They say the recording of history is left to the victors. Those who conquer other civilizations are left to define the heroes and villains of brutal campaigns, and the innocents have no voice. Here in the United States, we are not immune from that tradition. In fact, when some school districts attempt to teach a balanced perspective on historical events, they are often accused of encouraging young people to “spit on the graves of their ancestors.”
When I started school back in the 1940s, I remember being fascinated with the story of Columbus’ discovery of America. The beautiful tale of bravery and exploration captured my young imagination. I remember drawing pictures of the three ships with their names on the sails. Queen Isabel’s decision to pawn her royal jewels to finance his courageous voyage impressed me. Columbus’ courage to sail, uncertain he might fall off the edge of the earth, caught my fancy so much I started to draw an ocean precipice with the Santa Maria sideways tumbling off and sailors hanging onto the big sail. My teacher saw, and told me I should draw what really happened.
What did really happen? Today, most of us know that many Europeans had visited American shores many times before Columbus arrived. Queen Isabel did not pawn her jewels. Columbus actually borrowed money from Spanish Royalty to finance his first trip. He promised a large profit to these powerful investors assuming the best, but was plagued with fear of debtors prison upon returning empty handed. Columbus did not find his quick route to the riches of the East. The gold he did find was mostly rumors. Desperate for a marketable commodity to repay his loan, he seized by force 1200 Taiwa Indians and crammed as many as he could into his ships to sell in the Seville slave market back in Spain.
Thus began a 500 year campaign of greed and lust on the part of Europeans. The subsequent extermination of people and long-standing civilizations is one of the saddest chapters on human history.
Our own community is a testament to the power of myth. For many decades, Custer was hailed as a hero, praised for his martyrdom in spreading civilization and religion to indigenous peoples. We see that differently now, also.
Yet, there are some real heroes from Columbus’ time our youth could emulate. One example is Bartholome de Las Casas. He was there on the streets of Seville the day Columbus arrived back in Spain with his first cargo of Indian slaves. He would have seen the hundreds of survivors, some his own age of 8 years. Instead of seeing these people as chattel, he saw them as sorrowful and blameless human beings in chains before Queen Isabel and the citizens of Seville. On that day he may have locked eyes with a Taiwa child, and begun building a child’s empathy for fellow humans. This was the day that God placed upon this young man the makings of a true hero.
Bartholome grew up to be an influential scholar, historian, and social reformer. Back in the mid 1500’s, some of his writing went viral. He had a part in overturning the theology that indigenous people of the Americas lacked redeemable souls. In addition, his early theological and legal arguments against slavery spread eventually to the United States, helping inspire language in our own constitution. His ideas helped build our Abolitionist movement and inspired our civil rights movement, centuries later.
It’s interesting that we don’t learn more about this influential figure in American history. Here is an example of a real hero who could inspire school children to consider the impact of our actions and join in the fight for the same justice issues at root in our Revolutionary War. Not as flashy as Columbus’ ships falling off the edge of the earth, but perhaps a little more realistic.
When the revisionist history around Columbus’ Day is addressed, like it often is now across classrooms in Big Horn County, celebrations previously justifying the evil of empire could become truly inspirational. We could use this holiday to examine our own roots and religious heritage for real heroes to emulate.
The following is not included in the Big Horn County News column:
Columbus’ criminal rampage in our hemisphere should not be taught in our elementary schools. Along with the Jewish holocaust, this is material to encounter in high school at the earliest. We have plenty of real heroes to honor, people who committed their lives to our freedom and peaceful safety: Florence Nightingale, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Betty Williams, and Jesus and his disciples in Bible times. These were people who discovered what is best in the human soul, not an island in the Caribbean. Mass murderers like Christopher Columbus, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte do not belong in a place of honor in our schools.
Columbus left a contingent of troops in a stockade built from one of the ships to guard the remaining captives. Eventually, the residents of Hispaniola roused from their peaceful ways, stormed the stockade, killed all the Spaniards Columbus left behind, and freed their loved ones. When Columbus returned with a larger contingent, the slaughter of the Taiwa began in earnest. Their daughters were raped, children, fathers and mothers separated, and massive numbers enslaved until they died digging for gold in the mountains. Columbus’ frantic search soon turned from gold to humans. The word got out, and American nations turned from their relatively peaceful ways to fight off the Spanish conquistadors. But without guns and swords to balance the conflict, it simply brought on more atrocity. Eventually, the genocide may have exceeded that of Hitler, but since no one took account of Indian deaths there is no proof.
