Know what and who you are celebrating!! You celebrate the rapes of little girls. You are celebrating the rape and murder of women. You are celebrating slavery. You are celebrating genocide. You are celebrating torture. You are celebrating English tyranny. It sickens me that my own country celebrates these wretched things that was committed against the First Americans by Christopher Columbus, his men, and the Queen that sent him. 1451 - 1506 Opens the Door to European Invasion of the Americas In 1500, Columbus wrote to a friend: A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand. ******************** The following quote from an article Bill Biglow wrote, Rethinking Columbus: Towards a True Peoples History, published on Saturday, October 6, 2012, by Common Dreams, nicely articulates the reason why we, the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, must become more forceful in our demands that the true histories of our Peoples be taught in schools. Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor of “Rethinking Schools” and the co-director of the Zinn Education Project. This project offers free materials to teach people’s history and an “If We Knew Our History” article series. Bigelow is author or co-editor of numerous books, including “A People’s History” for the Classroom and “The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration”. “For years, I opened my 11th-grade U.S. history classes by asking students, “What’s the name of that guy they say discovered America?” A few students might object to the word “discover,” but they all knew the fellow I was talking about, “Christopher Columbus!”, several called out in unison. “Right. So who did he find when he came here?” I asked. Usually, a few students would say, “Indians,” but I asked them to be specific: “Which nationality? What are their names?” Silence. In more than 30 years of teaching U.S. history and guest-teaching in others’ classes, I’ve never had a single student say, “Taínos.” So I ask them to think about that fact. “How do we explain that? We all know the name of the man who came here from Europe, but none of us knows the name of the people who were here first—and there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of them. Why haven’t you heard of them?” This ignorance is an artifact of historical silencing—rendering invisible the lives and stories of entire peoples. It’s what educators began addressing in earnest 20 years ago, during plans for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, which at the time the boasted would be “the most stupendous international celebration in the history of notable celebrations.” Native American and social justice activists, along with educators of conscience, pledged to interrupt the festivities.” A substantial amount of the money used by Queen Isabella to finance the explorations of Columbus came from the seizure and sale of properties owned by Spanish Jews and Muslims. On March 30, 1492, she issued an edict demanding that Jews either convert to Catholicism, leave the country, or be executed. Quoted from We Were Not the Savages The event that led European Nations to destroy many of the civilizations of two continents, and drastically diminish the remainder, resulted from what was an almost impossible accident of fate. If it had not already occurred, it would be virtually impossible to envision. In 1492, Christopher Columbus, on a sea voyage to chart a shortcut to the Indies, funded by Queen Isabella of Spain, set the stage for the rape of American civilizations by going astray at sea. By chance he eventually landed on a small island in the Caribbean sea populated by a defenseless and friendly pacifist race of people, the Taino. These people were ripe for picking by unscrupulous men, and Columbus and his crew pillaged with impunity. The blind luck that led him to land on this small defenseless island instead of somewhere else along the thousands of miles of North and South American coastline-where people wouldnt have been so complacent-is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. In retrospect, if he had instead landed in a non-pacifist country, such as that of the Iroquois or Maya, history would have turned out differently. Their Warriors would have fought back ferociously, very probably ending his voyage on the American side of the Atlantic. If this had happened, and no Europeans had appeared for another century, population growth and technology development would have reduced the possibility of European colonization considerably. However, history turned out the way it did and no amount of fantasizing can change that. Columbus, thinking he was in the Indies, did not waste time paying lip service to the pretence that he was importing shining European ideals to the people he mistakenly labelled Indians. Instead he wrote in his journal: We can send from here, in the name of the Holy Trinity, all the slaves and Brazil wood which could be sold. True to the intent of these words, he initiated the Amerindian slave harvest on his first voyage. When he embarked from the Americas for Spain, it was with a cargo of five hundred Native Americans (it could have been a smaller number, I took the figure from a White mans declaration) crammed into three ships to be sold on the continental slave markets. Upon landing at Seville, only about three hundred of these unfortunate souls were still alive. These and booty were turned over to Queen Isabella. The news of the riches offered by Hispaniola and surrounding islands soon spread across Europe. The notion of fabulous wealth for the picking was like a magnet for other European Nations. Within a few years, harvesters from Spain and other European countries were travelling from island to island seeking artifacts, precious metals, spices, and human beings for enslavement. The cruel assault mounted by these people against the defenseless and non-aggressive Taino, who had numbered in the millions in 1492, was so effective that forty years later they were virtually extinct. The following incident set a precedent for European powers to forgive Caucasian barbarians who mass murdered American Indians. It is rare, indeed, to find an instance where one of them was imprisoned, or executed, for the horrors he committed. On August 23, 1500, Christopher Columbus and his brothers were sent back to Spain in chains by Spanish Governor Francesco de Bobadilla for mistreating Natives in the section of Hispaniola now known as Haiti. When they arrived in Spain, they were immediately released and graciously received at the royal court. We shall take you and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault . - Christopher Columbus
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 15:00:34 +0000
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