Several critical points to think about when considering re-naming Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. The American Indigenous peoples were the first to domesticate major nutritional food sources to the entire world food supply: CORN, POTATOES, TOMATOES, SQUASH, TURKEY. The introduction of these agrarian products radically changed the entire course of human civilization for the better. Besides which--- 1. Columbus did NOT discover America. Nor was he the first european to reach the American shores. Among many probable others was definitely Leif Erikson almost 500 years earlier. Columbus made 4 journeys to the Caribbean, once even touching the mouth of Venezuelas Orinoco river on South America. He claimed each and every time that he was exploring various unknown parts (at least to europeans) of the outlying archipelagoes of Asia. He never had the slightest idea about his geographic locations. 2. The european navigator/explorer that truly discovered The Americas was Amerigo Vespuscci, hence the latinization of his name to give us America! His exploratory sail first mapped the basic geographic outlines of the whole new land mass, and declared it was altogether NOT Asia! 3. Columbus did not circumnavigate the globe, therefore his voyages never demonstrated the physical roundness. He knew perfectly well that the earth was round, BUT did not prove the earth was round. He never claimed that he ever did such a thing. 4. What did Columbus discover and what did his voyages accomplish? a) Columbus cleverly played a hunch. He was a brilliant cartographer and ocean navigator. He correctly inferred from his extensive knowledge of the North Atlantic that there where vast circular sea and wind currents that flowed in The Great Ocean: the Easterlies and the Westerlies that could carry a sailing ship safely over to the western land mass and back again to his european motherland. b) He introduced the African slave trade and African slave labor to cultivate and harvest cash crops--primarily sugar and coffee--originally brought to europe by Islamic traders, which Colon introduce to the rapidly emerging agrarian economies of the Caribbean islands. He demonstrated how immense wealth could be yielded by unitizing the cultivation of these crops. This quickly helped the Spanish Imperial court reap gazillion of capital wealth. (Later conquistadors discovered the mother lodes of gold and silver that made the Spanish monarchy the first richest global power!) c) Columbus demonstrated that immense profits could be reaped by the trafficking and enslavement and exploitation of African slave labor for both mineral extraction (Gold and Silver) and food cultivation. d) Columbus subsequently carried out wholesale genocide of the indigenous Arawak and Taino people. He was a mass murderer, and was arrested and brought back to the Royal Court of Spain to be successfully tried for crimes against humanity by the Roman Catholic Church. Several points about Columbus Italian heritage, and his contribution to both the Catholic Church, and The Houses of Castile and Aragon (the fledging nation-state of Spain): 1. Columbus voyages were commissioned and capitalized and the Spanish Court of Ferdinand and Isabela. 2. His serial genocide not withstanding, Columbus voyages eventually brought thousands of millions of Indigenous peoples souls into the Roman Catholic Church, making it one of the largest established Churches on the entire planet. 3. He was born, lived and died in the city state of Genova. The modern 19th century nation-state of Italy did not exist for another four plus centuries!. 4. Early American politicians and historians intentionally expropriated Columbus from his Italian origins, in order to de-anglocize the American Historical narrative immediately following the establishment of a federally constituted United States of America. Ironically these American nationalists adopted the Catholic (Not Anglican/Episcopalian) Columbus as the original birth leader. He was transformed into the quintessential example key American Core Values. To wit, American history did not begin with Jamestown and Captain John Smith, Plymouth and John Winthrop, Williamsburg etc. Plus the discoverer Columbus, they claimed, represented all the basic core values of that made the new world America independent: heroic individualism; bold exploration; a courageous rejection, indeed defiance, of Old World, conventional wisdom; daring-do enterprising experimentation, inventive and imaginative inference. 5. This kind of revisionist history does not have to be viewed as a slap in the face to the cultural heritage of Italians or Italian Americans. In the disparaging words of Tony Soprano: End of Story.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 05:06:21 +0000