Native Americans On Christopher Columbus

[Guest]

https://youtu.be/fYTXRDtYzYc

There is brief cursing in this. Didn't catch it the first time.

[Guest]

[dominicansoul]

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of native americans who are happy today.  Not everyone lives in the doom and gloom of the past.  God brings good out of evil.

 

[blazeingstar]

7 minutes ago, dominicansoul said:

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of native americans who are happy today.  Not everyone lives in the doom and gloom of the past.  God brings good out of evil.

 

well this is thanksgiving, not Columbus day.  The fact that we still celebrate Columbus day is pretty disgusting.  There was a genocide committed by Europeans towards those who were native.  That's not easily forgotten.  That said, there were some of the most barbaric and warlike tribes where settlers landed (scalping parties anyone?) so one cannot fully blame Europeans for their blatant ignorance.

[dominicansoul]

I think in the history of man, there's always been conquering and settling and murder and viciousness on all sides.

God has a way of making positive things come out of it all.

For example, I'm of Spanish-Mexican descent.  Texas was first settled by Anglos by permission of the Mexican government.  When the Mexican government decided it was time for the Anglos to get out, the Anglos rebelled and wouldn't leave.  A war ensued.  There was brutality and murder and hatred and racism on both sides.  Am I happy Mexicans lost that war?  Was it unfair?  I don't know, I didn't live back in those times, and there's so much you can get out of texts in a history book.  But am I happy today because I'm an American and not living in Mexico?  YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

12 minutes ago, blazeingstar said:

well this is thanksgiving, not Columbus day.  The fact that we still celebrate Columbus day is pretty disgusting.  There was a genocide committed by Europeans towards those who were native.  That's not easily forgotten.  That said, there were some of the most barbaric and warlike tribes where settlers landed (scalping parties anyone?) so one cannot fully blame Europeans for their blatant ignorance.

Europeans didn't invent genocide to the Natives, though.  The Indians had been doing plenty of geno-ciding towards different tribes waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before the Europeans even knew this place existed...

[CatherineM]

The genocide was 90% due to our illnesses. If not Columbus, someone else would have eventually found the new world. Even if completely peaceful, they would still have been wiped out. What the English did to the Irish or what the Turks did to the Armenians was intentional. In Columbus' age they still thought illnesses were caused by bad humours in the body. Columbus might have been a profiteer seeking fame and fortune, but genocidal?  Hardly. 

[Luigi]

Genghis Khan invaded I-don't-know-where-all; the Goths & Ostrgoths invaded the Roman empire; the Anglos, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes invaded England, then the Normans did; the Muslims invaded various parts of Europe; the Germans took over almost all of Europe albeit for a short time compare to these other groups; the Japanese expanded into China, Korea, the Philippines, etc. simultaneously. And I don't even mention long-term Asian history because I don't know anything about it, but I doubt that everybody stayed in their own little corners of the world, in abiding peace, for millennia.

The Native American nations moved around plenty, invading and settling in each other's territories over a period of centuries.

If Columbus had not been the first to arrive in Central America (or North America, or South America), the Portuguese (or French, or English, or Dutch) would have been. It was an age of exploration, driven by the improved technology of ships. And the standard political assumptions of the time were "To the conqueror go the spoils."

We don't think that way (so much) any more. Was it right? Not according to today's lights. The best we can hope for at this point is that we make conscious decisions not to do that any more.

[blazeingstar]

We don't exactly have Genghis Kahn day though, do we?  The point is we celebrate someone who we should not.  

Although it was 1800's america that did the worst, with the burning of villages, the isolation onto unlivable reservations and the slaughter of buffalo.  Thats what I was referring to earlier...started by Columbus and his ilk's way of thinking.

[Luigi]

25 minutes ago, blazeingstar said:

We don't exactly have Genghis Kahn day though, do we?  The point is we celebrate someone who we should not.

Although it was 1800's america that did the worst, with the burning of villages, the isolation onto unlivable reservations and the slaughter of buffalo.  Thats what I was referring to earlier...started by Columbus and his ilk's way of thinking.

My point is that his ilk's way of thinking was everybody's way of thinking. Everybody was of the same ilk back then.

