Indians were defined as subhumans, lower than animals. George 
Washington compared them to wolves, "beasts of prey" and called 
 for their total destruction.  Andrew Jackson -- whose portrait appears 
on the U.S. $20 bill today -- in 1814  "supervised the mutilation of 800 
or more Creek Indian corpses  -- the bodies of men, women and children  
that [his troops] had massacred -- cutting off their noses to count and  
preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their 
 bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins." 
 

 Examining the nation's heroes may tell us 
 something fundamental about our goals and values. Christopher 
 Columbus has been a genuine American hero since at least 1792 
 when the Society of St. Tammany in New York City first held a 
 dinner to honor the man and his deeds. 
 
 Columbus Day -- first observed as a U.S. national holiday in 
 1892 and declared an annual day of national celebration in 1934 
 -- commemorates the re-discovery of North America, by 
 Christopher Columbus and his band of 90 adventurers, who set out 
 from Palos, Spain just before dawn on August 3, 1492 intending 
 to find Asia by crossing the Atlantic Ocean in three small 
 ships. 
 
 Columbus made four voyages to the New World.[1] The initial 
 voyage reveals several important things about the man. First, he 
 had genuine courage because few ship's captains had ever pointed 
 their prow toward the open ocean, the complete unknown. 
 Secondly, from numerous of his letters and reports we learn that 
 his overarching goal was to seize wealth that belonged to 
 others, even his own men, by whatever means necessary. 
 
 Columbus's royal sponsors (Ferdinand and Isabella) had promised 
 a lifetime pension to the first man who sighted land. A few 
 hours after midnight on October 12, 1492, Juan Rodriguez Bermeo, 
 a lookout on the Pinta, cried out -- in the bright moonlight, he 
 had spied land ahead. Most likely Bermeo was seeing the white 
 beaches of Watling Island in the Bahamas. 
 
 As they waited impatiently for dawn, Columbus let it be known 
 that he had spotted land several hours before Bermeo. According 
 to Columbus's journal of that voyage, his ships were, at the 
 time, traveling 10 miles per hour. To have spotted land several 
 hours before Bermeo, Columbus would have had to see more than 30 
 miles over the horizon, a physical impossibility. Nevertheless 
 Columbus took the lifetime pension for himself.[1,2] 
 
 Columbus installed himself as Governor of the Caribbean islands, 
 with headquarters on Hispaniola (the large island now shared by 
 Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He described the people, the 
 Arawaks (called by some the Tainos) this way: 
 
 "The people of this island and of all the other islands which I 
 have found and seen, or have not seen, all go naked, men and 
 women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover 
 one place only with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton 
 which they make for that purpose. They have no iron or steel or 
 weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are 
 well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrous 
 timid.... [T]hey are so artless and free with all they possess, 
 that no one would believe it without having seen it. Of anything 
 they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather 
 they invite the person to share it, and show as 
 much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether 
 the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are 
 content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be 
 given to them."[3,pg.63;1,pg.118] 
 
 After Columbus had surveyed the Caribbean region, he returned to 
 Spain to prepare his invasion of the Americas. From accounts of 
 his second voyage, we can begin to understand what the New World 
 represented to Columbus and his men -- it offered them life 
 without limits, unbridled freedom. Columbus took the title 
 Admiral of the Ocean Sea and proceeded to unleash a reign of 
 terror unlike anything seen before or since. When he was 
 finished, eight million Arawaks -- virtually the entire native 
 population of Hispaniola -- had been exterminated by torture, 
 murder, forced labor, starvation, disease and despair.[3,pg.x] 
 
