Hola a todos, todas y todes! Hello everyone! Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day, or in my case, happy Respect for Cultural Diversity Day!
528 years ago, Genoese navigator & trader Cristoforo Colombo arrived at the island of Guanahaní, in search of a new way to reach the Indies. After promptly changing the name the Taíno people had given to their island to San Salvador, he launched further expeditions to other islands near the area, in what became the beginning of one of the most exhaustive, violent & longstanding periods of systemic colonisation, imperialism, cultural erasure & genocide in human history: the conquest of the Américas.
Today, as it tends to happen every year, the historical discipline continues to face challenges when exploring these particular issues. Over 300 years of conquest & subjugation by European powers such as Spain, Portugal, England & France left a pillaged & forever changed land, in what had been a continent previously inhabited by tens of millions of people from thousands of different civilisations, from Bering to Tierra del Fuego, from the Nez Perce of the Plateau all the way down to my ancestors, the Gününa-Këna (Puelches) & the Aonikenk (Tehuelches) of Mendoza. Today, both History & every humanity have to contend with the advent of many perspectives that would frame any mention of this day as other than “Columbus Day” as negatively revisionist, disrespectful of Italian-American identity, & even as forgetful of the supposedly magnificent & mutually beneficial cultural exchange that occurred from the point when Colombo “discovered” América as a continent. So let’s talk a bit about those things, shall we? I’m mainly interested in the latter point, but first, let me draw some interesting points my esteemed colleague & fellow native descendant /u/Snapshot52 proposed some years ago:
A Word on Revisionism
Historical revisionism simply refers to a revising or re-interpreting of a narrative, not some nefarious attempt to interject presentism or lies into the past.
The idea that revisions of historical accounts is somehow a bad thing indicates a view of singularity, or that there is only one true account of how something happened and that there are rigid, discernible facts that reveal this one true account. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case. The accounts we take for granted as being "just the facts" are, at times, inaccurate, misleading, false, or even fabricated. Different perspectives will yield different results.
As for the idea of changing the way in which we perceive this day, from “Columbus Day” to Indigenous Peoples Day, being disrespectful to the memory of Colombo & therefore to the collective memory of the Italian-American population of the United States, I’ll let my colleague tell us about it
The recognition of Columbus by giving him a day acknowledges his accomplishments is a result of collective memory, for it symbolically frames his supposed discovery of the New World. So where is the issue? Surely we are all aware of the atrocities committed by and under Columbus. But if those atrocities are not being framed into the collective memory of this day, why do they matter?
Even though these symbols, these manifestations of history, purposely ignore historical context to achieve a certain meaning, they are not completely void of such context. And as noted, this collective memory forms and influences the collective identity of the communities consenting and approving of said symbols. This includes the historical context regardless if it is intended or not with the original symbol. This is because context, not necessarily of the all encompassing past, but of the contemporary meaning of when said symbols were recognised is carried with the symbol as a sort of meta-context.
What we know is that expansion was on the minds of Americans for centuries. They began to foster an identity built on The Doctrine of Discovery and the man who initiated the flood waves of Europeans coming to the Americas for the purpose of God, gold, and glory, AKA: colonisation. The ideas of expansionism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism, are all chained along, as if part of a necklace, and flow from the neck of Columbus. These very items are intrinsically linked to his character and were the ideas of those who decided to recognise him as a symbol for so called American values. While collective memory would like to separate the historical context, the truth is that it cannot be separated.
For a more detailed exploration of Colombo’s role & image in US history, I recommend this post by /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov
Now, for a less US-Centric perspective
In my time contributing to r/AskHistorians, even before I became a moderator, I made it a point to express that I have no connection to the United States; if you’ve read something of mine, chances are you’ve noticed that I use the terms “América” & “America” as two very distinct things: the former refers to the entire continent, whereas the latter is what the US tends to be referred as. Why do I use this distinction? Because, linguistics aside, I’m every bit an American as a person from the US. See, in Spanish, we don’t speak about “the Americas”, we call the entire thing América. We don’t call Americans “americanos”, we call them Estadounidenses, because we understand the continent to be a larger entity than the sum of North, Central & South areas. I’ve spoken about this earlier here.
