make use of English manufactured goods. There is almost no likelihood that the lead tablet found at Hatteras and linked by Dawson to the Lost Colony was used by John White or the Lost Colonists.
That Horton has not shared his archaeological evidence nor subjected any of his research to peer review is another problem. Horton can not expect historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists to find his old and familiar arguments persuasive if he does not publish his findings.
In my own book on Roanoke, which Dawson does not include in his sparse bibliography, I argued as he did that the Lost Colonists’ did not disappear. Indeed, I made the point that the colonists were lost only to those English explorers who tried and failed to find them. Algonquian peoples knew what happened to them and most likely determined their fate. There has been a long national obsession over the Lost Colonist. Yet the shores of the Atlantic World were littered with the remains of castaways, castoffs, and casualties. Getting lost and left behind was part of the business. Roanoke is much more interesting as an Algonquian story, of native peoples adjusting to the arrival of newcomers, making use of them in their own political, economic, and diplomatic maneuvers, before ultimately deciding that the colonist caused more harm than good. As the great historian Malinda Maynor Lowery said in the New York Times piece, the Lost Colony legend is “like a monument that has to come down,” but that “it’s harder to dismantle an origin story than a statue.” Dawson and Horton, however much they claim to look at the Croatoan Indians, focus all their efforts on that tired and failed monument to English empire on the Outer Banks.
If we replace
Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, are we guilty of engaging in
partisan “revisionist” history? Are we
doing something that is unsavory, disrespectful, or mean? American history, of course, is being revised
all the time in scholarship, but also in the streets, in public spaces, and at
sites of commemoration. A Christopher Columbus statue in Central Park with
bloody hands: like a torn-down Confederate monument, or the Oñate monument’s
missing foot, these acts of vandalism are, at some level, commentaries and
rebuttals to interpretations of the American past that individuals and groups
find objectionable.
Several years ago I had an opportunity to speak about Indigenous Peoples’ Day at Lasell College, just outside of Boston. The students had been asked to read the opening sections of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s Patriot’s History of the United States.As I told the students at Lasell, I am a historian. I teach and write about Native American history and Early American history, so as part of my daily job I try to keep abreast of the scholarship on Columbus, and what historians have been saying about the so-called “Columbian Encounter” or “Columbian Exchange,” or, more generally, “First Contact” between natives and newcomers. I explained that scholars who work in this field do not generally bother with Zinn’s People’s History or Schweikart’s Patriot’s History. Not when we are doing our own research and teaching. There is so much better material written by historians who have actually gone back to the primary sources. Both of the books are highly partisan. Both allowed their politics to shape the answers to the questions they posed, a cardinal sin for historians. Both are simplistic, at times and in places poorly tuned to ambivalence and nuance, unwilling to explore fully the exceptions to their rules. But both of them, as well, have been very widely read.
Zinn’s People’s History is on that short list of deeply flawed books that
has been, on the basis of its strengths, highly influential among American
historians in teaching them that the history of ordinary working Americans
matters. Zinn, of course, wrote with an agenda.
That agenda is clear and present in the book’s title. He wanted to tell the story of ordinary
Americans in the making of their nation’s history. He wanted to shift the story away from the
elites, where it had been focused for so long, towards working people, women,
the enslaved, and Native Americans. His
goal was to write an inclusive history that challenged those comforting myths
that have for so long dominated that narrative:
a democratic history that was anything but celebratory. He wanted to
show that what America as a nation has accomplished came at the expense of
large numbers of people; and because the contributions of those people had
traditionally been neglected, that those in power sometimes, indeed quite
often, acted in their own interests and used their power to justify occasional
acts of extraordinary cruelty, exploitation, and violence. Love of one’s country cannot occur without an
honest look at the past. Ordinary people
were not merely acted upon. Their
resistance and their protests and their movements shaped much of American
history. Ordinary, non-elite people were
forces in history.
These are laudable goals, and Zinn
constructed at times a powerful story that could carry his readers along,
despite his occasional tendency to reason beyond what his evidence would
bear. Some of his shots misfired, but it
is difficult still to overstate how refreshing and liberating this approach to
the nation’s past was, certainly to my own generation of historians.
Schweikart and Allen, on the other
hand, wrote with chips on their shoulders.
They call out Zinn for his “Marxism” in their opening paragraph, even if
Zinn said different things about his ideology at different points in his
career, and they then proceed to bash one straw man after another in their
attempt to protect the nation from “academics” who too often say, according to
Schweikert and Allen, “my country, always wrong.”
You hear this a lot in my line of work. I think back to President Trump’s unhinged address at the United Nations General Assembly in 2019. The media and academic institutions, he said, “push flat out assaults on our histories, traditions, and values.” College professors, even though they cannot persuade their students to do the reading, or put away their cell phones, somehow can indoctrinate them with socialist principles. The President here is repeating a bald-faced lie, a willful and complete mischaracterization of the historical profession carried out for partisan purposes that is so irresponsible it is going to get someone hurt. If for Zinn, the purpose of history is to look critically at the American past, to question long-cherished truths, and dispel pernicious myths, for Schweikart and Allen, its purpose is to instill patriotism. Their goal is to protect the stories that have, in their view, been unjustly assailed by Zinn, and by a generation of historians since Zinn first wrote.
This sort of logic can have devastating consequences for public policy. If you saw the Pew Research poll in August of 2019, the results are troubling. According to the data, the percentage of Republicans who see value in a college education fell from 53% in 2012 to just 23% in the most recent survey. Nearly 80% of Republicans believe higher education is headed in the wrong direction because of professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats (73% to 56%) to assert that the problem of students not receiving skills they need to succeed in the workplace is a major reason why higher education is headed in the wrong direction. And three-quarters of Republican respondents felt that rampant political correctness is a significant problem in American higher education.
So A Patriot’s History, they say.
That’s what is needed. But what’s
the opposite of a Patriot? A traitor, someone who is ashamed of their country,
or disloyal, or dangerous. You have seen
in recent months where rhetoric like this leads. From “Send her Back!” to “Blood and Soil!” to
caged children, the dead in a Texas Walmart killed by an armed racist who hated
Mexicans, this sort of rhetoric can escalate quickly and violently.
History is such a fraught subject—it
always has been, but now, especially so. It matters. And the work historians do
is often implicated in assaults on what makes this country great, a menace to
what the Boston Review called the
“fragile patriotism of the American Conservative.” If only we would stop
harping on the bad stuff.