 A Spanish missionary, Bartolome de las Casas, described 
 first-hand how the Spaniards terrorized the natives.[4] Las 
 Casas gives numerous eye-witness accounts of repeated mass 
 murder and routine sadistic torture. As Barry Lopez has 
 accurately summarized it, "One day, in front of Las Casas, the 
 Spanish dismembered, beheaded, or raped 3000 people. 'Such 
 inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight,' he 
 says, 'as no age can parallel....' The Spanish cut off the legs 
 of children who ran from them. They poured people full of 
 boiling soap. They made bets as to who, with one sweep of his 
 sword, could cut a person in half. They loosed dogs that 
 'devoured an Indian like a hog, at first sight, in less than a 
 moment.' They used nursing infants for dog food."[2,pg.4] This 
 was not occasional violence -- it was a systematic, prolonged 
 campaign of brutality and sadism, a policy of torture, mass 
 murder, slavery and forced labor that continued for CENTURIES. 
 "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and 
 away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the 
 world," writes historian David E. Stannard.[3,pg.x]  Eventually 
 more than 100 million natives fell under European rule. Their 
 extermination would follow. As the natives died out, they were 
 replaced by slaves brought from Africa. 
 
 To make a long story short, Columbus established a pattern that 
 held for five centuries -- a "ruthless, angry search for 
 wealth," as Barry Lopez describes it. "It set a tone in the 
 Americas. The quest for personal possessions was to be, from the 
 outset, a series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, 
 in which an end to it -- the slaves, the timber, the pearls, the 
 fur, the precious ores, and, later, arable land, coal, oil, and 
 iron ore-- was never visible, in which an end to it had no 
 meaning." Indeed, there WAS no end to it, no limit. 
 
 As Hans Koning has observed, "There was no real ending to the 
 conquest of Latin America. It continued in remote forests and on 
 far mountainsides. It is still going on in our day when miners 
 and ranchers invade land belonging to the Amazon Indians and 
 armed thugs occupy Indian villages in the backwoods of Central 
 America."[6,pg.46]  As recently as the 1980s under Presidents 
 Ronald Reagan and George Bush the U.S. government knowingly gave 
 direct aid to genocidal campaigns that killed tens of thousands 
 Mayan Indian people in Guatemala and elsewhere.[7] The pattern 
 holds. 
 
 Unfortunately, Columbus and the Spaniards were not unique. They 
 conquered Mexico and what is now the Southwestern U.S., with 
 forays into Florida, the Carolinas, even into Virginia. From 
 Virginia northward, the land had been taken by the English who, 
 if anything, had even less tolerance for the indigenous people. 
 As Hans Koning says, "From the beginning, the Spaniards saw the 
 native Americans as natural slaves, beasts of burden, part of 
 the loot. When working them to death was more economical than 
 treating them somewhat humanely, they worked them to death. The 
 English, on the other hand, had no use for the native peoples. 
 They saw them as devil worshippers, savages who were beyond 
 salvation by the church, and exterminating them increasingly 
 became accepted policy."[6,pg.14] 
 
 The British arrived in Jamestown in 1607. By 1610 the 
 intentional extermination of the native population was well 
 along. As David E. Stannard has written, "Hundreds of Indians 
 were killed in skirmish after skirmish. Other hundreds were 
 killed in successful plots of mass poisoning. They were hunted 
 down by dogs, 'blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives 
 [mastiffs] to seaze them.' Their canoes and fishing weirs were 
 smashed, their villages and agricultural fields burned to the 
 ground. Indian peace offers were accepted by the English only 
 until their prisoners were returned; then, having lulled the 
 natives into false security, the colonists returned to the 
 attack. It was the colonists' expressed desire that the Indians 
 be exterminated, rooted 'out from being longer a people uppon 
 the face of the earth.' In a single raid the settlers destroyed 
 corn sufficient to feed four thousand people for a year. 
 Starvation and the massacre of non-combatants was becoming the 
 preferred British approach to dealing with the 
 natives."[3,pg.106] 
 
 In Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey extermination was 
 officially promoted by a "scalp bounty" on dead Indians. 
 "Indeed, in many areas it [murdering Indians] became an outright 
 business," writes historian Ward Churchill.[5,pg.182] 
 
