Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Column: Rewriting Columbus Day
By Adrienne Langlois
Brown Daily Herald, Brown U.
October 10, 2008

On Oct. 12, 1492, a sailor aboard a small caravel somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean kept watch in the early hours of the morning. As the sun rose, he sighted land, calling to his crewmates excitedly.

In a ten-week journey full of doubts and threats of mutiny, it was a moment of hope for the captain of the fleet, Christopher Columbus, who had begun the journey in an attempt to find a faster route to the West Indies.

But the sailors' encounter with what they would come to consider a strange, new land would also become the beginning of one of the most controversial interactions in American history.

Today, in the United States, Columbus Day is celebrated on the second Monday of October. For most of us at Brown, Columbus Day provides a much-needed three-day weekend that takes the place of the longer fall break many of our friends at other schools receive. For some Italian-Americans, Columbus Day is a time to celebrate their heritage through the accomplishments of the famed Italian explorer. For American citizens with American Indian heritage, the celebration of Columbus's arrival in the New World represents the American government's continued complicity in cruelty against indigenous minorities.

These varying interpretations of Columbus's historical significance make him one of the most famous and infamous figures of all time.

One need not look at an elementary school history book to understand that in many ways Columbus has come to represent Europe's first interaction with the New World. The phrase "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" is perhaps the most well-known "fact" in American history.

In front of Union Station in Washington, D.C., a formidable statue of Columbus stands, with a lofty inscription applauding his "high faith" and "indomitable courage that gave man a new world." From the inscription alone, it's clear that the hero worship has gotten a little out of hand.

Columbus's journals reveal a man racked by insecurity who was obsessed with reaching Asia and obtaining gold. He falsified longitudinal readings to calm his uneasy crew, fabricated sightings of tree branches and birds, and, after encountering native peoples, tricked them aboard his ship with trinkets and forced them to collect gold under punishment of death. In short, he was deceitful and opportunistic, thinking of little beyond his ultimate goals.

While it's hopefully unlikely that someone exhibiting this behavior today would receive a marble statue in our nation's capitol, reducing Columbus to a caricature of an evil conqueror representative of all indignities against American Indians is just as unproductive as representing him as a hero.

It's not unwise to view Columbus alongside other early explorers, but it becomes problematic when the details of each encounter are lost in the process of criticizing these now infamous figures.

Indigenous people were mistreated in ways that extend beyond conventional stereotypes of land theft and smallpox blankets, and solely focusing on Columbus diminishes the true scope of these atrocities.

Additionally, attempts to downplay the importance of European perspectives in this particular historical narrative ultimately do more harm than good. Telling history from the viewpoint of the oppressed is important, especially since a lack of source material and the government's neocolonial motivations have silenced these voices for centuries. But any historian worth his or her weight in primary sources knows that a well-researched analysis of any historical phenomenon requires accounts from all points of view.

Eliminating the perspective of the oppressors neglects an equally important part of the story of the conquest of indigenous peoples. The motivations of explorers like Columbus were not solely the product of latent racism in 15th and 16th century Europe. Those who write off the unfortunate actions of Europeans against natives of the New World as the product of pure racist tendencies ignore the other equally problematic motivations for continued injustice against minority groups in the present day.

While Columbus may not deserve the laudatory depictions he has received in history books for centuries, crimes against American Indians and other minorities extend far beyond the scope of one man's arrival in the Caribbean. This upcoming Monday should provide us with an opportunity to think critically and consider our country's unfortunate legacy of oppression.

If anything, there's much to be learned from this explorer's missteps. Columbus was so blinded by his desire to reach Asia that it took him months to admit he had happened upon a completely different territory. To let our understanding of this man be obscured by either praise or disgust is ultimately just as hurtful to the participants in this narrative as Columbus's actions themselves.

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