So let me give you a definition: for
those of us who are historians for our living, history is the study of
continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples,
institutions, and cultures. It is not a science, but it is a discipline. When we do our work properly, we ask
questions about the past, we dig like badgers for the evidence we need to
answer these questions, examine and assess this evidence with our eyes, ears,
and hearts open, and then try to present our answers with a measure of grace
and style. We must be truthful, honest,
always, when it comes to this evidence. We want to persuade you that our answer
is right, our thesis correct, and our questions important. Sometimes we
succeed. Sometimes we fail. The measure of this must be the quality of the
evidence and the strength of our reasoning.
As a result, history can be a brutal
business. We question everything. We are
not in the business of telling you want you want to hear. History can provide us with an explanation
for what happened, why, and the difference it made, but it seldom provides us
with comfort, and solace, and your cherished myths will find no shelter with us
around. It can be dark and violent and, at times, filled with heroism and
bravery indeed, but there is also deceit and evil. When the great ancient Greek historian
Thucydides wrote in his history of the Peloponnesian War, that “war is a
violent teacher,” it for him was not a comforting story at all, but one of the darkest,
most brutal depictions of human nature to appear in the western tradition.
And about those questions that
historians ask. When I was taught long
ago how to be a historian in my research methods class at California State
University at Long Beach, my professor emphasized the importance of objectivity. Several years later, one of the professors
that I studied with at Syracuse wrote at length about the historic emergence of
objectivity as a value in historical scholarship. Many of those who criticize
our work may raise objections that we are biased, and driven by our agendas to
predetermined outcomes, that we lack objectivity. Bias and prejudice and ideology can indeed
cause the undisciplined to ask loaded or bad questions, or to read the evidence
in a distorted manner, to make it say things that it does not say. That is bad history. But our preconceptions, as well, which we can
think of as the lenses through which we look at the world, color our
perceptions of what is good and bad, right and wrong.
The point I would like to make is that
all historical writing, whether it is the essay assigned you by teacher or
professor, or a term paper, or a doctoral dissertation or a book, is an attempt
to answer a question. And whether we are
on the right or the left, the questions that present themselves to us as
historians—that strike us as important, and worth answering, and worth
investing all the time, travel, expense and energy to answer, come to us from
our experiences in life, and in the archives, from our hard work, and, quite
often, from our sense that all is not well. That is as true for Zinn as it is
for Schweikart and Allen.
My experience has been that if you
read history long enough, eventually you will feel regret. Asking why a certain reality is ours can lead
the curious mind to wonder if indeed other realities were possible. And if other possibilities existed, why did
they not come to be? Who benefited from this particular outcome, and what might
they have had to lose through other outcomes?
And if one of these possible outcomes seems superior to our current
state of affairs, how do we get there, or why did we not get there? Questions, you see? History, this process of asking about
continuity and change across time and space, can make clear the yawning gap
between the way things are and the way things might have been.
If history can help us identify
alternative paths, how can we responsibly look away? To ask, “Why This?” leads easily to “why not
that?”
Doing history well forces us to
always be willing to reconsider our assumptions, and sometimes it involves so
profound a reassessment that it becomes difficult to abide, for example, the
continued presence of statues or monuments commemorating a particular part of
the past. These statutes—these
monuments—are texts, right? They make a claim, state an assertion about the
past. They argue for the significance of
this, or that, or another person, place, or thing. They offer an
interpretation, and the assumptions and the evidence behind those assertions—it
is our job as citizens and scholars to question them. Sometimes these
monuments, these interpretations, are based on myth more than history.
What’s the difference? Myths are
stories that are not completely false, but that we accept and repeat anyways
because of their explanatory power. They
explain what we claim to stand for, what we believe in, why we fear what we
fear, who we are and how we came to be.
And so, at last, we come to Christopher Columbus, who is one of these mythical figures. He is perhaps better known as a symbol than for what and who he actually was. Take, for instance, President Trump’s proclamation commemorating Columbus Day in October of 2018. It is routine for Presidents to make a proclamation on Columbus Day. In 1492, the President claimed, “Columbus and his mighty three-ship fleet…first spotted the Americas. His historic achievement ushered in the age of discovery that expanded our knowledge of the world.” Columbus’s “daring journey,” the President continued,
marked the beginning of centuries of transatlantic exploration that transformed the Western Hemisphere. On Columbus Day, we commemorate the achievements of this skilled Italian explorer and recognize his courage, will power, and ambition — all values we cherish as Americans.
Columbus’s spirit of determination and adventure has provided inspiration to generations of Americans. On Columbus Day, we honor his remarkable accomplishments as a navigator, and celebrate his voyage into the unknown expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. His expedition formed the initial bond between Europe and the Americas, and changed the world forever. Today, in that spirit, we continue to seek new horizons for greater opportunity and further discovery on land, in sea, and in space.
Although Spain sponsored his voyage, Columbus was, in fact, a proud citizen of the Italian City of Genoa. As we celebrate the tremendous strides our Nation has made since his arrival, we acknowledge the important contributions of Italian Americans to our country’s culture, business, and civic life. We are also thankful for our relationship with Italy, a great ally that shares our strong, unwavering commitment to peace and prosperity.
There is nothing in this statement that is glaringly incorrect, as far as it goes. But it is selective, as I will point out, and incomplete. Still, these sentiments are widespread. Let me give you another example: A guy named Alejandro Bermudez wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal denouncing efforts at Notre Dame University to cover up murals depicting scenes of Columbus. Politically correct students, in his view, were determined to erase one of the great figures in the history of Europe and the Americas. Bermudez said that Columbus was “ahead of his time.” Native peoples lived lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, Bermudez suggested, and they practiced human sacrifice. “In bringing the first of many missionaries who showed millions of people the path to salvation,” he wrote, Columbus helped put an end to this barbarism.
The Columbus Day holiday, of course, has its own history. It found its origins in the Italian-American community. Columbus, from Genoa, sailed in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, the authors of the Spanish Reconquista, and in 1492 he “discovered” America. He was, his advocates claim, an Italian and an American hero. The holiday in his honor asserted that Italians, themselves victims of bigotry and discrimination, were Americans, too. And so it goes. A long-time conservative talk show host on AM Radio in Rochester, New York, where I live asserted via tweet on Columbus Day that “other than the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the discovery of the Americas by Columbus was the most important event in human history.”
There is a defensiveness in all of this, and in Schweikart and Allen’s book as well. That is because a growing number of people have argued that there is nothing edifying in the story of Columbus, save for the native peoples who at times and places survived the carnage. It is a story rife with avarice, violence, and bigotry. So we see a movement with scholars playing a role, writing polemical works like Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise or David Stannard’s American Holocaust, but led largely by indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, calling on all of us to reconsider the Columbus holiday. It is worth pointing out that there was not one mention in the President’s proclamation, or in similar statements by others, of the catastrophe that followed in the wake of discovery.