I’m from Argentina. I was born in a land that had a very different conquest process than that of North América, because the Spanish conquistadores were here earlier, they had more time to ravage every culture they came across, from Hernán Cortés subjugating the Aztlans & later betraying the tribes that had allied themselves with him, to Francisco Pizarro taking advantage of the political instability of the Inca empire to destroy the Tahuantinsuyo. However, before the conquistadores came to the area where my ancestors lived, they already knew the meaning of conquest, genocide & cultural erasure, as did many other peoples in the rest of the continent. See, these practices aren’t exclusively an endemic problem brought to our shores by Europeans, because we know & understand that much like the Aztlans & Incas subjugated & conquered hundreds of cultures & civilisations in their expansionism, the Mapuches of Chile & Argentina spent decades systematically conquering, displacing & forcefully integrating many tribes into their dominion, chiefly my ancestors, the Aoninek & the Gününa-Küne, who were displaced & conquered by the Mapuches, who forced them to pay tribute to them, while having to change their culture, their religion, their way of life & even their tribal names, because the Mapuches replaced them with the names Chewel Che & Pwelche (Tehuelche & Puelchue in Spanish), which in Mapundungún, the Mapuche language, mean Vicious People & People of the East, respectively.
So, as you can see, most of us historians aren’t trying to destroy anyone’s heritage, because we recognise that atrocities & cultural erasure practices were very much a thing among native civilisations & cultures. However, it would be disingenuous and plain wrong to try & deny that the conquerors applied systemic policies of extermination in their search for wealth & conquest in América. Even if we concede that a cultural exchange was indeed established from October 12 1492 onward, we need to be extremely aware of the fact that this exchange was always forcefully imposed by the conquerors over the conquered. Last year, we had a fascinating panel discussing the colonisation of the continent with several of our contributors, I highly recommend you check it out here. There, I spoke briefly about what made this cultural exchange forceful to begin with: El Requerimiento, The Spanish Requirement, a legal document issued by the Spanish crown that, from 1513 onward, every time the conquistadores encountered a native settlement, were supposed to read out loud.
To summarize it, it states that, under the authority of the Catholic Monarchs Fernando & Isabel, whose power emanated from the Pope, who had ceded every land they were to conquer to them & only them, & who did so because, as Pope, had been given power & authority directly from God through the Holy Church "Lady & Superior of the World Universe", the native indios had two choices.
First, to accept the rule of the Spanish Empire. If they accepted it, they were to be treated with respect, allowed to maintain their freedoms & lands, just under Spanish government.
If they were to reject the terms of el Requerimiento, the conquistadores promised to take their lands, their properties, their women & children by force & by holy war, as it was their divine right.
So, they gave them two choices. The problem?
The natives couldn’t understand Spanish. The conquistadores read this Requirement to people who didn't & couldn't understand the language. The Requirement was only issued as a poor attempt of justification for the atrocities they knew were going to commit. While in later decades they developed translations as they went further inland, the fact remains that the Spanish had absolutely no regard for cultural diversity or for respecting anyone’s sovereignty in their newfound colonies. I made a translation of the full text here.
Speaking of Cultural Diversity
Prior to 2010, Argentina called this day “Race Day”. Sounds pretty atrocious, huh? Still, it was widely accepted, in a country where, even if tens of thousands of Italian immigrants arrived over the centuries, there is no such thing as an “Italian-Argentinian” collective memory, at least not in the sense it exists in the US. However, when the government decided it was time to change the horrific name this day had traditionally had, there was a lot of pushback. Why? For the same reasons exposed earlier about “Columbus Day” in the US. While most Latin Américan former colonies gained their independence from Spain in the early 19C, we still speak the language they forced the natives to learn, many people still practice the religion they imposed on every civilisation they encountered, & most people ignore, consciously or otherwise, that roughly half of the continent can trace their ancestry to some native people or other. I just happen to be closer, generationally wise, & I just happen to be a historian. So, today, here in Argentina we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the law that changed the name of a dreadfully positivist & violent “Race Day” to Respect for Cultural Diversity Day.
Am I happy with this change? Somewhat. The sentiment comes from the right place, & many natives & experts of the humanities were consulted when thinking of an appropriate name. But there’s still a lot we have to do for the name to actually mean anything, reparations have to be made, for the memory of my now almost extinct people, & for those who are still alive, well, & fighting for their independence & freedom, including my people’s former conquerors, the Mapuches, who remain locked in a constant struggle against erasure & repression from the governments of both Chile & Argentina. There are instances in which history needs to be revised. This is one of those pivotal points in the construction of collective memory, where voices like mine join with the millions of native Indians who still live, some surviving, some striving to thrive, some nearly forgotten. We the subaltern are still here, & , at risk of going overboard with the self-centred ideas, I’m just a simple indio, who learned about their history from their great grandmother, who’s proud of their ancestry, & who will continue to do thorough, mindful scholarship to avoid centuries of history to be permanently deleted from the world.
