MY ANCESTOR DIDN’T BRING AMERICAN SIN
There is plenty of blame for those who came before and after Christopher Columbus
As the descendant of both Christopher Columbus and the Aztec Emperor Montezuma II, it is only natural that I would be interested in the debate over Columbus’ legacy in America. History has some truly evil people. Columbus is certainly not one of them. Most often, history is not made up of perfect people and evil ones, but of complex people who must be understood in context.
What is happening at the hands of Columbus’ detractors is political, not historical. Two cultures meeting for the first time in 1492 was no easy thing, but blaming Columbus for everything that went wrong hides the truth about him. It also obscures the great things that the countries of the American hemisphere have accomplished.
Columbus did something incredible reaching the Bahamas on board three small ships. The fleet’s caravels were not warships but explorer vessels. He brought together two continents that didn’t know of one another’s existence. For the first time in history, the world acquired a truly global perspective.
DIFFERENT IMMUNITY
We usually forget that people in the Middle Ages were deeply religious, much more than we are. This was certainly true of Columbus. Faith was his primary motivation. Those who now question Columbus ignore the fact that slavery, cannibalism, warfare and human sacrifice existed in the Americas before he even sailed.
Some today blame Columbus for everything they dislike in U.S. history, despite the ample evidence that he was a moderating force on his men, and that he sought to keep friendly relations with Native Americans.
These same people blame him for the deaths of Native Americans when the overwhelming majority of those deaths were due to disease, caused by their different degree of immunity compared with the Europeans.
The tactic of those who hate Columbus are resurrecting Anglo-supremacist propaganda that paints all who sailed under the Spanish flag — or were Hispanic — as violent and untrustworthy. They hated not just Catholics in general but Columbus in particular because he was the Catholic hero in U.S. history. In Englishspeaking countries, British explorers tend to be treated far better than Spanish ones.
Today, Americans learn little to nothing of English atrocities in America, while Columbus — who sailed under Spain’s flag and never actually set foot on the territory of the United States — is blamed for every mistake any Spaniard or Portuguese explorer or colonist ever made — and any that the British or Americans made as well.
MORAL REVOLUTION
Few children in this country will learn that Spain’s kings quickly gave citizenship to Native Americans and began restricting their enslavement. Spain began a moral revolution when slavery was still accepted by the rest of Europe. Spain also built universities to educate the Indians and churches to minister to their spiritual needs. The Spanish worked to integrate with Native Americans, while the British and the Americans tended to have much more combative relationships with them and often forced them onto reservations. Spain never founded any reservation.
This is not to say that we should not understand that those of indigenous heritage want recognition and celebration of aspects of their heritage. Such recognition should be welcomed, but not by rewriting the historical record to blame Columbus for every negative aspect of U.S. history.
The same people who tout the myth of the evil Columbus would have us believe that Native American culture was as good as Spanish was evil. This binary approach warps reality. Neither culture was perfect. And neither should be totally condemned.
The Aztec built huge cities and were excellent astronomers and engineers. The Spanish marveled at the orderly and immense city of Tenochtitlan when they encountered it in the 16th century. But the Aztec also administered a vast empire, built on a subjugation of neighboring tribes with — among other horrors — human sacrifice.
This is not to argue that the Aztec accomplishments were not important, but that civilization too was far from perfect. In fact, it was their Native American neighbors, not the Spanish, who provided an overwhelming majority of the warriors needed to overthrow that empire.
An all-or-nothing view of history polarizes everything. And ironically, those who oppose Columbus in the name of progressive ideas end up following the propaganda campaigns of the Ku Klux Klan and also of Hugo Chavez, who suppressed the celebration and replaced it with the Day of Indigenous Resistance.