In his 2017 proclamation Trump said that “the permanent arrival of Europeans to the Americas was a transformative event that undeniably and fundamentally changed the course of human history and set the stage for the development of our great Nation. Therefore, on Columbus Day, we honor the skilled navigator and man of faith, whose courageous feat brought together continents and has inspired countless others to pursue their dreams and convictions — even in the face of extreme doubt and tremendous adversity.” Not one mention of native peoples. Many of us see that as a problem because native peoples were not incidental to this story, and that, in fact, one cannot arrive at a full understanding of the Columbian encounter, and indeed American history, without assessing its consequences for native peoples. We are witnessing a reaction against the very notion that native peoples have a place in this story that is worth remembering and retelling.
So the Columbus Day holiday is under siege. He discovered nothing, some of his critics point out, for the “New World” he stumbled across in search of the riches of Cathay was already occupied by millions of people. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages in 1992 reawakened interest in the explorer and his actions in the New World, and that attention did not cast Columbus in a good light. Recently, a growing number of colleges and municipalities across the country have recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day, to be held on the federal Columbus Day holiday.
Now,
an Italian-American friend of mine asked me once why any one of the other 364
days of the year could not be chosen for Indigenous Peoples Day. In his
view, the movement to obtain recognition for Indigenous Peoples’ Day generated
conflict where none was needed, and caused offense to Italian-Americans. I
do understand this. Similar arguments
were raised in this town, when a petition was presented to recognize Indigenous
Peoples’ Day. The answer given by its proponents is that the Columbus Day
holiday many native people now view as a day for mourning the victims of an
American holocaust and 500 years of genocide.
The
Columbian Encounter is the beginning of a horror story for the native peoples
of the Americas, North, South, and Central, as well as the indigenous population
of the Caribbean, who were quickly destroyed as autonomous peoples by the
Spanish newcomers. Columbus, his supporters might argue, gets too much of
the blame. He did nothing to native peoples in North America because he
never set foot on the North American continent. This much is true, but
Columbus has become, and perhaps always has been, a symbol standing in for the fundamental
violence of discovery. For some he is a symbol of heroism and bravery, for
others a symbol of racism and genocide.
Long ago I taught at a one-day NEH gathering on the
Blackfeet Reservation way up in northwestern Montana. The subject was
children’s literature that treated in different ways the history of America’s
native peoples. One of the books was Michael Dorris’s Morning Girl (1992),
written by a Native American novelist. The story followed Morning Girl
and her brother Star Boy, indigenous children playing and exploring in the
“Pre-Columbian” Caribbean. It is a story that is wise and gentle. But at
its close, it takes a darker turn. Morning Girl swims out to see a
strange sight approaching the beach.
Dorris ends the story
with a lengthy excerpt from Columbus’s journal:
In order that they would be friendly to us — because I recognized that they were people who would be better freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force — to some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads which they put on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. Later they came swimming to the ships’ launches where we were and brought us parrots and cotton thread in balls and javelins and many other things, and they traded them to us for other things which we gave them, such as small glass beads and bells. In sum, they took everything and gave of what they had very willingly. But it seemed to me that they were a people very poor in everything. All of them go around as naked as their mothers bore them; and the women also, although I did not see more than one quite young girl. And all those that I saw were young people, for none did I see of more than 30 years of age. They are very well formed, with handsome bodies and good faces. Their hair coarse — almost like the tail of a horse-and short. They wear their hair down over their eyebrows except for a little in the back which they wear long and never cut. Some of them paint themselves with black, and they are of the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white; and some of them paint themselves with white, and some of them with red, and some of them with whatever they find. And some of them paint their faces, and some of them the whole body, and some of them only the eyes, and some of them only the nose. They do not carry arms nor are they acquainted with them, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and through ignorance cut themselves. They have no iron.
Their javelins are shafts without iron and some of them have at the end a fish tooth…. All of them alike are of good-sized stature and carry themselves well. I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies and I made signs to them asking what they were; and they showed me how people from other islands nearby came there and tried to take them, and how they defended themselves; and I believed and believe that — they come here from tierrafirme to take them captive. They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion. Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses in order that they may learn to speak…
Now, when you look at this passage, what do you see?
Morning
Girl, then, is the story of that child who Columbus saw
as his men approached landfall in October of 1492, and whose gentleness and
innocence led the wayward Admiral to conclude that her people would make good
servants.
We
spent quite a bit of time that morning discussing Dorris’s book. The Native
American teachers from Blackfeet felt very differently about the book than did
some of the non-native teachers. The Blackfeet teachers all agreed that
if they were to use Morning Girl in class, they would cut out that last
piece. They would have physically removed the last page from the
book. Too painful, and too traumatic for the children who might read it,
they thought. In Fourteen-Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the
ocean blue…and contemplated how indigenous children might make good slaves.
Columbus was a brilliant navigator. He discovered routes across the Atlantic that
blazed the trail for subsequent colonization of the Americas. No question. But there is more to this
story. Columbus sought the riches of
Cathay, of course. He sought gold and spices and the exotic riches European
explorers knew could be found in the Orient. Zinn makes a big deal in the
opening pages of his book about Columbus’s greed. But Columbus found little of value, and the
expense of the expeditions pushed Columbus to find some other commodity. The
consequences were horrifying. While the scholars who have looked at the
question disagree, at times intensely, over the size of the population of the
Americas and the Caribbean before Europeans arrived, there is little doubt as
to what happened afterwards. By the
1550s, a mere sixty years after Columbus arrived and described those docile
native peoples in the Caribbean, they had ceased to exist as a people, and many
Caribbean Islands became eerie, uninhabited paradises.
To be fair, Columbus and his supporters did not set out
to initiate a new world genocide. They
wanted empire. They wanted to extend the reach of Christendom. They wanted
wealth. They extended the Reconquista that drove the forces of
Islam out of the Iberian Peninsula outwards across the Atlantic.But the findings were paltry. Slavery
offered a critical solution of funding this “enterprise of the Indies.” In February of 1495, Columbus sent 550
Indians from Española crammed into four ships.
These he chose out of the 1600 brought to the docks because they were
“the best males and females.” On the passage home, about 200 of them died,
their bodies tossed into the sea. Those
who survived arrived in Spain in a weakened state. In effect, Columbus
inaugurated the Middle Passage, complete with the overcrowding and high
mortality rates associated with African slavery.