At the risk of verging on contemporary politics, I think this is especially important given the White House's Proclamation on Columbus Day 2020, particularly the bit where:
Sadly, in recent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy. These extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discoveries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions. Rather than learn from our history, this radical ideology and its adherents seek to revise it, deprive it of any splendor, and mark it as inherently sinister. They seek to squash any dissent from their orthodoxy. We must not give in to these tactics or consent to such a bleak view of our history. We must teach future generations about our storied heritage, starting with the protection of monuments to our intrepid heroes like Columbus. This June, I signed an Executive Order to ensure that any person or group destroying or vandalizing a Federal monument, memorial, or statue is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Which ties into larger issues of how we present and understand history. There is an historical narrative to idolizing Columbus and downplaying his enslavement and destruction of indigenous peoples - of erasing them and their stories from history. I think it is extraordinarily telling that President Trump emphasizes "our history" - but who is us, in this case? Not the many indigenous peoples of the Americas who suffered directly from the actions of Christopher Columbus and his men, not those who died in their millions from warfare, disease, and systemic discrimination and abuse that has carried on...well, up to the current day. If there is a radical effort to erase history, it is by those who seek to cling to outmoded hagiographies of American mythology instead of reading with, and dealing with, what actually happened.
On this Columbus Day, we embrace the same optimism that led Christopher Columbus to discover the New World. We inherit that optimism, along with the legacy of American heroes who blazed the trails, settled a continent, tamed the wilderness, and built the single-greatest nation the world has ever seen.
To paraphrase Alan Moore, the United States of America sometimes has difficulties distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters. North America was a vastly populated place before Europeans showed up - and those "trailblazers" often followed trails already laid, and settled this continent by pushing out those peoples who were already there. The image of Americans as heroes conquering a wilderness is a constructed one.
Two things, because I am a nitpicker:
There is one very particular instance in the Spanish language where we use "Americas": the famous expression "hacer las Américas". For our non-Spanish speaking fellows, it means emigrating to America and becoming succesful there. A more literal translation would be "making the Americas" or even better "making it in the Americas".
Guanahani may not be correct. It does appear for the first time in Columbus' letter to Santángel, printed in 1493 in Barcelona by Pere Posa, but it may be a typo. Don Demetrio Ramos, my mentor's mentor, conclusively proved the manuscript preserved in the Archivo General de Simancas to be from Santángel's own hand. By the clear caligraphy and page composition, it is beyond any doubt the draft prepared by Santángel for the press. In that manuscript, the name of the island is not Guanahani but Guanabam.
reparations have to be made
Who do you want to pay these reparations? The Spanish empire is long dead, somewhat ironically in part as a result of their colonialism and disease, while the former colonies that became nations see themselves to this very day as victims of colonialism, their logic being is that they say they were oppressed by the Spanish too, and many claim to have native ancestry themselves.
I assume this thread is open for discussion, so forgive me if I misstep.
So, as you can see, most of us historians aren’t trying to destroy anyone’s heritage, because we recognise that atrocities & cultural erasure practices were very much a thing among native civilisations & cultures.
I hear this.
The Requirement was only issued as a poor attempt of justification for the atrocities they knew were going to commit.
And I understand this.
But I'm a little confused then as to where this fits in:
The ideas of expansionism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism, are all chained along, as if part of a necklace, and flow from the neck of Columbus.
Which seems to suggest that Columbus is responsible and should be held historically accountable not just for prevalent colonialism, but also for racism and sexism?
Talking about the indigenous people from Argentina, someone needs to talk more about the argentinian genocide of their indigenous people on the 19th century. Rarely talked or even discussed. I have a couple of questions, who was more brutal in terms of indigenous people repression on the U.S.? The british colonies or the U.S. as an independent republic? I say this because the whole invasion of indigenous territories happened under the U.S. as a republic.
To what extent is Spain the sole bad empire? I mean, Spain has it's movement of the spanish black legend and I'm completely confused on how to take their arguments. Yes, the spanish were conquerors but in no difference than any power at that age and to a degree they did built missions where communities of indigenous people were taught how to read and write.
So, as you can see, most of us historians aren’t trying to destroy anyone’s heritage, because we recognise that atrocities & cultural erasure practices were very much a thing among native civilisations & cultures. However, it would be disingenuous and plain wrong to try & deny that the conquerors applied systemic policies of extermination in their search for wealth & conquest in América. Even if we concede that a cultural exchange was indeed established from October 12 1492 onward, we need to be extremely aware of the fact that this exchange was always forcefully imposed by the conquerors over the conquered.
Did indigenous peoples/tribes ever attack and subjugate each other?
