Columbus Day is this Monday. I will choose to spend the day in remembrance of the millions of Native Americans he killed and all the others that followed.
Although I hardly resemble a Native American, I was raised as one. If you took one look into my childhood home, you would see vast amounts of traditionally handmade native decor. I remember counting some 200 Kokopellis around our house. I met many Navajo and Cherokee tribal members growing up. Most of them were either blood relatives, or I was considered family to them. My father was born and raised on and near the Navajo reservation, however we have Cherokee blood. The result was a sort of mash-up of Navajo and Cherokee cultures. My aunt is currently a Cherokee tribal member, and my grandfather and all previous relatives were. I'm currently working on my own Cherokee citizenship. My parents and relatives taught me from a young age about the horrible treatment of Native Americans by European settlers and the U.S. Our ancestors experienced the worst of the Trail of Tears, and during that time they changed our last name of Falling Leaves to Falling to become more excepted by white society. I learned none of this in school. It surprises me that people still don't know anything about Native American oppression. I try to express this to people every year around Columbus Day, but most people don't care or don't believe the facts.
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| Click image for a chart on the explorers of America |
Columbus was a great navigator, but his accomplishments end at that. He never discovered America. The Americas were visited nearly fourteen times before. Native Americans even crossed the Atlantic to Europe before Columbus did. Anthropologists conjecture that Native Americans traveled millennia ago from Canada to Scandinavia or Scotland. And two Native American ships were found shipwrecked in Holland around 60 B.C.
Columbus is responsible for the genocide of around 15 million people. Some historians give figures closer to 8 million. Yet other historians pin him for many more millions of deaths. Columbus reduced the Taino
numbers from as many as 8 million to about 3 million in 1496. Perhaps 100,000 were left by the time of his
departure. His policies, however, remained,
with the result that by 1542 the Spanish census of the island showed barely 200
remaining alive. The Taino were
considered extinct. Per his own diaries,
letters, and reports Columbus willingly planed this genocide even before
leaving Spain. He also noted the Taino were a gracious people and welcomed him when he landed on their island. There were over 15
million indigenous people throughout the Caribbean Basin at the point of first
contact with Columbus. All of which were
then considered extinct.
I believe one of the problems that we face today is that people so willing paint Native Americans as small, insignificant tribes who eventually benefited from the Europeans. However their cultures were in many ways more advanced than the Europeans especially in equality issues. Women and LGBT people were treated with respect (something the rest of the world wouldn't begin to understand until many, many years later). They were not like the reduced numbers living on reservations in poverty today.
By wiping out these nations, Columbus set a
precedent that would later result in the massacres and horrible treatment of
the other indigenous cultures of the Americas.
334 years later, what is commonly described as the most horrible act our
government has committed, the last of the U.S. Native Americans were forced to
leave their homelands during the Trail of Tears. During which the United States essentially paid their citizens the equivalent of $719 to kill any Native Americans along the way. The man responsible is honored on our twenty dollar bill.
"I fought through the War Between the States and have seen many men shot, but the Cherokee Removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."
-Georgia soldier who participated in the removal
Native American hardships have often been compared to the Holocaust. If you juxtapose percentages of the Jewish population in Europe who died during the Holocaust and of Cherokee who died during The Trail of Tears, they were virtually the same. Columbus killed around the same number of people as Hitler during the Holocaust.
The European settlers and U.S. government enacted countless examples of genocides and crimes against humanity. Today, 515 years later, we still have a Native American political prisoner that
has not been released.
Why is it that we
have a day celebrating such an atrocious man and yet no day in remembrance of
Native Americans?—two continents of people, somewhere between 50 and 100
million, nearly wiped out of existence.