His enslaving plans reached their peak in 1495-1496. “Under the protection of the Holy Trinity,
from here [his new world] we can send all the slaves needed, and if the
information that I possess is correct, we could sell four thousand slaves who
will be worth at the very least twenty cuentos.” The shipment of slaves on this scale would
have required thirty to forty ships, a massive undertaking. As Andres Resendnez has pointed out in his
book The
Other Slavery, Columbus would have turned the new world into a slave
exporting center, were it not for his monarch’s reluctance to enslave the
people whose souls they hoped to save. But more potent than the King and
queen’s opposition to a transatlantic trade in slaves was the growing number of
colonists’ recognition that those native peoples were needed to harvest the New
world’s riches, through labor systems like the encomienda, which came to
resemble many of the elements of slavery.
If you read excerpts from Bartolome De Las Casas’s Devastation of the Indies–and if you are a student in a Native American history course treating this period you likely will–you can read about the sheer brutality of the Spanish conquistadors who followed Columbus. Las Casas provides a first-hand account of the first modern genocide: Spanish ships able to sail homeward without need of navigational instruments because all they needed to do was follow the trail of floating corpses, enslaved Indians who died on the Atlantic crossing. Las Casas described how Spanish colonists could buy human flesh for their dogs, and how Spanish war dogs tore native peoples literally limb from limb. Las Casas described the competition between conquistadors to see who could run through the most Indians with one thrust of the pike, and how Spaniards burned native peoples in groups of thirteen in honor of Jesus and the apostles, and bashed their children’s heads in by swinging them against the rocks.
Historians
long have focused upon so-called “Virgin Soil Epidemics”, that took millions of
indigenous lives, but there are problems in connecting these biological
explanations with what the first-hand observers wrote. Las Casas, who arrived
in 1502, said that greed was the reason that Christians “murdered on such a
vast scale,” killing “anyone and everyone who has shown the slightest sign of
resistance,” and “subjected all males to the harshest and most iniquitous and
brutal slavery that man has ever devised for oppressing his fellow men,
treating them, in fact, worse than animals.” It is true that Las Casas became
famous for championing the humanity of native peoples, and he may have had a motive
therefore to trump up these charges of brutality, but the same descriptions
were given by other early observers.
And
all this brutality, all the subjugation that occurred under the aegis of the
Spanish encomienda system, exacerbated the consequences of epidemic
diseases, which in places killed off 80% of the population. Brutality made
native peoples less able to resist the onslaught of disease. Millions died. They were not all killed by Columbus, but the
deaths followed from processes of colonization he pioneered, with which he is
so closely associated by both his critics and his champions.
So
here’s the thing. I really do not want
to talk about Columbus. I am not terribly interested in the claims of those who
support his colonizing ventures. Let me suggest an alternative way of looking
at this period, one made more viable perhaps if we recast Columbus Day as
Indigenous Peoples’ Day. We can focus on heroism and bravery, but that does not
get us very far. We can focus on victimization and cruelty. God knows,
Columbus and his successors were violent and brutal and victimized many. No
one can look at the documents and question this reality. But to focus on
victimization alone does a deep disservice to the history of native peoples.
In my own work, to the extent that the sources permit, I
try to tell the story of the first European explorers who came to North America
from the Indians’ perspective, reading these sources against the grain,
considering sources like oral tradition and archaeology that American
historians a generation ago when I started out were reluctant to use. What native peoples saw when they looked at
these newcomers, their strategic calculations, how they fit the Europeans into
their conceptual universe, these are questions that interest me. If you
look at the story of the French explorer Jacques Cartier, who sailed into the
St. Lawrence River in the 1530s, or his Spanish contemporary Coronado who
wandered throughout the American southwest, or Soto’s violent exercise in
futility in the Southeast, or the Juan Pardo expedition, or Cabrillo’s
ineffectual reconnaissance of the California coast, or even the Roanoke voyages
of 1584-1590, you cannot help but see one consistent theme. It is so obvious in
the surviving documents. What is clear in every account is the utter dependence
of the newcomers upon the native peoples who cautiously welcomed them into
their communities, cultivated them as military allies and trading partners,
enlisted them in their struggles with their neighbors, and contemplated
transforming them into kin. When the newcomers wore out their welcomes in
North America, their enterprises were doomed, their situation worse than
desperate. These European explorers discovered what they believe they
discovered only because native peoples allowed them to do so. And the
effects of the visits by these European sojourners were remarkably short-lived,
the consequences fleeting. Even with De Soto, who many scholars long had
blamed for spreading epidemic disease into the continent’s interior, we now
know from the work of historians like Paul
Kelton and anthropologists like Robbie
Etheridge that his disastrous expedition had little long-term
effect. The wasting plagues came in the seventeenth century, not the
sixteenth, a product of an Anglo-American trade in Native American slaves, the
scope of which was vast and mind-boggling. Before roughly 1720, more Native
American slaves were exported from the American colonies than African slaves
imported
Commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day in this way need
not belittle or demean the western tradition. What it does do is allow us
to pay attention to the experience of those native peoples whose losses were
Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of
discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter. If, after all, any number of
people in our nation’s history had had their way, native peoples would be gone:
They would have been wiped out by warfare and epidemic and chronic disease; or
they would have been “removed” to make way for the “settlers” who championed
the rise of Andrew Jackson in the first few decades of the nineteenth century;
or confined on tiny reservations until the missionaries and teachers and
government farmers wiped away any trace of their identity as native peoples; or
assimilated into the American body politic; or “terminated” in the middle
decades of the twentieth century, with the reality of their native nations
erased by congressional statute. Indians were supposed to disappear.
Viewed as unfit, native peoples were not supposed to survive. If any number of
people had their way, Native American people would not be here to call for an
Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
A final point we need to discuss, one that many
historians of this subject feel keenly. The reaction to Indigenous Peoples’ Day
coming from the political right reflects the increasingly oft-expressed anger
of white males at nearly any expression of grievance by people of color.
Protestors who assert that “Black Lives Matter, and who complain about the
alacrity with which militarized police deploy violence against African
Americans are dismissed as violent; the protests of principled men like Colin
Kaepernick and other African-American NFL players is regarded as an assault on
the flag, and a demonstration of a lack of patriotism, with no discussion
whatsoever of the issues that generated those protests. Suggestions that
monuments to racist Confederates be removed or revised are treated as an
assault on white identity and southern heritage; and the recent New York Times “1619” series, which
historians will tell you was entirely reasonable, is maligned by the right as
“propaganda.” Native peoples, meanwhile,
are told to get over it. The crimes you “allegedly” suffered took place
long ago, and therefore the problems occurring in your communities are entirely
your fault. No attempts at truth and reconciliation as in Canada, no
“Sorry Day” as in Australia. Nope, just
a bunch of people saying, at best, “Bummer, but we had nothing to do with that.”
