In light of the government's recent "apology" for its own complicity in the murderous residential school system that killed upwards of 50,000 aboriginal children and amounted to an official program of cultural genocide, I consider it wise to reflect upon how this continent was taken in the first place, and to what ends.
Gold, silver, slavery and murder: The legacy of Columbus
In the fall of 2001, a great brouhaha was raised in the media about a handbook produced by the student union at Concordia University in Montreal. A number of organizations came together in a press conference to denounce the publication, while incensed right-wing editorialists denounced the student union as, among other things, "anti-globalization zealots" guilty of "sullying the university's name." Among the features of the handbook singled out for condemnation at a press conference was its entry for October 8, 2001 which reads "Thanksgiving — Colonialist Holiday."
But what is it to which the right-wingers object? After all, native peoples certainly didn't initiate Thanksgiving Day, nor do they celebrate it. As Ward Churchill of the American Indian Movement has asked about the annual celebrations on this day:
Should we be thankful for the scalp bounties paid by every English colony — as well as every US state and territory in the lower 48 – for proof of the deaths of individual Indians, including women and children? How might we best show our appreciation for the order issued by Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, requiring smallpox-infested items be given as gifts to the Ottawas so that 'we might extirpate this execrable race?'... It's no mystery why Indians don't observe Thanksgiving Day. The real question is why do you feast rather than fast on what should be a national day of mourning and atonement.
Given that it is not a day of mourning and atonement, what is the holiday if not a celebration of European colonization of North America? Here the outraged conservatives turn evasive. And for good reason. For the legacy of European colonization of the Americans, beginning with the "voyages" of Christopher Columbus, is not quite the uplifting affair they choose to celebrate.
As a number of commentators have pointed out, Columbus was less interested in discovery and adventure than he was in gold. In fact, his preoccupation with the metal could be described as obsessive. One expert points out that the word gold appears in his diary 140 times on his first trip to the Americas: "It was the one constant of his Journal, the one recurring goal, and on some days he seemed hardly able to get it out of his mind." Alas, the great discoverer came up empty on his first two trips to the "New World" (1492 and 1493). Five years later, however, his luck turned: gold was discovered in the new colony of Espanola (what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic). As extensive mining began, the colony turned out from one to three tons of the yellow metal every year between 1504 and 1519. "Gold is most precious," exuded Columbus. "Gold is treasure, and with it, whoever has it may do what he wants in the world, and may succeed in taking souls to Paradise."
Paradise is not what would be visited upon the area's indigenous peoples, however. On his first and second voyages, despairing of finding gold, Columbus had hit upon another commodity that he could use to satisfy the king and queen of Spain, who had financed his journeys: slaves. Worried by his failure to locate gold, he sent several dozen natives back during his first voyage. Then, during the second trip, he captured 1,600 Tainos from the interior of Espanola and proposed to the Spanish royals that these men, women and children could be traded for cattle and supplies. With the discovery of gold on his third voyager came the decision that would shape all the early chapters of colonial history in the Americas: the great "discoverer" decreed that indigenous people would be enslaved and forced to mine gold. In time, slavery would become the preferred labour system for every major commodity in the "New World": gold, silver, sugar, tobacco.
Of course, the indigenous peoples were unlikely to submit readily to this new arrangement. In order to conquer their resistance, terror was pursued as a routine part of colonial policy. Gallows were erected in every Spanish town, 340 of them in the valley of the Vega Real alone. And these gallows were used with bloody results. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who came to the Americas as a Catholic missionary, chronicled the savagery of the Spanish. One historian summarizes part of his findings:
De las Casas reports how they made low, wide gallows on which they strung up the Arawaks, their feet almost touching the ground, Then they put burning green wood at their feet. These executions took place in lots of thirteen. Why? This was "in memory of our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles."
De las Casas continues to say that chiefs and nobles were usually not hanged like that, but burned to death on grids of rods. Once, he writes, a captain complained that he couldn't sleep because of the cries and he ordered the victims strangled. But the constable... instead put sticks over their tongues so that they could not make a song, and "roasted them slowly, as he liked." Men, women and children on Columbus' Hispaniola were hacked to pieces, and those pieces were sold from stalls to the Spaniards for feeding their dogs.
Murder, death by overwork, and disease ravaged the indigenous peoples. The scale of the human destruction is staggering. Scholarly research now suggests that there were about eight million Tainos when Columbus first arrived in 1492. Four years later, only three million remained. By the time Columbus left his duties as governor of the colony in 1500, a mere 100,000 of these indigenous peoples had survived. By 1542, perhaps 200 were alive. In short, within 50 years of European conquest, more than 99.9 per cent of the Tainos population had perished. An apocalypse had occurred, bringing in its wake a wave of human annihilation that would reverberate through the Americas.
— Another world is possible: Globalization and anti-capitalism by David McNally
