10/16/2020
Bloomington City Council proclaimed October 14th, 2019 Indigenous Peoples’ Day to the chilled tears of Bloomington’s reactionary right. Like many U.S. jurisdictions, Bloomington forgot the celebration of Christopher Columbus in favor of recognizing the long and often forgotten history of Native Americans. Torii More, the Curator of Digital Humanities at Mclean County Museum of History read this testimony by Kickapoo Tribal Chairman Lester Randall:
“The painful history of Native Americans in this country is one that cannot be erased or forgotten, but the narrative of those experiences can be reshaped and it is imperative that the truth be acknowledged.By changing the second Monday in October to Indigenous People’s Day, communities demonstrate their awareness of the rich history, culture and traditions of the indigenous peoples of America and the resident Indian tribes in our state.”
Kickapoo Tribal Chairman Lester Randall
To Diane Benjamin and her reactionary snowflakes nothing could be more profane than forgetting the (mythical) legacy of Christopher Columbus. “Like true progressives attempting to destroy all traditions, on the Bloomington Council agenda” crowed the Dodo-like Ice Queen not realizing the imminent extinction of her ideology. Instead of making real arguments, the Ice Queen merely reposted an opinion piece in the New York Post by Kyle Smith entitled “Columbus Day haters are missing the entire point of the holiday.”
“There’s no doubt Columbus — and the conquistadors who followed — enslaved and slaughtered on a mass scale,” writes Smith. “But Columbus didn’t bring cruelty to peaceful, benign peoples. The indigenous people were also cruel to one another.” Smith’s argument seems to be that genocide and slavery weren’t so bad because Indigenous people engaged in violent acts with each other. Apparently, Christopher Columbus saw the way the Taino were dressed and decided they were asking for it.
The Eurocentric reactionaries go on to site a number of violent practices including cannibalism as to why European culture was so much more civilized than indigenous. Yet, they’ll never mention how in 15th century Europe, doctors would collect the blood of execution victims for others to drink believing it had healing properties. There was even a drink called mummy water created by soaking body parts in various spirits which was believed to cure epilepsy. But, sure… the indigenous peoples of the Americas were the barbarians.
Furthermore, Christopher Columbus is hardly worth celebrating at all. Not only did he never set foot on what is today the United States, but he was widely regarded as a moron. The overwhelming consensus of the 15th century was that the voyage West towards Eastern Asia was impossible. Even then, people had a rough idea of how large the circumference of the Earth was (this went as far back as the Ancient Greeks). Because no one in the West was aware of the Americas, it was theorized that a voyage West would take so long that any ship was doomed to run out of supplies before they reached Eastern Asia. Instead of relying on common sense notions of geography, Columbus followed the beliefs of Peter D’Ailly, an astrologer, that the earth was actually much smaller. Through a rather dubious method of calculations, Columbus posited that the distance between Europe and Japan was only 2,700 miles; the real distance is over 13,000 miles!
Most people remember being taught in school that Columbus was the first European to posit the Earth was round. (In fact, most of the world dating back thousands of years knew the Earth was round.) Columbus actually didn’t believe the Earth was altogether round.1 Convinced by his own spurious arithmetic, Columbus posited that the the Earth was actually pear-shaped and the tip of the Earth was a nipple. “Columbus reasoned that the world was shaped like a ball with a breastlike protuberance. He felt himself not just crossing the ocean but going up it, his whole ship being lifted gently toward the sky. Had he reached the very tip of the protuberance, he concluded, he would have sailed straight into the Terrestrial Paradise.”2 How anyone can see this man as anything but a bumbling buffoon who just happened to get lucky defies basic logic?
While many try to discount the significance of the Columbus’ brutality, even during his own lifetime he methods were seen as particularly cruel. Bartolomé de las Casas, whose father sailed with Columbus, was frank about Columbus’ culpability in the atrocities committed against the Taino. “Referring to a Taino prisoner whose ears were chopped off during the Second Voyage, las Casas writes, ‘This was the first case of injustice perpetrated here in the Indies on the mistaken and vain assumption that what was being enacted was justice. It marked the beginning of the spilling of blood, later to become a river of blood, first on this island and then in every corner of these Indies.’”3 Columbus’ management was so bad his own crew eventually mutinied against him, and he was arrested back to Spain. Columbus’ own records detail the affable Taino people of the islands Columbus “discovered.” Despite this fondness, this did little to effect his treatment of them. He brutally enslaved the Taino and in the matter of less than two decades turn the 25,000 population of the Taino into a mere 250.
Probably one of the most ridiculous reason for celebrating Columbus in the Americas is that he never thought he discovered a new land. He lived and died firmly believing he had sailed to Asia, despite all evidence to contrary.
Perhaps Columbus is a “handy spokesman” for European colonization. What could be more European than haphazardly stumbling across occupied land, declaring it “discovered”, and stubbornly refusing to admit how wrong your mythical ideology is?
If you’d like to learn more about Native Americans, the Mclean County Museum of History has a new exhibit entitled “Challenges, Choices, & Change: A Community in Conflict” opening November 9, 2019. You can find out more information about this exhibit here.
Woe be the fall of Columbus. And, Love & Liberation for Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
- “Probably the most famous “fact” about Columbus—his insistence, against overwhelming scholastic opposition, that the world was round—was the work of a fabulist, Washington Irving, who wrote the first modern biography of the explorer. (Irving concocted the “fact” to back up his thesis that Columbus’s journeys expressed a bold, proto-American rationalism.)” see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/10/14/the-lost-mariner
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/10/14/the-lost-mariner
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/10/14/the-lost-mariner