I
have been teaching and writing about Native American history for a long time,
more than thirty years. Every day when I talk with my very good students, I
realize that I still have so much to learn. Every time I read new
scholarship, I realize that there are so many more stories out there that we
should tell. I will be a student of this subject forever.
But
one thing is so very clear to me. Racism towards Native Americans is a real
thing. The inequalities experienced by native communities are
significant. The statistics
do not lie. History is a force in that story. Its presence is keenly felt
and, for those who wish to see it, clearly visible. New York, for example, where
I have lived for all but five of the last twenty-seven years, became the Empire
State, through a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession. You could not
have one without the other.
The
transactions through which New York acquired Iroquois land happened a long time
ago, but these were transactions that violated federal laws the United States
lacked the power and perhaps the willingness to enforce. These were not
acts of nature. They were not inevitable. They were crimes. The Supreme Court has
held that these illegal transactions occurred so long ago that nothing can be
done to right these wrongs, but that does not mean that the rights retained by
native peoples should be ignored, or their history dismissed.
New
York’s native peoples have seen, through a long history, their homelands
invaded. They experienced waves of epidemic disease. They faced
dispossession, and then the effort to “remove” them to new homes in Arkansas,
or Wisconsin, or the Indian Territory, and then to re-educate their children,
and disable their governments. Disease, warfare, dispossession, diaspora:
the injuries occurred a long time ago, but their legacies remain. And
when native peoples and their allies suggest that we commemorate that history
on a special day, one up to now associated with what they see as the symbol of
a genocidal process against native peoples, their arguments are dismissed.
Columbus
Day found its origins in discrimination against Italian-American immigrants. We
were here from the beginning, Italian-Americans said, and we have as great a
claim to this continent as any other group. In celebrating the mythical
Columbus, the holiday has seldom encouraged any significant and honest
discussion of the consequences of the Columbian Encounter, a process which was,
as historian Alfred Crosby showed a long time ago, a global process much bigger
than one wayward Genoese mariner. It is time for the bad history and the
myth associated with this day to be reconsidered, and if recognizing Indigenous
Peoples’ Day helps I am all for it. If you oppose Indigenous Peoples’ Day, you’re
too late. It is coming. So let’s talk about Columbus, to be sure, and
the European invasion of America, but let’s do so with our eyes firmly upon
those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured
and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and
slaughter.
The failed governor of a failed colonial enterprise, sent packing from what would soon become the fabled “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, and a pretend aristocrat whose patron procured for him a bargain-basement coat-of-arms, John White was also an “important” and “renowned” artist whose “vivid” and “lifelike” images included an Algonquian woman he depicted with two right feet. Nearly everything John White touched turned to shit.
White did not lack for experience, we are told. He likely sailed aboard one of Martin Frobisher’s voyages in search of mineral wealth and a northwest passage in the 1570s. He accompanied the reconnaissance voyage Sir Walter Ralegh sent to “Virginia” in 1584 and, the next year, returned aboard the much larger expedition sent to establish a base along the coast of today’s North Carolina. He was among those men who, that summer, explored the coast to the south of Roanoke Island where he completed several paintings of the Algonquian peoples of the region and towns in which they lived, before he returned home with Sir Richard Grenville in the fall of 1585. He may have traveled more widely in the summer of 1585 to gather the information necessary to make his large map of the Outer Banks and Eastern North America. In 1587 Ralegh decided to try again, and for reasons that remain inexplicable still, he appointed White governor of what he hoped would become the “Cittie of Ralegh.” White returned home from the colony a few weeks after arriving, and would not make back until 1590. It was then that he discovered that the colony he claimed to have governed had disappeared. Five voyages to America, but he spent more time aboard ships coming and going than he actually did on American shores.
It is easy, I suppose, to view White as a pathetic figure. He brought his family to England’s paltry new world outpost. Circumstances forced him to return to England, and to struggle for several years to return to America. He never succeeded in reuniting with his daughter, her husband, and their daughter Virginia, the first English child born in America. How painful this must have been for him, to not know what had happened to his child and grandchild.
It is understandable. It must have been agonizing for White. I can imagine his pain easily. But I keep tripping over my belief, based upon reading and re-reading the surviving records, that every time John White was faced with an important choice, he made the wrong one.
Every document that sheds light on the planning for the 1587 colony, for instance, shows that Ralegh charged White with establishing his “Cittie” on the Chesapeake Bay. Relations with the Indians there the previous year offered promise. An English party spent some time there in 1585 and 1586. They found the deep water anchorage, abundant food, and peaceful Indians far more welcoming than the Algonquians in the vicinity of Roanoke, who would soon chase the colonists out of America.
Before heading to the Chesapeake, White wanted to check in on the men Richard Grenville had left at Roanoke the year before, shortly after the harried colonists evacuated. He may as well have intended to install Manteo, the Indian from Croatoan who had stuck with the colonists since 1585, as a sort of feudal “Lorde of Roanoac” to govern the region in Ralegh’s name. So they were going to check in on Grenville’s colonists, install Manteo in his new post, and then carry on northward towards the Chesapeake. Simple enough. But that did not happen, and White’s explanation why makes little sense.
White and his men clambered aboard the pinnace, a smaller ship capable of safely crossing the Outer Banks. “Simon Ferdinando,” the expedition’s pilot, told the sailors aboard to drop White’s party at Roanoke, “saying that the Summer was farre spent.” It was the 22nd of July and, White suggested, Ferdinando wanted to get on with the more lucrative business of chasing Spanish prizes.
Which makes no sense at all, for Ferdinando did not leave until the last week of August, more than a month later. White spent much of his account whining about Ferdinando, blaming him for everything and for nothing, and the charges simply do not add up. One of the ships that made up the 1587 voyage separated from the other two in some rough weather: White blamed Ferdinando for this, accusing him of trying to abandon one of the ships. At another point, Ferdinando was not certain of his latitude, and at another he thought he could find food in the Caribbean but his supplier could not be found. Understandable, perhaps, but White blamed Ferdinando for these events, too. The colonists ate poisonous fruit, manchineel apples, and to wash that down drank nasty, stagnant water, and fell ill. Ferdinado remained aboard the flagship. Still, White blamed Ferdinando, even though it was he who allowed the colonists to drink “stinking water of the pond,” and who failed to keep the colonists safe while on land. Later, the flagship nearly ran aground near Cape Fear, and again White blamed Ferdinando. And the decision to settle on Roanoke, despite instructions to go elsewhere? White blamed that on Ferdinando, too, but the only logical explanation for White and his colonists ending up on Roanoke was that he decided to settle in this somewhat familiar setting, rather than move to the Chesapeake where he had no first hand experience.
