Columbus about history more than statues

 

Bill Knight column for 9-21, 22 or 23

             People aren’t stupid; we learn. Sometimes lessons are fanciful fables; sometimes they’re difficult realizations of our past.

Columbus statues aren’t symbols of humanity’s progress, one man’s courage or Italians’ gifts. However, they represent ignorance and greed more than racism and hate.

In Peoria, the Park District this week may decide the fate of a local Columbus statue, days before the anniversary of Columbus’ second voyage to the Western hemisphere, on Sept. 25, 1493. The statue could be removed, changed to represent someone else, remain with explanatory signage, or left alone.

We must learn from the past – actual, factual history. Monuments don’t help, mostly showing what we claim to value or what we choose to remember (or forget).

As far as history, too many textbooks stress comforting myths, not facts. Maybe publishers and schools want to avoid rocking the boat, or accept familiar propaganda, no matter how false.

Illinois native James Loewen, author of 1995’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” wrote, “We must pay attention to what the textbooks are telling us and what they are not telling us.”

Changes in Europe set up Columbus’ voyage and Europeans’ centuries-long domination of the world. Columbus’ first trip was funded by Spain’s Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who that year led the “reconquest” of Spain, launched the Spanish Inquisition, and expelled Muslims and Jews who didn’t convert to Christianity.

Significant Columbus-era details omitted from most textbooks, said Loewen, a 78-year-old scholar from Decatur who taught at the University of Vermont and Catholic University of America, were increasing military might, technology (like the printing press), the rise of prestige tied to wealth and power, Christianity’s aggressive proselytizing, and the zeal for controlling islands, from Sardinia and Malta to the Canary Islands and Ireland.

History can be exhilarating or complicated, surprising or shameful. But if everyday Americans accept incomplete or inferior histories, we miss out on teaching moments associated with facts that can be uncomfortable, even disgraceful.

We lose reality.

“Historians do not know all the answers,” said Loewen, “hence history is not just a process of memorizing.”

Reflecting on our country’s background, we’re torn between extremes: A unified march taming the wilderness, establishing liberty and developing a great nation, or a dark land-grab sloshing through blood of innocents and fouling the world.

Columbus’ purpose was neither seeking a new route to the Far East, nor adventure. It was conquest, unlike Vikings who settled in North America or the seafaring Africans, Phoenicians and Egyptians who probably made the trek hundreds of years before.

Describing the indigenous people he confronted in the West Indies, Columbus wrote, “They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion… Everything they have they give for anything given to them.

“I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men and govern them as I please.”

He initially kidnapped dozens of Indians to take to Spain (fewer than 10 survived the trip), and on his second voyage– with more than 1,000 armed men, cavalry and attack dogs on 17 ships – he demanded food, gold, cotton and even sex. He started punishing natives severely for breaking his laws; they resisted, fought and were defeated.

The slave trade stepped up in 1495, when 500 Indians were sent to Europe. Hundreds died en route, but Columbus wrote, “Although they die now, they will not always die. The Negroes and Canary Islanders died at first.”

Loewen said, “Because the Indians died, Indian slavery then led to the massive slave trade the other way across the Atlantic, from Africa.”

An island once home to millions of people, according to Kirkpatrick Sale’s “The Conquest of Paradise, “ the population was decimated: to 12,000 by 1516, to 200 by 1542, and exterminated by 1555, according to Benjamin Keen in “The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia.”

Bartolome de las Casas, who was there and wrote “History of the Indies” (published after his 1566 death), described the “brutality” of the Spaniards, who he called “utterly ruthless and cruel.”

Back in downstate Illinois, Peoria’s Columbus statue was erected in 1902 not to recognize ethnic pride or an individual’s heroism, but to promote a neighborhood. Still, some assume Italian Americans revere Columbus.

Commenting on Chicago’s Columbus statue, Gabriel Piemonte of the Italian-American Heritage Society said, “Italian Americans condemn the honoring of Columbus, the murderer, mutilator and enslaver. This symbol is dead.”

Loewen said, “Our textbooks are not about teaching history. Their enterprise is Building Character. They therefore treat Columbus as an origin story. He was good and so are we.

“When textbooks paint simplistic portraits of a pious, heroic Columbus,” he added. “they provide feel-good history.”