It is Columbus day in America, and today we remember the fateful (and for many, fatal) connection that was made all those centuries ago between the peoples of America and Europe. Though it was not the first time people from the East met people from the West (Vikings were chilling with Native Americans long before), Columbus’s journey marked the beginning of a new era of trans-Atlantic movement that spelled the end of Native sovereignty in America and the start of the long era of colonialism that we still inhabit today.
Some say we should not remember Christopher Columbus because he was a slaver and a crook whose actions lead to the deaths of millions of people. It is hard to deny that Columbus’s voyage resulted in the destruction of an entire hemisphere worth of culture. Yet, I appreciate that Americans have a day to remember their own history. Atrocious though it may be to so plainly acknowledge that the arrival of Europeans spelled the doom of millions, I think it is worth keeping that fact close. It is through destruction that we the people came into our own kingdom in the most beautiful land in the world. If we cannot appreciate the sacrifices, many unwilling, that went into building America, then we do not deserve America. Barbarians, the lot of us!
In a theme that builds toward Thanksgiving and comes to a head at Christmas, Americans have an opportunity to reflect on their wretched origins. And wretched they were! Starving immigrants packed into the belly of a galley, feeding on hard bread nibbled by pests. Starving immigrants that, once delivered, had to starve through a frigid winter in a land they did not know. For all the furor among Republicans against the encroachment of immigrants in our time, the American people were themselves immigrants from the start. Dirtier then, and a lot less intelligent too I bet. These immigrants required help to survive, and they got it (wretched as they were).
I get ahead of myself, though. Columbus day is first and foremost about that first fatal contact. What world did the explorers from Europe see? On this day, we must remember that the land was not empty. In fact, it was not even sparsely inhabited. Charles C. Mann wrote a book about this very subject called “1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.” In it, he looks to early accounts of colonists, explorers, and merchants to obtain an understanding of Native American populations during and before the arrival of Columbus. According to the account of a mariner named Verrazzano from 1523, the coastline everywhere north of the Carolinas was “densely populated” (50). Mann writes of Verrazzano being able to smell native bonfires for hundreds of miles off the coast. Their settlements marked the whole coast up to Massachusetts, smoke billowing. This is to say that before disease struck down much of the native population of the Americas, the land was actually densely populated. America has had agriculture, land management, and really civilization itself for many thousands of years before a European ever laid eyes on it.
The animal life of America during the exploration era was reportedly amazing. Mann writes of rivers near Boston bursting so full of spawning fish that they leapt out of the rivers and glimmered like a stream: “Runs of Atlantic salmon, short nose sturgeon, striped bass, and American shad annually filled the harbor. But the most important fish harvest came in late spring, when the herring-like alewives swarmed the fast, shallow stream that cut through the village. So numerous were the fish, and so driven, that when mischievous boys walled off the stream with stones the alewives would leap the barrier–silver bodies gleaming in the sun–and proceed upstream” (45). Today, freshwater spawns along the Massachusetts coast are so small that they are unnoticeable. Commercial fishing of alewives has been illegal since 2006 due to the depleted population and risk of extinction.
The vegetables need go without saying. The potatos, tomatos, carrots, and CORN that our cuisine cherishes and our diets depend upon are all, of course, the product of ten thousand years of domestication undertaken by native peoples.
And so on. The debt that Europeans owe Native Americans has been written about extensively, and I hope to write about it more. But Columbus day is really about contact. Wretched European meets wretched Indian. Or maybe not-so-wretched Indian. Maybe the Native Americans were the healthy ones– fit, eating well on vegetables and fresh fish, and living in a clean country. Maybe the Europeans, cloistered to ships and eating old bread, were the more wretched. Regardless, these wretched people were fated to meet, and their contact changed the world.
Columbus day is a great opportunity to explore the history of this contact. With greater empathy, we may be able to act better when the next contact inevitably happens. For it is destiny in this world that we will meet new and strange people that live lives alien to our own. The choice to make friends or enemies is ours. With a knowledge of history, we might be able to make the better choice. It is my hope that we will abandon superiority and choose peace with the new forms of humanity that we encounter every day.
~ ~ ~
Check it out!! VVVV
Mann, Charles. “1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.” Vintage Books, division of Random House, Inc. Second Edition. New York