It was a bad choice. Grenville’s men were very clearly dead: White reported that his men found the skeleton of one of them. Very clearly they had been killed by Indians. Within a couple of days, those same Indians killed George Howe, one of White’s closest advisers. White attempted to carry on some diplomacy and figure out how the Indians felt about his colonists, which somehow still seemed a mystery to him. The Croatoans, always friendly, at first feared the English and lined up for battle before Manteo assuaged their fears. They lectured the English about indiscriminate attacks the year before. They begged the English not to steal their food. White decided that this was a good time to ask them for favors, and told them to carry messages to the neighboring Indian villages, indicating that the English “would willingly receive them againe, and that all unfriendly dealings past on both parts, should be utterly forgiven and forgotten.” This reflected nothing more than White’s utterly clueless understanding of the situation in which he had placed the colonists–in the midst of large numbers of Algonquians who had no interest in accepting English friendship. He was in no position to “receive” anyone.
Could White make it worse? Yes. After waiting a week, and receiving no response from the Indians, White decided to attack “the remnant of Wingina his men, which were left alive, who dwelt at Dasamonquepeuk,” across the sound from Roanoke. It was they, he believed, who had killed George Howe and wiped out Grenville’s party. White led a party across the sound, surrounded some Indians in the dark at Dasemonquepeuk, and launched his assault. As White put it himself, “we hoped to acquite their evill doing towards us, but,” he said, “we were deceived, for those Savages were our friends, and were come from Croatoan to gather the corne & fruit of that place, because they understood our enemies were fled immediatly after they had slaine George Howe.” They killed the wrong Indians. They killed friendly Indians, or at least he least hostile of the Algonquians in the region. The colony was now in dire straits, with no friends, and little provision.
Over the next several days, the English baptized Manteo, and White’s daughter gave birth to Virginia Dare. The colonists needed provisions, and White could not find any volunteers to go home to lobby for more. The colonists told White to go himself. He whined. He feared that during his absence, “his stuffe and goods might be both spoiled, & most of them pilfered away.” White refused to go. He feared that the people he led would rifle through his stuff. The next day, the 23rd of August, more of the colonists, “as well women and men,” once again told White to leave. Please. Really, just go. Don’t worry. We will be fine. We will be better off without you. They wanted him to leave. They knew who they were dealing with. They promised to sign a bond not to steal White’s crap, as if they really wanted his books and his armor. He must have found it difficult o leave his daughter and granddaughter behind, but that is not the argument he made. With a promise not to steal any of his stuff in hand, White departed for England on the 27th.
It was a hellish journey home. White survived, but many of the sailors did not. He tried again to sail for America the next year, that of the Armada, but the ship he was aboard was mauled by a French corsair. In the battle for control of the ship, White was shot in the ass, an injury that does not seem to have embarrassed him at all. By the time he finally made it back to Roanoke in 1590, he could determine only that the colonists were no longer on the island, and that the trunks containing his stuff had been dug up by Indians, broken open, and their contents ruined. So much for that bond. White seemed to know where the colonists were, though the location is not clear from his account. In any case, White was a man who nobody listened to. He could not persuade the mariners to devote the time to seek out the colonists, and White returned, once again, to England, his voyage entirely without effect.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to apologize for the damage done by residential schools for First Nations children in Newfoundland and Labrador. He will do so on November 24. Like many apologies, I suppose, it is not enough to erase the trauma suffered by so many First Nations families. In the end, however, there are limits as to what can be done to address the crimes and the mistakes of the past. Acknowledging, apologizing, and a pledge to learn and never let it happen again: it is incomplete, but much, much better than nothing.
I am inclined to be charitable towards Trudeau, and those Canadians committed to pursuing truth and reconciliation. My own country, after all, has shown a disturbing and consistent unwillingness to examine much of its history critically, and this tendency has been even more pronounced than usual in the response to the important dialogues surrounding police violence against people of color and the efforts to remove racist Confederate monuments.
Earlier this week I appeared on a local public radio call-in show called “Connections,” hosted by Evan Dawson, on WXXI Rochester. (The audio is here). I was on the show to talk about Native America but also to discuss the growing movement on college campuses and in municipalities across the country to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day every year on the second Monday in October. Peter Jemison, from the Ganondagan State Historic Site, joined me on the program.
This movement, as I pointed out in an earlier post, is viewed as an affront by many Italian-Americans whose ancestors suffered discrimination when they immigrated to this country. There may be grounds for compromise here, as Father James Martin pointed out earlier this week. “If we abolish #ColumbusDay in favor of #IndigenousPeoplesDay,” he tweeted, “we still need a day to honor Italian-Americans, who were once marginalized. I’d suggest a new name for #ColumbusDay and a new day for #IndigenousPeoplesDay.” Maybe there is something to be said for this, a compromise.
But the political right has not couched their opposition to Indigenous Peoples’ Day in these terms,and they have shown little interest in compromise or discussion. Bob Lonsberry, for instance, a long-time conservative radio personality in Rochester, tweeted out last Monday that “other than the birth, death, & resurrection of Jesus, the discovery of the Americas by Columbus was the most important event in human history.” There are a lot of obvious problems with this argument, but this sort of sentiment has been widely embraced on the political right. Matt Walsh, a columnist for The Blaze who tweets @MattWalshBlog, told his many followers to not “let anyone tell you it’s wrong to celebrate the great men who built our civilization.” Kurt Schlichter, another pundit aggressively active on Twitter, said that “the European conquest of the Americas was history’s greatest achievement.” The Daily Wire posted an incredibly racist and offensive video, since removed from their site with apologies from the editor, depicting the Americas in 1491 as a land of savagery, cannibalism, and superstition that was refined and civilized by Christopher Columbus.
And the President, our Bronze Creon, proclaimed that
“the permanent arrival of Europeans to the Americas was a transformative event that undeniably and fundamentally changed the course of human history and set the stage for the development of our great Nation. Therefore, on Columbus Day, we honor the skilled navigator and man of faith, whose courageous feat brought together continents and has inspired countless others to pursue their dreams and convictions — even in the face of extreme doubt and tremendous adversity.”
Not one mention of native peoples. We are witnessing a reaction against the very notion that native peoples have a place in this story that is worth remembering and retelling.