If he were alive today, he would almost certainly be awaiting execution. His reign of terror throughout the islands between Yucatan and Florida was so horrific it exceeds the level of crimes against humanity even of Saddam Hussein. Some three million people were put to death over three decades, many with horrendous pain, unspeakable cruelty, and slow agonizing torture. He was a criminal, inviting or forcing his men into unspeakable acts against the children and adult citizens of the nations beginning with Hispaniola.
We still have in Big Horn County a revisionist history in Columbus Day. Our rich mix of culture and religion in Big Horn County provides the right context to remedy this. The false lessons about Columbus Day popularized for political gain almost a hundred years ago are being understood with an honest investigation of the documents.
We were visited in Big Horn County once with a little Columbus named Custer. The history of that encounter was similarly revised to make him a hero. For years, he fought and subdued Indians in their own homeland, slaughtering their children and elderly when encountering opposition to his greed for gold, land, and political power. It became then, in our national conscience, manifest destiny. But it has changed. We have seen the light. Blessed with descendants from both sides coexisting right here now in Big Horn County, our impetus for peace welling up from the spring of our religious diversity here has overcome much of the hostility. We fortunately ended up memorializing the event that happened on Last Stand Hill, rather than honoring one of those who died there.
Unlike Jesus, or even heroes like Martin Luther King, Custer and Columbus were both shedders of human blood. Columbus was simply the first European Christendom representative to explore this hemisphere. His purpose, far from spreading Christian faith, mutual gain, or even good will, was to extricate gold and human beings for export and sale back across the Atlantic, enhancing the power and wealth of Spain. Custer was simply, we hope, the last. The 500 years of greed and lust by powerful Europeans, started by Columbus, backed by European guns, germs and steel against the nations of this hemisphere, should now be over.
There is a real hero from Columbus’ time our youth could emulate: Bartholome de las Casas. He was there on the streets of Seville the day Columbus arrived back in Spain with is first cargo of Indian slaves. There had to be some reason God placed upon this young man the makings of a true hero.
Back in the mid 1500’s, some of his writing went viral. He had a part in overturning the theology that indigenous people of the Americas lacked redeemable souls. In addition, his early theological arguments against slavery spread eventually to the United States, helping inspire language of our constitution. His ideas helped build our Abolitionist movement and inspired our civil rights movement.
Casas' first book prompted an investigation by the Catholic church of practices of slavery and genocide in the new world beginning with Columbus, "The Only Way."
"Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566) is the key to the quincentenary debate--should we celebrate or should we weep? His was the main cry against the tragic fate of the Indians, the main cry for reform. Until now, he has been known only from incomplete sources. This book begins his rediscovery in 1992.
Las Casas was barely 18 when he came to America in 1502, spending the next decade as a planter in the West Indies. He befriended the natives, but saw them cruelly massacred and exploited by conquistadors. In 1514 the mounting shock turned him into a defender of the Indians from then until his death at 82. As a priest-colonist, a Dominican friar, a bishop, he fought at court in the New World for their full human rights, using his first book, The Only Way, to great effect. The earliest version produced a papal encyclical on behalf of the Indians, the second motivated an emperor to issue laws protecting them, the third taught a generation of Spanish scholars. Sullivan's translation of The Only Way to Draw All People to a Living Faith lets us hear Las Casas in full at last. The familiar horrors and denunciations are all there, but so is a gentle voice filled with compassion and yearning for peace. For centuries, the treatise influenced mission theory and practice in many lands; modern writers studied its missiology and its relation to his own mission experiment. But this new version--the lost opening reconstructed, the massive proof texts banished, the original form restored--reveals the doctrine that guided Las Casas' career. In it, he pleads for the way of Christ: evangelization by peaceful charity and respect not by "fire and the sword." Sullivan has given us a brilliant rendering of the powerful central version Fray Bartolome composed at Oaxaca in 1539 to change the conscience of Christendom. The work makes the same appeal to conscience today.”
A thoroughly researched documentation on Columbus and Casas is "Bartolomé de las Casas: A Biography," by Lawrence Clayton 2012. See the Amazon description and reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/Bartolom-e9-las-Casas-A-Biography/dp/1107001218.
Helen Rand Parish may have done the most over the last decades to uncover the revisionism in the history of Columbus with her research and writings. See the information on Casas in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas
Other resources on Casas:
http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/bartolom%C3%A9-de-las-casas
http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?action=read&artid=444
"the indigenous population of Hispaniola, the island where Columbus landed, reduced from 250,000 to 15,000 in two decades due to the war and forced labor. This genocide called the attention of those theologians like Vitoria and Las Casas who were concerned with the morality of the conquest. Nonetheless, as Brian Tierney states: “In the end, all the writings on behalf of the Indians did little or nothing to ameliorate their plight. The battles that were sometimes won in the debating halls of Salamanca and Madrid were nearly always lost among the hard realities of life in Mexico and Peru.”"