Thanks for the post, and for all your work for the community. I always appreciate your insight, and perspectives!
Great post, enjoyed reading it. I personally think it’s rather dumb to even acknowledge Columbus Day. I’m curious what you think of the broader world history here, as it relates to your ancestors-namely that all human ancestors, Columbus’ ancestors included, were at some point victims of a stronger culture which overtook a weaker one, and were enslaved or killed outright. Whether it’s Neolithic Yamnaya who killed their way across Europe using the newly invented wheel and copper weapons to subdue local populations, or Columbus using his technological advantages, or even just good old fashioned genocide by Native American tribes overwhelming each other.
It seems to me as a layman that history is of course filled with bloody conquest, and that the movement to “discredit” Columbus is exactly right, as he behaved as a conqueror. What I find interesting is the sort of psychological projection that goes on in (rightly!) pointing out Columbus’s evil doing, in that many who are the loudest doing it tend to lionize native groups and ignore their own history of savagery and conquest as if the Mayans et al were simply basket weaving all day and not out subjugating.
At the end of the day, we are all human, and therefore share the exact same potential for good and evil, and certainly worshipping Columbus and ignoring what he did is a lie, just as pointing fingers at Columbus and ignoring indigenous violence and history is wrong too-had the dominant cultures of the Americas had Columbus’s tech, they would have certainly used it to subjugate just as native Americans embraced the firearm as soon as they saw it could kill from greater distances. Love to hear a criticism of my thoughts as I am just an avid reader and lover of human history as terrific and shitty as it’s always been.
from Hernán Cortés subjugating the Aztlans & later betraying the tribes that had allied themselves with him,
This may be a language thing, but "Aztlans" isn't really a term that's used (at least in english) in this way. Aztlan is a semi-mythical place that various Nahua groups claimed to have travelled from before arriving in Central Mexico, with the Mexica group in particular founding Tenochtitlan and being the one most associated with the "Aztec" label (though this can refer to either them speffically, the Nahuas as a whole, or the "Aztec Empire", which was an alliance between the cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcco, and Tlacopan, and their various subject states).
More importantly though, is that those allied groups weren't "tribes": Tlaxcala was the primary ally group Cortes had, and they were a (by Mesoamerican standards) moderate to large kingdom composed of roughly 2 dozen towns and ruled by a city-state of the same name, which itself was really composed of 4 cities which had grown into one another, ruled via a coillective senate; and would have been pretty sizable. The next largest all, Texcoco, was the second most powerful city in the Aztec Empire and likewise had tens of thousands of inhabitant and significant political complexity and infanstructure, which as a massive series of aqueducts, flow-control channels, and other systems for the city's royal garden retreat at Texcotzinco. Xochimilco, Iztapalapa etc likewise had at least 10,000 to 15,000 denizens, large palace complexes with rich gardens, etc
The groups that Cortes allied with (or really, that were doing most of the work fighting and may have been actually calling the shots) were not tribes, but city-states and kingdoms. These were urban state socities, and Mesoamerica had formal goverments, urban cities, large scale archtecture, etc for thousands of years by this point.
I'm also somewhat iffy on the claim that Cortes "betrayed" them. Tlaxcala for example was granted a number of special rights under Spanish rule over the next century for their contributions to Spanish campaigns, for example.
I don't have any added questions or comments at this time. I'm grateful for you and everyone that went into making this post possible, also to all the added information in the comments. I've known through brief research and having a very good history teacher that most of the history I learned early on was very white washed (as a U.S. citizen). I'm home schooling my child due to medical issues, but it also gives me an opportunity to present more accurate information to her as she gets older and not just one person's point of view who wrote a book specifically for a public school system or what not. She's a bit young to understand any of this now, but I saved it in hopes of her being able to read through it, asking her own questions, and us being able to research more together. Thank you so much to everyone.
Do you have a question or just a rant?
I guess this is kind of a very specific question, but would any of the historians here recommend any particular books about the Mapuche people in Argentina?
And as an aside, I want to thank every one of the people who make this sub such a great place to read and learn from.
Is this video accurate? I watched it and I want to know if any of it is true. Thanks.
Your post reminds me that as someone from the US who grew up speaking English, when I learned some Spanish and discovered that we were generally called "Estadounidenses" it made me really sad that we don't use "United Statesian" in common practice. (Of course it also raises the pickle of Mexico being also "United States" but language is tricky.)
Thank you for the fun reminder and more importantly the very thoughtful and timely post.
Incredible post. Thank you for taking the time to write and share it. I hope the people who struggle with the issues you brought up about celebrating Columbus take the time to read it and look at it from a different perspective.