[Maggyie]

Actually the Mongols today do celebrate and honor Genghis Khan. His birthday is a national holiday. As in all these cases people view the "great man" positively or negatively based on whether they were the victor or the victim. 

[CatherineM]

Vlad the Impaler is also revered in Romania because he kept the Turks out. Great men are men of their ages. Washington owned slaves. Several Popes gave us black eyes. 

[Luigi]

One process I see happening in these interviews is that Columbus is blamed for everything he did personally, plus everything that happened after he died. He becomes a handy place to assign all the blame, as it were, when there is plenty of blame to spread around among nations and over centuries. I see the same process in other groups. I see it most frequently in my own interactions with African-Americans and their reaction to slavery. I credit it to the power of narration.

But the same thing happened to me personally when I was in Ireland.

I'm Catholic, and I took a vacation once in Ireland, the land of some of my forebears. The Church of Ireland (essentially a division of the Anglicans, or the Episcopalians as we call them in the US) owns the Hill of Tara where St. Patrick challenged the pagan king. They own the high crosses that generations of Catholics sculpted to tell Biblical stories to the illiterate. They - the English, the Anglicans - invaded Ireland in 1650 under Oliver Cromwell, kicked the living whatever out of the Irish, took their land and settled their Scotch mercenaries on it, tried to extirpate the native language, banned the celebration of Mass and the praying of the rosary, sent resistors "to Hell or Connaught," eventually "hanging men and women for the wearing of the green." And it took me only about a week of wandering around Ireland before I was fuming mad at the English for what they did to "us." I had to stop, breathe, and reflect - it didn't happen to me. I was internalizing the (very real) suffering of people I had never met, who lived three or four centuries ago. I was livid over things I never experienced. My actual forbears survived all of that - they're the ones who made it!

Narration allows us to participate, through a kind of  virtual reality, in other people's experience. We identify with the main character of the story, whether we are demographically similar to that character or not. In a lot of ways, that's good. I can watch a movie about someone struggling with depression and come to some understanding of what they must be going through. Or read a book about a death in the family and sort of experience the sense loss that the characters experience. We can internalize other people's experience, and empathize with them. Really it's the practice of charity, allowing me to see my connectedness to other, dissimilar people.

But narration also allows us to internalize other people's awful experiences, and then react as if those experiences had happened to us. And that's the opposite of the practice of charity - or at least partially - I identify with the oppressed (which is good) but simultaneously come to hate the oppressors (which would be good IF the oppressors were still around. But they're not).

And, to Blazeingstar's point, I'm not committed to celebrating Columbus or giving him a day (as if days were ours to give to anyone). It's not much of a celebration where I live, anyway - mostly sales at furniture stores. But I also don't think we can retroactively assign blame to people for doing what they did according to the cultural norms of their times. I do think we can examine their actions and learn from them,

Edited November 25, 2015 by Luigi

[NadaTeTurbe]

Anyway, the Dia de Colon (Colombus day) is the Spanis National Holiday, and it is RIDICULOUS. Seriously. It's stupid. First, it's the whole "let be nostalgic of the time where Spain was great", because of course we don't want what Spain is now. And Colombus is not someone to celebrate. plus, it's supposed to be "national Holiday", but the president of Catalunya and the president of Pais Vasco don't come, so there's no unity. We should be celebrating another thing instead, such as the 23 of february, when king Juan Carlos stopped a coup d'état. That make sense. But Dia de Colon as a national holiday ? Ridiculous. 

[KnightofChrist]

What were Columbus' actual crimes/sins that he himself committed that would be cause to cease having a day in his honor?

 

[Ice_nine]

1 hour ago, KnightofChrist said:

What were Columbus' actual crimes/sins that he himself committed that would be cause to cease having a day in his honor?

 

Is this a genuine question or are you just sitting on some links that will "prove" the mass rape and pillaging that occurred under his nose is just a bunch of p-c liberal propaganda taught by people who hate America? Is this question just setting up for a lesson? It's a genuine question to you on my part.

Are you also willing to consider that the Knights of Columbus made a pretty big error in honoring the guy? That perhaps they were a little bit racist, superior, and/or indifferent to the sufferings of natives? Because if you can't consider that than a discussion is not really worth having is it?