When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and 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 multi-volume History of the Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances, especially the women. Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards.
Las Casas tells how the Spaniards "grew more conceited every day" and after a while refused to walk any distance. They "rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry" or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. "In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings."
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."
The Indians' attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports, "they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help." He describes their work in the mines: those who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks them; After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil. Husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . .. and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write. ...
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 the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian [read Native American] settlements in the Americas. 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.Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, in his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, tells about the enslavement and the killing: "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide."
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots."
So it is sad that some white Americans, ignorant of the genocide applied to the native civilizations of America by their earliest forefathers spreading out from early European colonial settlements, wish to celebrate the first white colonizer of the Americas - who came to plunder, and enslave and murder Americans.
Knowing what we know today, Columbus Day seems to be celebrating murderous racism, and as such is an embarrassing admission of the ethical inferiority of the white man centuries ago. Given the history of slavery and white conquest, and todays continuing largely white domination of the world through the use of brutal economic weapons backed up by military threats and covert destabilization violence, Americans should pick a less disgusting and shameful theme for an early October holiday. Hailing Columbus today would seems to confess that the ethical inferiority still exist today.
White people best be quiet about that 1492 voyage whose success was that it made slaves of Americans.
Write members of Congress, media and clergy. Substitute 'Native-American Day' for Columbus Day. Howard Zinn says history can be used as a weapon for good or bad.
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