Happy Indigenous day and best wishes.
Excellent post, and much needed. I’m currently an honors candidate doing my best to write a history of 18th century trans-Appalachian colonial diplomacy which prioritizes indigenous voices and agency, but it’s so hard to extract those perspectives from the small amount of unreliable information we’ve been left with by almost exclusively white authors. It really makes me appreciate the work that historians who focus on the subject do.
Edit: And thank you to the mods for taking out the trash.
Thank you for sharing this. I was wondering how schools and other institutions treat occasions like these!
A bit of an aside here, but just yesterday my friend reminded me of the situation over in the Chagos islands, which more broadly speaks to how indigenous erasure, dispossession, and injustice still occurs today, and has such long historical roots. Even though plenty of political change (for the better) has stemmed from mobilization within the context of the nation-states produced through these indigenous exclusions, there has always been a transnational dimension to forms of memory and indigenous struggle. But distance from others, geographical, cultural, popular, has made this difficult. And there's a lot of horrifying stuff in how it's been turned into a military base. Take some of the cables from back in the 60s:
"Unfortunately along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays."
and from back in 2010, from correspondence between the US and UK:
"Establishing a marine reserve might, indeed, as the FCO's Roberts stated, be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands' former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling..."
Thank you i will try to learn new things from this post.
This post is amazing. Thank you for your insights!
By the way I'm chilean and I really want to learn about Argentina's experience with the colonization, is there any source that you can recommend me? At this side of La Cordillera de Los Andes we learn more about what happened with Peru and Bolivia, than Argentinean history, and now I'm really curious. Thanks!
All my relations. Thank you for sharing your wisdom
What I'm genuinely curious about is whether there is a way to seek any kind of restorative justice? If we are as just and civilized as we claim to be, and the conquest of the Americas is agreed to have been astronomically damaging with effects lasting well into the present, then it would appear to be a moral failure if no action or widespread acknowledgement at the very least is taken.
Happy Columbus day to yall too. I love this sub for its well researched and expansive responses but I think this misses that level a small amount. While I do agree the actions of the occupation and colonization of the lands Columbus discovered was atrocious and vile. It was not disproportionally atrocious and vile compared to the world Columbus lived in and around. In the 15th century the Mediterranean World had all sorts of "genocides" going on and about in the same vein as Columbus led to . The Ottomons and Mamlukes enslaved and utilized a large class of citizenry. The Byzantines sold slaves via the Balkans and the rest of modern Europe was just coming out of Manorialism/ Feudalism as systems of operation. The idea of people to be conquered or enslaved was not evil , simply life at the time. And its this frame that I think the actions of Columbus' crew is overstated as evil within the moment . Of course they are horrible today from our lens .
Columbus had a net good compared to his evils. Without his discovery (which was a discovery as he brought "america" to the known world. The known world of course being Africa , Europe and Asia as the hotbed of historical advancement and commerce ) . This discovery allowed modern nations to flourish and I believe directly contributed to the Enlightenment and the advancement of modern rights .
This doesnt even recognize the PURPOSE of Columbus day which was to embolden the status of America as a nation of Immigrants , in the period it was made a national holiday Italian Americans were being lynched , threatened and treated as an "invasive" class bringing crime , foreign language and aggressively sexual men (sound familiar?) The Knights OF Columbus were founded to protect this group of people and there are instances of them openly fighting the KKK who targeted these catholic immigrants. Columbus day was founded to make them feel welcome and project onto America that America is for Immigrants , as its "discovery" was due to an italian. Removing the context of the holiday slanders what it is supposed to represent by trying to claim it celebrates the atrocities of the old world rather than celebrate the founding and success of the new world .
Edit: im no historian and this is not a typical submission for this sub so I hope it doesnt offend the mods that its not of that caliber But i think this whole thread was sort of made as a discussion .
Thank you for this post!
Just one thing, "todes" is a neutral pronoun, it is use so as you don't call a bunch of people of varying genders "he", is almost like saying , to a group of folk "he, she and they" I guess the way you wanted it to be was more close to "guys, gals, nbals" or something like that
Very good post. Well done.
Thank you for adding the gender neutral term 'todes' to your intro. It is really refreshing to see inclusive language in 'academic spaces'.
Edit: The fact that this comment has been downvoted just goes to show how much the academia still has to go concerning inclusiveness.
"... to reach the Indies."
Why do westerners have difficulty in just saying the word, India instead of Indies? Or perhaps I'm getting piqued unnecessarily. In my defence, it happens all too often in one form or another. Not giving credit, where credit is due.