 Indians were defined as subhumans, lower than animals. George 
 Washington compared them to wolves, "beasts of prey" and called 
 for their total destruction.[3,pgs.119-120]  Andrew Jackson -- 
 whose portrait appears on the U.S. $20 bill today -- in 1814 
 "supervised the mutilation of 800 or more Creek Indian corpses 
 -- the bodies of men, women and children that [his troops] had 
 massacred -- cutting off their noses to count and preserve a 
 record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their 
 bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins."[5,pg.186] 
 
 The English policy of extermination -- another name for genocide 
 -- grew more insistent as settlers pushed westward. In 1851 the 
 Governor of California officially called for the extermination 
 of the Indians in his state.[3,pg.144]  On March 24, 1863, the 
 ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS in Denver ran an editorial titled, 
 "Exterminate Them." On April 2, 1863, the SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN 
 advocated "extermination of the Indians."[5,pg.228] In 1867, 
 General William Tecumseh Sherman said, "We must act with 
 vindictive earnestness against the [Lakotas, known to whites as 
 the Sioux] even to their extermination, men, women and 
 children."[5,pg.240] 
 
 In 1891, Frank L. Baum (gentle author of the WIZARD OF OZ) wrote 
 in the ABERDEEN (KANSAS) SATURDAY PIONEER that the army should 
 "finish the job" by the "total annihilation" of the few 
 remaining Indians. The U.S. did not follow through on Baum's 
 macabre demand for there really was no need. By then the native 
 population had been reduced to 2.5% of its original numbers and 
 97.5% of the aboriginal land base had been expropriated and 
 renamed the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Hundreds 
 upon hundreds of native tribes with unique languages, learning, 
 customs, and cultures had simply been erased from the face of the 
 earth, most often without even the pretense of justice or law. 
 
 Today we can see the remnant cultural arrogance of Christopher 
 Columbus and Captain John Smith shadowed in the cult of the 
 "global free market" which aims to eradicate indigenous cultures and 
 traditions world-wide, to force all peoples to adopt the ways of 
 the U.S.  Global free trade is manifest destiny writ large. 
 
 But as Barry Lopez says, "This violent corruption needn't define 
 us.... We can say, yes, this happened, and we are ashamed. We 
 repudiate the greed. We recognize and condemn the evil. And we 
 see how the harm has been perpetuated. But, five hundred years 
 later, we intend to mean something else in the world." If we 
 chose, we could set limits on ourselves for once. We could 
 declare enough is enough.  So it is always good to celebrate 
 Columbus on his day. 
 
 ============== 
 [1] J.M. Cohen, editor, THE FOUR VOYAGES OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS 
 (London: Penguin Books, 1969). ISBN 0-14-044217-0. 
  
 [2] Barry Lopez, THE REDISCOVERY OF NORTH AMERICA (Lexington, 
 Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. ISBN 
 0-8131-1742-9. 
  
 [3] David E. Stannard, AMERICAN HOLOCAUST; COLUMBUS AND THE 
 CONQUEST OF THE NEW WORLD (New York: Oxford University Press, 
 1992). ISBN 0-19-507581-1. 
  
 [4] Bartolome de las Casas, THE DEVASTATION OF THE INDIES: A 
 BRIEF ACCOUNT (translated by Herma Briffault) (Baltimore, 
 Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). ISBN 
 0-8018-4430-4. 
  
 [5] Ward Churchill, A LITTLE MATTER OF GENOCIDE; HOLOCAUST AND 
 DENIAL IN THE AMERICAS, 1492 TO THE PRESENT (San Francisco: City 
 Lights Books, 1997). ISBN 0-87286-323-9. 
  
 [6] Hans Koning, THE CONQUEST OF AMERICA; HOW THE INDIAN NATIONS 
 LOST THEIR CONTINENT (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), pg. 
 46. ISBN 0-85345-876-6. 
  
 [7] For example, see Mireya Navarro, "Guatemalan Army Waged 
 'Genocide,' New Report Finds," NEW YORK TIMES February 26, 1999, 
 pg. unknown. The TIMES described "torture, kidnapping and 
 execution of thousands of civilians" -- most of them Mayan 
 Indians -- a campaign to which the U.S. government contributed 
 "money and training." See http://www.nytimes.com/