He sold indigenous girls as young as nine, to be sex slaves. That was how he made his trip to the Caribbean financially sound, even though there was no gold there. There was still profit. There was profit found in selling the peaceable people who may or may not have really thought Columbus was ashamed of his tail.
Christopher Columbus, my hometown’s namesake, was a monster.
He was as bad as the slave traders we learned about, when we had our cursory elementary school lessons on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. He was not a hero at all. His ship, named for Our Lady, brought plague and agony to the indigenous people living in the New World. It was the first of so many ships, so many settlers who viewed the indigenous people as a disease. 90% of those indigenous people were wiped out in the 500 years between 1492 and 1992. Millions of human beings were systematically exterminated for the convenience of European people. Our own genocide, as terrible as what Hitler had done in Germany, and we barely learned a word about this in school.
In school, we molded our narratives from bronze, so you couldn’t see any complexity or lies. It was a simple matter of a brave and heroic man discovering a fine new place for Europeans to live, on a ship named for the Virgin Mary.
He didn’t sail down the Scioto and dock in Columbus, but he might as well have. Because “Scioto” was the word for “Deer” in the language of the Native Americans who are dead now. The Iroquois, the Potawatomi, the Chippewa are gone. The Eerie after whom we named our big lake; the Wyandot after whom we named an amusement park, before the Columbus zoo bought and renamed it; the Shawnee after whom we named a state park in a different part of Ohio, are gone. What stands in their place is a city built by settlers of European descent, named after Christopher Columbus, whom they called a hero.
And a statue was built in his honor, out of bronze to hide any shadows.
This year, my daughter is in first grade.
I looked at the calendar to see what day it was, when the mail didn’t come in on time. And I shuddered. It was Columbus Day once again. The anniversary of that ridiculous school assembly to honor that much-lauded monster with the big ugly hands.
I smiled at her. “Today is Indigenous Peoples Day, Rosie. It’s the day we remember the first people who lived here, the Native Americans.”
I grabbed a book of stories with some Native American legends in it, and searched the internet for some videos of Native American ceremonies. I quickly threw together a special lesson for Indigenous Peoples Day. I realized that whatever I chose would be silly and not enough, never enough to make up for the terrible history that was all but erased to make a smooth, simple bronze narrative for white Americans to be proud of. But I wanted to show her something real, something that was true, about the place she lived in.
I don’t believe in hiding shadows.
(image via Pixabay)
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