Chris Columbus and Messy History

Columbus Statue in Syracuse, New York. Photo by Wil Snodgrass
Many statues of Columbus attract protests these days, and this one is no exception. For those who dislike this particular statue, I agree that it seems to take delight in portraying Native Americans - of which there were many in Upstate New York - as subservient to Columbus. In this case, wouldn't removing the figure of Columbus and leaving the plinth with the chiefs in headdress be appropriate for the statue's location? It's sited not near any of Christopher's beachheads, but in the foreground of the Onondaga County Courthouse. The Onondaga people were charter members of the Iroquois Confederacy, key allies against the British during the Revolutionary War. Alternatively, then, the statue could remain intact and be interpreted as a link between Colonists and Native Americans united against a common enemy. At any rate, the point is that messy history means simplistic conclusions may not be accurate.

 

History is messy.

Of all the things I learned in school growing up, that's one thing I didn't learn.  And you probably didn't either.  We were spoon-fed pre-packaged parcels of chock-a-block history lessons, with Colonial America in one box, European history in another box, and Texas history in a huge box (here in Texas, all 7th graders are taught how absolutely indebted the world is to the Lone Star State!).  

World history often gets broken up and tossed into various other boxes like geography and social studies.

When I got to college, I had a history professor who announced that his job was to re-teach us history.  Public school so corrupts our understanding of the world around us, he said, that it's a wonder our modern society isn't even more twisted than it already is.  While it is true that people who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, the vast majority of us have never been taught how individual bits of history correspond to the whole.

And increasingly, when Columbus Day rolls around every year, we're confronted with that unfortunate reality.

Not because "Indigenous Peoples Day" deserves to replace unfettered adulation of the White guy who "discovered" the "New" World.  But because even folks who champion the Western Hemisphere's "indigenous people" don't realize that the civilizations Columbus mocked and tortured weren't really all that civilized to begin with, either.

The more I learn about Christopher Columbus, the more convinced I am that he wasn't just a product of his time.  He was deeply ethnocentric, incredibly vainglorious, and wildly racist.  His writings, even watered down by all the caveats his modern defenders posit, stand as sad testament to his disdain for just about everybody he encountered over here.  Let's just go ahead and admit it.

The thing is, we can't stop there.  When I was in junior high, I took Spanish classes, and I learned about the Mayans, the Incas, and the Aztecs.  And while they were remarkably advanced cultures for Central and South America, they were not civilized.  No "indigenous people" champion today would want to live in any of those cultures.

Mayans, for example, believed in human sacrifices.  They fought vicious wars amongst themselves.  They were also ignorant regarding basic ecology - they caused epic deforestation that endangered their society.  For all the people today who complain about diseases Europeans brought to the Western Hemisphere, let's remember that there are many ways to die, and our indigenous peoples were already facing perils of their own making.

The Incas were colonizers - the dreaded "C" word that horrifies progressives today.  Through crude diplomacy and brutal warfare, they amassed a huge empire along the western coast of South America.  If Columbus hadn't shown up, who knows how much of the continent would have fallen under their control.  For all the people today who complain about imperialistic European colonizers, their posturing is mostly frustration that Whites tended to be more capable at it than indigenous societies like the Incas.

Aztec culture was based on warfare.  Their religion and economy depended on it.  Warfare was how the Aztecs survived - by expanding their empire - and how they pacified their deities.  The Aztecs had no standing army per say; every man was part of their army.

Don't believe me?  Do your own research.  It's not hard - I learned about their warfare when I was in the 7th grade.  But I learned it in the "Spanish Class" box, and I was not encouraged to compare the facts about ancient people groups in the Western Hemisphere to what happened on our side of this planet after Europeans arrived.  I suspect many people who revile Columbus weren't, either.

And what of the Native Americans here in the United States?  Think about it for a minute:  Why do we have the term "braves" in our lexicon today?  It's not because of white supremacy.  Native Americans tended to be quite fierce.  They scalped their enemies long before Europeans began docking their ships along the Atlantic Coast.  Not every tribe possessed such brutality, but generally speaking, the conquest of their world attributed as beginning with Columbus was just an extension of the warfare that was their existence before Europeans set foot on these shores.

There was no placid, bucolic "kumbaya" utopia going on here before Columbus.  In fact, there was no real government, and no rule of law.  Societies here were ruled by autocrats and perpetuated by warfare.  So, how was that so different than what Columbus introduced, you might ask?  Maybe not a lot - except that Columbus was an emissary of a government that was governed to a certain extent by laws.  

The rule of law is not natural to humanity - it was invented by the Greeks.  White Europeans (oh no!).  Ever heard of Aristotle?  He's the guy generally credited with formalizing the philosophy of authority by civil code rather than individual power.

While the rule of law may have been wholly ignored during Columbus' explorations, the concept's evolution made its way to the "New" World not by osmosis, but after the European conquest of this hemisphere.  Was it pretty, and neat and clean, and pure?  Of course not.  It was ugly.  People did bad things.  All kinds of really bad, awful things.  And yes, you and I are living with the messy consequences today of those messy things.

But how does denying reality of this hemisphere before, during, and after Columbus help clean up the messes from history?

Sure, let Christopher's dirty laundry hang out in the fresh air of freedom for all to see.  Should we celebrate him because of how he acted?  No, but is there anything in his sheer passion for discovery that is at all meaningful and relevant to our progress today?

And at the same time, let's not canonize indigenous peoples.  Did they deserve to be treated the way Columbus treated them?  No, but was the world in which they lived deserving of preservation?  Again, the answer would be a resounding "NO", right?  At least, if you value the rule of law and human rights.  Those things may have been absent from the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, but they did follow.  Eventually.

Would values like the rule of law and human rights have eventually come to the Western Hemisphere had Europeans not?  We don't know, and how can we speculate?  Perhaps Asians would have found the western coast of our hemisphere, but remember, the indigenous folks who were already here had come from Asia across the Bering Strait, right?  Might nomads from the "West" have trickled down through North America over the centuries by land, bringing concepts like the rule of law and human rights with them?  Maybe, and maybe they'd have met the same warrior tribes that the Pilgrims and other colonists encountered on the East Coast.

Suffice it to say that the history we're supposedly acknowledging today is messy.  Very messy.  But making villains out of each other, and Italians, and indigenous peoples today misses that point.  What would be so wrong with using this day as a reminder that none of us is perfect?  That daily life is made up of six billion people making mistakes and (hopefully) learning from them?

Maybe you don't appreciate what we have today, compared with what ancient civilizations had - or didn't.  That's the bigger problem with folks who grouse about Columbus, isn't it?  Would you want to risk being alive today in any of the ancient cultures Columbus' arrival helped extinguish?  

Maybe Columbus isn't the person who should have a day named after him (or an uber-liberal university in New York City *cough* *cough*).  But if we're going to start naming holidays after people groups, what's so special about folks who slaughtered each other because they were the more dominant?

Isn't that what you dislike about the Europeans?  Or are you just upset that Europeans had more lethal weapons?

What happens when we don't learn from history?