taken out of context I must seem so strange (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} likeawoman) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} debunkingwhite,@ 2007-10-08 12:34:00 |
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Columbus Day
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 4-7.
Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the best specimens to load onto ships. If those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the worn, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good on his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off an bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faceds Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor to work on huge estates, known later as the encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and they died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.
The chief source -- and on many matters the only source -- of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed Columbus's journal and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History of the Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances, especially the women. They are not completely peaceful, because they do battle from time to time with other tribes, but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are individually moved to do so because of some grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings.
...
[Zinn goes on to quote Las Casa description of the the equanimity between sexes among the Arawak, including open marriages and access to abortion. Las Casas also describes the lack of religious structures and the communal living arrangement of the people, as well as their mild temperment.
Zinn then goes on to quote Las Casas on the terrible treatment of Arawak slaves]
...
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."
...
[Zinn quotes Las Casas on the mining and farming Indian slaves were forced to do for the Spaniard invaders and the strain this labor put on familial relationships and its exponential affect on infant and child mortality.]
...
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it..."
Thus began this history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas -- even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?) -- is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure -- there is no bloodshed -- and Columbus Day is a celebration.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 4-7.
Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the best specimens to load onto ships. If those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the worn, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good on his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off an bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faceds Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor to work on huge estates, known later as the encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and they died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.
The chief source -- and on many matters the only source -- of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed Columbus's journal and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History of the Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances, especially the women. They are not completely peaceful, because they do battle from time to time with other tribes, but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are individually moved to do so because of some grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings.
...
[Zinn goes on to quote Las Casa description of the the equanimity between sexes among the Arawak, including open marriages and access to abortion. Las Casas also describes the lack of religious structures and the communal living arrangement of the people, as well as their mild temperment.
Zinn then goes on to quote Las Casas on the terrible treatment of Arawak slaves]
...
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."
...
[Zinn quotes Las Casas on the mining and farming Indian slaves were forced to do for the Spaniard invaders and the strain this labor put on familial relationships and its exponential affect on infant and child mortality.]
...
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it..."
Thus began this history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas -- even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?) -- is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure -- there is no bloodshed -- and Columbus Day is a celebration.
