Statues of Christopher Columbus were recently vandalized in San Francisco, California and Providence, Rhode Island. The vandals threw red paint on the statue and wrote graffiti associating Columbus with genocide.
These vandals are part of a larger movement that is attempting to eradicate the Italian explorer’s U.S. holiday, Columbus Day. The movement wishes to replace the holiday with a new holiday coined Indigenous People’s Day.
So why the hatred for the first European to discover the Americas? The sign draped over the Providence statue read “Stop Celebrating Genocide.”
This is eyebrow raising. Was the man who discovered the Americas a genocidal maniac or a brave and valiant explorer who connected two hemispheres?
To answer this question, you must cut through the politics and divisive commentators and return to the facts. Who was Columbus, and what was he doing?
Columbus was an Italian explorer with a simple goal: Find a trade route west to East Asia. His target destination was Cipango (Japan) and not India, as is constantly reported. Throughout his first voyage in his recorded journals, Columbus is seen consistently searching for Cipango.
“Afterwards I shall set sail for another very large island,” Columbus wrote. “Which I believe to be Cipango, according to the indications I receive from the Indians on board.”
He obviously never made it Japan, and he knew that. Columbus never thought he had made it to his target destination. He knew he was somewhere new.
By his third voyage Columbus had discovered the continent of South America. He coined this “Otro Mundo,” meaning “other world.”
“He became conscious that so great a land was not an island but a continent,” Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th Century Spanish colonist and historian, recorded.
We know Columbus was an Italian explorer who became the first European to meaningfully discover the Americas, but what about how he treated the people already in the Americas? Was he genocidal and hellbent on ridding the world of these indigenous Americans? Right out of the gate, we know the vast majority of indigenous people died after Columbus’s expeditions.
Though we may never know the exact amount of depopulation, a research article published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives states, “it is estimated that upwards of 80–95% of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492.”
These numbers are staggering, but we must ask ourselves what was the cause of death for so many people? The answer is simple: disease. Indigenous Americans had no resistance to European diseases and were completely ravaged by diseases like smallpox.
“Yet it’s increasingly clear that most of the carnage had nothing to do with European barbarism,” the Yale historian David Brion Davis said in a Newsweek article. “The worst of the suffering was caused not by swords or guns, but by germs.”
This exchange of disease was not only inevitable but completely unintentional. It wouldn’t be for at least a couple hundred more years after Columbus’s voyages that physicians and scientists began tossing around the ideas of germs.
While it may be true that many of the indigenous people dies of disease, that does not speak to Columbus’s intention. For that we must turn to the recorded writings we have of his.
It is increasingly clear from his writings that Columbus had a few goals, first of which was to subjugate the people under the Spanish crown. He also intended to convert the natives to Christianity and exploit them for natural resources, namely gold.
“It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants,” Columbus wrote in a letter to the King of Spain. “And I am of the opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion.”
The indigenous people were to be subjugated under the Spanish crown and feudal system, forced to work in service to the crown, but they were not the property of the crown. As with any other feudal system at the time, the lowest peasant class was treat poorly, but they were not slaves. Nobody owned them.
It is also important to note Columbus only governed in the new world until 1500. He was imprisoned by the Spanish crown for mismanagement of the colonies. Columbus ruled in the new world for less than a decade, yet generations of killings of the indigenous people are blamed on him.
Even faced with the fact that Columbus and his men were responsible for atrocities, it is not fair to label these atrocities as genocide. Genocide is a word with a very specific meaning, and use of the word genocide to label any atrocity degrades the severity of it.
According to the United Nations, genocide is an “act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group.”
Columbus had no intent to destroy the indigenous people on ethnic, racial, or religious grounds. In his own words, he wanted to subjugate them and believed they had no religion. His motive was conquest, and dissenters were killed. He had no desire in whole or part to wipe the indigenous people from the face of the planet.
In conclusion, Christopher Columbus was an explorer who conquered land and people for the Spanish crown. Looking through a historical lens, Columbus was not very different from explorers who came before him with the notable exception that he connected the new world with the old. This set the stage for a new era of globalization and the reason most of us are here in this country today.
The atrocities faced by indigenous people should never be understated, but to blame them all on a man who lived hundreds of years ago and spent less than a decade on the continent is a little misguided. If you wish to look at progenitors of atrocities against Native Americans, I suggest you start with the U.S. government. I believe the facts you will find align much closer with genocide than the expeditions of Columbus.
If we are to celebrate our history with holidays such as President’s Day and Columbus Day, I certainly feel the indigenous peoples of the country deserve a holiday. Replacing Columbus Day with such a holiday accomplishes little more than turning Columbus Day into a hate Columbus day. Can we not simply leave Columbus Day to serve as reminder of our past and celebrate the connecting of the globe back in 1492, while also setting aside another day to recognize the history and contribution indigenous people have had on our society?