Indeed, assertions such as these, like all assertions based upon shoddy historical reasoning, I find deeply troubling for a number of reasons. First, they completely deny the enormous human consequences of European imperialism and colonialism in the Americas. Millions of people died as a direct result of colonization. The avarice, bigotry, and violence of these explorers is so apparent in the documentary record that to ignore it or deny it requires a positive act of will. The most conservative critics of Indigenous Peoples’ Day show a deep lack of sensitivity to the sufferings of native peoples, to say the least, and a willingness to consign the historical experience of millions of people like them to the dustbin of history.
Like a guy named Bruce, who was the first caller on Evan Dawson’s show. Native peoples, Bruce suggested, were savage and violent, their lives poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Although Europeans did some “bad things” here and there, it was all in the name of progress. Indians should stop bitching and moaning, Bruce implied. After all, he could lose his property at any time should the government exercise its power of eminent domain, he said, so in that sense he was just like the Indians. Join the club, he said. No, Bruce. No. White dudes who have the luxury of listening to NPR in the middle of the day, I am willing to wager, generally do not suffer dispossession at the hands of the government. And certainly not in the systematic and continent-wide scale experienced by America’s native peoples.
Second, these assertions celebrate what many scholars and activists now call settler colonialism, the legacies of which are still felt in very real ways by native peoples. Settler colonialism encourages the erasure, the dismissal, of native peoples and their concerns from the realm of rational discourse. The country was not being used, these conservatives argue, and only Europeans with their refinement, religion, and culture made it better. It is racist in its dismissal of both the inherent beauty of so many indigenous cultures and the blood-drenched history of Europe for centuries before Columbus sailed out into the ocean blue. Life in fifteenth century Europe was no walk in the park.
Commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day–and this is a point that so many of these right-wing pundits do not see–does not belittle or demean the western tradition. What it does do is allow us to pay attention to the experience of those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter. If, after all, any number of people in our nation’s history had had their way, native peoples would be gone: They would have been wiped out by warfare and epidemic and chronic disease; or they would have been “removed” to make way for the “settlers” who championed the rise of Andrew Jackson in the first few decades of the nineteenth century; or confined on tiny reservations until the missionaries and teachers and government farmers wiped away any trace of their identity as native peoples; or assimilated into the American body politic; or “terminated” in the middle decades of the twentieth century, with the reality of their native nations erased by congressional statute. Indians were supposed to disappear. If any number of people had their way, Native American people would not be here to call for an Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Finally, the reaction to Indigenous Peoples’ Day coming from the political right reflects the increasingly oft-expressed anger of white males at nearly any expression of grievance by people of color. Protestors who assert that “Black Lives Matter, and who complain about the alacrity with which militarized police deploy violence against African Americans is dismissed as violence; the protests of principled men like Colin Kaepernick and other African-American NFL players is regarded as an assault on the flag, and a demonstration of a lack of patriotism, with no discussion whatsoever of the issues that generated those protests. Suggestions that racist Confederate monuments be removed or revised is treated as an assault on white identity and southern heritage; and native peoples, meanwhile, are told to get over it. The crimes you “allegedly” suffered took place long ago, and therefore the problems occurring in your communities are entirely your fault. We had nothing to do with that.
I have been teaching and writing about Native American history for a long time, more than thirty years. Every day when I talk with my very good students, I realize that I still have so much to learn. Every time I read new scholarship, I realize that there are so many more stories out there that we should tell. I will be a student of this subject forever.
But one thing is so very clear to me, and the tweets I mentioned above are the evidence: Racism towards Native Americans is a real thing. The inequalities experienced by native communities are significant. If you have followed the posts on this blog at all, or the stories I share on my Twitter account, you will see this plain as day. The statistics do not lie. New York, where I have lived for all but five of the last twenty-seven years, became the Empire State, as Laurence Hauptman has so ably shown, through a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession. You could not have one without the other.
The transactions through which New York acquired Iroquois land happened a long time ago, but these were transactions that violated federal laws the United States lacked the power and perhaps the willingness to enforce. The Supreme Court has held that these transactions occurred so long ago that nothing can be done to right these wrongs, but that does not mean that the rights retained by native peoples should be ignored, or their history dismissed.
New York’s native peoples have seen, through a long history, their homelands invaded. They experienced waves of epidemic disease. They faced dispossession, and then the effort to “remove” them to new homes in Arkansas, or Wisconsin, or the Indian Territory, and then to re-educate their children, and disable their governments. Disease, warfare, dispossession, diaspora: the injuries occurred a long time ago, but their legacies remain. And when native peoples and their allies suggest that we commemorate that history on a special day, one associated with the author of a genocidal process against native peoples, their arguments are dismissed.
Look at the ground underneath your feet. If you live in western New York where I live, in towns called Irondequoit, or Nunda, or Geneseo, or Tonawanda, think about the processes of dispossession that made New York state what it is. If you believe that laws matter, that the Constitution matters, that the pledges in a treaty that guarantees to the Six Nations the right to “the free use and employment of their lands” matters, then drop the whining about Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It is not a good look. It makes you sound like a racist buffoon.
In Native American history, there are lots of guilty parties, but Christopher Columbus is guiltier than most. There is absolutely nothing edifying in this story of avarice, violence, and religious bigotry, save for the native peoples who at times and places survived the carnage. The continued celebration of Columbus Day does a historical injustice to the native peoples of two continents and the Caribbean.
The Columbus Day holiday found its origins in the Italian-American community. Columbus, quite likely from Genoa, sailed in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, the authors of the Spanish Reconquista, and in 1492 he “discovered” America. He was, his advocates claim, an Italian and an American hero. The holiday in his honor asserted that Italians were Americans, too.
But the Columbus Day holiday has been under siege for some time. He discovered nothing, of course, for the “New World” he stumbled across in search of the riches of Cathay was already occupied by millions of people. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages in 1992 reawakened interest in the explorer and his actions in the New World, and that attention did not cast Columbus in a good light. Recently, a growing number of colleges and municipalities across the country have recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day, to be held on the federal Columbus Day holiday. An Italian-American friend of mine asked me the other night why any one of the other 364 days of the year could not be chosen for Indigenous Peoples Day. In his view, the movement to obtain recognition for Indigenous Peoples’ Day generated conflict where none was needed, and caused offense to Italian-Americans. While I understand his argument, the commemoration of Indigenous Peoples Day is something I support. As we point out in Native America, the Columbus Day holiday “many native peoples view as a day for mourning the victims of an American holocaust and 500 years of genocide.”
