Today is Columbus Day, and what better way to observe it than by reading the first chapter of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, with his detailed and disturbing accounts of early interactions between Europeans and the natives of Hispaniola, Mexico, and the future United States. Here's an excerpt. I highly recommend reading the whole chapter, which you can find here at History is a Weapon.
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
"History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation-a world not restored but disintegrated.
5 comments:
thanks for the info
Howard Zinn is a genius!
Howard Zinn was an active member of the communist party who stated that he was to the left of Mao Zedong, the commie responsible for the deaths of 70 million of his countrymen; he supported Castro, the commie who turned Cuba into a totalitarian prison camp while imprisoning, torturing, & murdering thousands (including gays, just for being gay - & still going on in Cuba). As any reader of his texts knows, he is a virulent hater of this country - the country that gives him the freedom to get rich spewing his hate-mongering hypocrisy. It's fashionable in your narrow-minded, arrogant little PC crowd to honor a jerk like Zinn, but it only illustrates your own hypocrisy.
--Stick to porn, something that doesn't tax your limited intellect.
It took me awhile to try to come with a response to anonymous and that unfortunate political bent that seems to be unleashed without apology these days. It defines poison, it revises history, and it should be shamed into the dark corners of human thought from which it originates.
I live 10 miles off of the Kalispel Rez. It is the smallest aboriginal or first nation reservation in the US and it stands as the ultimate symbol of the crooked generosity of Europeans. We'd originally promised the Indians a territoy extending across the Idaho panhandle, that would have included the wealthy resort communities of present day Sandpoint, Priest Lake, and most of Lake Pend Oreille---one of the deepest and cleanest lakes in the world. The rez had been scouted by David Thompson, been the carrot that secured the Kalispel's cooperation against the Blackfoot and meant the tribe avoided the violent plight of the Spokane's, the Colville's and the Nez Pierce.
Instead they received just a few thousand acres, most of it in the floodplains of the Pend Oreille River. The final holdings were not ratified until decades later and the tribe lived in limbo as they perished.
I am related to many members of the Salish bands---mainly the Colville's. Members of my family have been marrying Indians and vice versa for my entire life---including my grandmother, cousins, and two of my partners have been first nation. I myself have no native blood but pow wow, the tribe itself, and the survivors of this horrible chapter in human history are not just political theories to be debated in far away universities.
The Indians I know do not celebrate Columbus Day, and it is---as the author you reference hints a holiday dedicated to genocide.
I find it ironic and sad that whites renamed so many places---assuming of course that they did not already have names. In the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area, The Enchantment Lakes are bordered by the Lost Plateau. This area, now that it has been discovered, is so popular that it requires a permit to enter and people spend years on waiting lists just to score such a permit. Yet I have to think that this plateau was never "lost" to the Indians. Even if many of them are burdened with the red tape of obtaining a permit if they wish to revisit it.
I write all of this as a guilty party. Members of my father's family were among the first white families to push a wagon team into northern Pend Oreille County, across the Kalispel's land into NE Washington, and as additional white settlers followed, the Kalispels had little resistance---they'd already been decimated by disease and this would be the very last place settled in the lower 48long after it was widely known what had been done to them by the rest of the world. By the early 1900's the tribe had dwindled to less than 50 members. I suspect this, aside from greed, might have been one of the factors in their allotment of the smallest holdings that they were finally offered in the 1920's.
If any group of people have cause to be bitter and angry it would be the Kalispels. Instead, especially now with gaming revenues, they've become a leading economic force in the northern intermountain west. They are among the largest employers. They've built one of the finest resorts in the West and surprisingly enough are a huge underwriting partner for Spokane's Pride festivals, newspapers (when they were still in print) and non governmental AIDS services organizations.
Dan Savage has made no secret of he and his partners disdain for the people of the Inland Empire, especially down in Spokane, but in his "It Get's Better" campaign I find it willfully telling that no mention is made of the Indians and the enormous resources they've dedicated to trying to right wrongs without bitterness and with a pledge to the brightest future they can lend a hand in helping to create.
It took me awhile to try to come with a response to anonymous and that unfortunate political bent that seems to be unleashed without apology these days. It defines poison, it revises history, and it should be shamed into the dark corners of human thought from which it originates.
I live 10 miles off of the Kalispel Rez. It is the smallest aboriginal or first nation reservation in the US and it stands as the ultimate symbol of the crooked generosity of Europeans. We'd originally promised the Indians a territoy extending across the Idaho panhandle, that would have included the wealthy resort communities of present day Sandpoint, Priest Lake, and most of Lake Pend Oreille---one of the deepest and cleanest lakes in the world. The rez had been scouted by David Thompson, been the carrot that secured the Kalispel's cooperation against the Blackfoot and meant the tribe avoided the violent plight of the Spokane's, the Colville's and the Nez Pierce.
Instead they received just a few thousand acres, most of it in the floodplains of the Pend Oreille River. The final holdings were not ratified until decades later and the tribe lived in limbo as they perished.
I am related to many members of the Salish bands---mainly the Colville's. Members of my family have been marrying Indians and vice versa for my entire life---including my grandmother, cousins, and two of my partners have been first nation. I myself have no native blood but pow wow, the tribe itself, and the survivors of this horrible chapter in human history are not just political theories to be debated in far away universities.
The Indians I know do not celebrate Columbus Day, and it is---as the author you reference hints a holiday dedicated to genocide.
I find it ironic and sad that whites renamed so many places---assuming of course that they did not already have names. In the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area, The Enchantment Lakes are bordered by the Lost Plateau. This area, now that it has been discovered, is so popular that it requires a permit to enter and people spend years on waiting lists just to score such a permit. Yet I have to think that this plateau was never "lost" to the Indians. Even if many of them are burdened with the red tape of obtaining a permit if they wish to revisit it.
I write all of this as a guilty party. Members of my father's family were among the first white families to push a wagon team into northern Pend Oreille County, across the Kalispel's land into NE Washington, and as additional white settlers followed, the Kalispels had little resistance---they'd already been decimated by disease and this would be the very last place settled in the lower 48long after it was widely known what had been done to them by the rest of the world. By the early 1900's the tribe had dwindled to less than 50 members. I suspect this, aside from greed, might have been one of the factors in their allotment of the smallest holdings that they were finally offered in the 1920's.
If any group of people have cause to be bitter and angry it would be the Kalispels. Instead, especially now with gaming revenues, they've become a leading economic force in the northern intermountain west. They are among the largest employers. They've built one of the finest resorts in the West and surprisingly enough are a huge underwriting partner for Spokane's Pride festivals, newspapers (when they were still in print) and non governmental AIDS services organizations.
Dan Savage has made no secret of he and his partners disdain for the people of the Inland Empire, especially down in Spokane, but in his "It Get's Better" campaign I find it willfully telling that no mention is made of the Indians and the enormous resources they've dedicated to trying to right wrongs without bitterness and with a pledge to the brightest future they can lend a hand in helping to create.
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