Dispossessing the barbarian: the language of Spanish Thomism and the debate over the property rights of the American Indians
Sepulva was Las Casas’ opponent in a debate using law and theology to decide whether Indians in the New World were worthy of Christian protection. Here is Sepulva’s writing: "Just War Against Barbarians," by Juan Gines de Sepulva
https://www2.stetson.edu/secure/history/hy10430/sepulveda.html
Bartolome de las Casas traveled with Columbus and was prominent in advocating for the survival of the population in the Americas being enslaved at that time. His book, "The Tears of the Indians" is available free online through google books. Unfortunately, it's the 1870's translation and the typesetting, as well as vivid descriptions of obscene abuse, makes it a tedious read:
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Tears_of_the_Indians.html?id=I6IWAAAAYAAJ
Another book by him, “History of the Indies,” is a much larger work, a current translation available in print, consists of documents and narrative of his largely failed advocacy of full human rights for indigenous citizens of the Americas.
Another summary of his life work is THE DEVASTATION OF THE INDIES: A BRIEF ACCOUNT by Bartolome de Las Casas 1552. This is posted online by the Anchorage School District in Alaska:
https://www.asdk12.org/staff/bivins_rick/HOMEWORK/216236_LasCasas_TheDevast.pdf
Where did this revisionist history come from? The real, original story of Columbus in this hemisphere beginning in1492 lay dormant in the archives of the Catholic church, basically ignored until recently. Our American Knights of Columbus began looking for an American hero kids could look up to. Through lobbying, and no careful investigation of historical sources, Congress agreed in 1934 to honor this courageous explorer. Or so I was taught in Montgomery School in the 50’s.
For information countering the Columbus Day revisionist history accepted as standard history for almost two centuries in America, see
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kasum/columbus-day-a-bad-idea_b_742708.html
There are problems with this: Columbus was clearly not the first to set foot on Western Hemisphere soil. Leif Ericson was probably the first European to venture here. And decades before Columbus, the Chinese explorer Zheng He is said to have led more than one expedition to this hemisphere. But even more important is the arrogance of it all. It’s almost certain that peoples who first became “Native Americans” arrived here thousands of years ago via Alaska. And then there is the DNA evidence of Polynesians arriving on the west coast of South America long before Columbus and the Vikings.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/1421-the-year-china-discovered-america/
Following his father’s example, Bartholome de Las Casas sailed to the New World. In Cuba and other Carribbean islands, he was successful in all he did. He was rewarded several times with land tracts, always including the inhabitants as slaves. But his success did not cloud the compassion and sense of gross unfairness apparently implanted in his conscience as an 8-year-old. Such is the interpretation of some historians trying to explain how Las Casas, the first and for many years the only one of the Spanish conquistadors, soldiers and priests to raise a voice in protest against this gross inhumanity.
A very successful soldier in the New World, he was awarded tracts of land with title to inhabitants as well. But he refused to enslave them or kill thim. He used his university education in at least one recorded legal debate against the atrocities in which he was immersed. He addressed successive royalty to promote a better way than that of the conquistadors to convert American nations to Christianity. He even attempted to carve out a separate nation in the vicinity of modern Venezuela to show how indigenous peoples and the invaders could coexist. Finding little or no success in these efforts, he resorted to writing. This was natural, since he was the primary editor of Columbus’ journals. He wrote several books, in his later years recording in grossly atrocious detail his experiences. This made his writing off limits to children. This and the United States’ revisionist history leading to Columbus Day celebrations may explain why his writings have so long been so obscure. Thankfully, we have history teachers here in Big Horn County who know and honor this great hero whose determination to follow God’s commands for the nations would influence our nation’s origin.
Where did this revisionist history come from? The real, original story of Columbus in this hemisphere beginning in 1492 lay dormant in the archives of the Catholic church, basically ignored until recently. Our American Knights of Columbus began looking for an American hero kids could look up to. Through lobbying, and no careful investigation of historical sources, Congress agreed in 1934 to honor this courageous explorer. Or so I was taught in Montgomery School in the 50’s.
There are problems with this: Columbus was clearly not the first to set foot on Western Hemisphere soil. Leif Ericson was probably the first European to venture here. And decades before Columbus, the Chinese explorer Zheng He is said to have led more than one expedition to this hemisphere. But even more important is the arrogance of it all. It’s almost certain that peoples who first became “Native Americans” arrived here thousands of years ago via Alaska. And then there is the DNA evidence of Polynesians arriving on the west coast of South America long before Columbus and the Vikings.
David Graber
Hardin, MT
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