The Columbian Encounter, so-called, is the beginning of a horror story for the native peoples of the Americas, North, South, and Central, as well as the indigenous population of the Caribbean, who were quickly destroyed as autonomous peoples by the Spanish newcomers. Columbus, his supporters might argue, gets too much of the blame. He did nothing to native peoples in North America because he never set foot on the North American continent. This much is true, but Columbus has become, and perhaps always has been, a symbol standing in for the “fundamental violence of discovery,” as I class it in the second chapter of Native America.
Long ago I taught at a one-day NEH gathering on the Blackfeet Reservation way up in northwestern Montana. The subject was children’s literature that treated in different ways the history of America’s native peoples. One of the books was Michael Dorris’s Morning Girl (1992). The story followed Morning Girl and her brother Star Boy, indigenous children playing and exploring in the “Pre-Columbian” Caribbean. It is a story that is wise and gentle. But at its close, it takes a darker turn. Morning Girl swims out to see a strange sight approaching the beach.
Dorris ends the story with a lengthy excerpt from Columbus’s journal:
In order that they would be friendly to us — because I recognized that they were people who would be better freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force — to some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads which they put on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. Later they came swimming to the ships’ launches where we were and brought us parrots and cotton thread in balls and javelins and many other things, and they traded them to us for other things which we gave them, such as small glass beads and bells. In sum, they took everything and gave of what they had very willingly. But it seemed to me that they were a people very poor in everything. All of them go around as naked as their mothers bore them; and the women also, although I did not see more than one quite young girl. And all those that I saw were young people, for none did I see of more than 30 years of age. They are very well formed, with handsome bodies and good faces. Their hair coarse — almost like the tail of a horse-and short. They wear their hair down over their eyebrows except for a little in the back which they wear long and never cut. Some of them paint themselves with black, and they are of the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white; and some of them paint themselves with white, and some of them with red, and some of them with whatever they find. And some of them paint their faces, and some of them the whole body, and some of them only the eyes, and some of them only the nose. They do not carry arms nor are they acquainted with them, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and through ignorance cut themselves. They have no iron.
Their javelins are shafts without iron and some of them have at the end a fish tooth…. All of them alike are of good-sized stature and carry themselves well. I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies and I made signs to them asking what they were; and they showed me how people from other islands nearby came there and tried to take them, and how they defended themselves; and I believed and believe that — they come here from tierrafirme to take them captive. They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion. Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses in order that they may learn to speak…
Morning Girl, then, is the story of that child who Columbus saw as his men approached landfall in October of 1492, and whose gentleness and innocence led the wayward Admiral to conclude that her people would make good servants.
We spent quite a bit of time that morning discussing Dorris’s book. The teachers from Blackfeet felt very differently about the book than did some of the non-native teachers. The Blackfeet teachers all agreed that if they were to use Morning Girl in class, they would cut out that last piece. They would have physically removed the last page from the book. Too painful, and too traumatic for the children who might read it, they thought. In Fourteen-Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…and contemplated how indigenous children might make good slaves.
I do not agree with altering books in this manner, nor in insulating children from the more horrifying parts of our shared history, but I understood their concerns. We spend some time on Columbus in Native America. We have to. Between the first and second editions, one of the many books I read as I worked on revising the text was Andres Resendez’s excellent The Other Slavery which, among other things, described in detail the centrality of slavery in Columbus’s enterprise. Columbus carried slaves back to Spain on each of his voyages, and promised the Crown “as many slaves as Their Majesties orders to make.”
If you read excerpts from Bartolome De Las Casas’s Devastation of the Indies–and if you are a student in a Native American history course treating this period you likely will–you can read about the sheer brutality of the Spanish conquistadors who followed Columbus. Las Casas provides a first-hand account of the first modern genocide: Spanish ships able to sail homeward without need of navigational instruments because all they needed to do was follow the trail of floating corpses, enslaved Indians who died on the Atlantic crossing. Las Casas described how Spanish colonists could buy human flesh for their dogs, and how Spanish war dogs tore native peoples literally limb from limb. Las Casas described the competition between conquistadors to see who could run through the most Indians with one thrust of the pike, and how Spaniards burned native peoples in groups of thirteen in honor of Jesus and the apostles, and bashed their children’s heads in by swinging them against the rocks, as in the Flemish (and Protestant) engraving to the left. And all this brutality, all the subjugation that occurred under the aegis of the Spanish encomienda system, exacerbated the consequences of epidemic diseases, which in places killed off 80% of the population. Brutality made native peoples less able to resist the onslaught of disease. Millions died.
But here’s the thing, and I hope you will see it if you read Native America. We can focus on victimization and cruelty. God knows, Columbus and his successors were violent and brutal and victimized many. But to focus on victimization alone does a deep disservice to the history of native peoples.
In Native America, we tell the story of the first European explorers who came to North America from the Indians’ perspective: What native peoples saw when they looked at these newcomers, their strategic calculations, how they fit the Europeans into their conceptual universe. If you look at the story of the French explorer Jacques Cartier, who sailed into the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s, or his Spanish contemporary Coronado who wandered throughout the American southwest, or Soto’s violent exercise in futility in the Southeast, or the Juan Pardo expedition, or Cabrillo’s ineffectual reconnaissance of the California coast, or even the Roanoke voyages of 1584-1590, you cannot help but see one consistent theme. It is so obvious in the surviving documents. What is clear in every account is the utter dependence of the newcomers upon the native peoples who cautiously welcomed them into their communities, cultivated them as military allies and trading partners, enlisted them in their struggles with their neighbors, and contemplated transforming them into kin. When the newcomers wore out their welcomes in North America, their enterprises were doomed, their situation worse than desperate. These European explorers discovered what they believe they discovered only because native peoples allowed them to do so. And the effects of the visits by these European sojourners were remarkably short-lived, the consequences fleeting. Even with De Soto, who many scholars long had blamed for spreading epidemic disease into the continent’s interior (a mistake I made in the first edition), we now know from the work of historians like Paul Kelton and anthropologists like Robbie Etheridge that his disastrous expedition had little long-term effect. The wasting plagues came in the seventeenth century, a product of an Anglo-American trade in Native American slaves, the scope of which was vast and mind-boggling.
Columbus Day found its origins in discrimination against Italian-American immigrants. We were here from the beginning, Italian-Americans said, and we have as great a claim to this continent as any other group. The holiday has seldom encouraged any significant and honest discussion of the consequences of the Columbian Encounter, a process which was, as historian Alfred Crosby showed a long time ago, much bigger than Christopher Columbus. It is time for the bad history and the myth associated with this day to go away, and if recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day helps I am all for it. Let’s talk about Columbus, to be sure, and the European invasion of America, but let’s do so with our eyes firmly upon those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter.
