500 YEARS OF RESISTANCE
This article was originally written as a letter to the editor of the Kingston Whig Standard by Ian Bruce of Ottawa. As of press time it had not been printed.
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I understand that the replica of Columbus' ship "Nina" featured in the movie "1492" will be visiting Kingston. Many people, myself included, will be interested to see this example of traditional European shipbuilding. However, since this ship is specifically associated with the arrival of Europeans in North and South America, it is important to use the occasion to discuss aspects of this history which are politically relevant today. The image of the "discovery" of the New World promoted by the celebration of the 500th anniversaries of the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot is misleading, if not altogether false. The European colonization and settlement of the Americas was predicted on the expropriation, enslavement, and genocide of the indigenous population, which before contact may have amounted to as many as fifty million people. Their descendents are far less numerous. Columbus himself started the process which still continues today, if in a less numerous form. He conscripted the native inhabitants of Hispaniola to extract gold from the island. Persons who did not fulfil rigid quotas had their hands chopped off. Within two years of Columbus' landing, over 125, 000 Arawaks were dead from disease, murder and suicide. This atrocity was repeated in a much larger scale over the next three centuries as millions of South American aboriginal people were enslaved for work in silver and mercury mines. One fact which somehow escaped mention during the Cabot commemoration is that the European settlement of Newfoundland was something less than entirely beneficial to the Beothuk people who had lived there for thousands of years. Some of the "civilized" immigrants decided that hunting "savages" was much more fun than hunting animals, and this became a popular sport. The last Beothuks were exterminated in the nineteenth century. Newfoundland owes its good fortune in not having to settle any aboriginal land claims to the "final solution" having been completed before this came to be seen as politically incorrect. This is not just ancient history. Physical annihilation began to go out of fashion as a solution to the North American "Indian problem" in the late nineteenth century, after the wounded knee massacre, although it is still in progress in South and Central American countires such as Brazil and Guatemala. It was replaced by the kinder and gentler Apartheid system, established in this country by the Indian Act. Until the middle of this century, aboriginal people were prohibited from leaving their tiny reservations, prohibited from farming after the rivers where they fished were poisoned and the animals they hunted disappeared, prohibited from doing anything to support themselves. They were free to rot on welfare or die. Meanwhile, their language and culture were systematically obliterated by the well-documented residential schools, where physical and sexual abuse were commonplace. Of course, the priests and nuns who beat native children for speaking their own language had only their best interests in mind. Since the 1960's, things have moderated a bit. First Nations people are now free to assimilate into white settler society, if they can overcome the pervasive racism they are confronted with. Considering what European civilization did to their culture, it's understandable that many of them are not very enthusiastic about this option, preferring instead to try to reclaim a small part of what they had before "discovery". When they try this, it quickly becomes apparent that things haven't actually changed very much. Try to prevent a bunch of rich bigots from bulldozing a traditional cemetary to build a golf course, get attacked by Sq stormtroopers and the Canadian Army - Oka. Try to reclaim land temporarily lent for a military base fifty years ago, get shot dead by the RCMP - Ipperwash. Try to defend yourself against and FBI death squad, rot in jail for twenty years - Leonard Peltier. This is the political context in which the celebrations of European conquest take place. It's no surprise that the people how oppose current aboriginal land claims, so they can stripmine the earth, clearcut the forests, and build golf courses and fishing resprts for other rich folks, who would like to bury the history of the oppression and expropriation of the inigenous people of this continent, which equals or surpasses the most horrific atrocities ever committed in Europe. There is a direct conection between this history and the current struggle of First Nations for land rights and self-determination. People going to see the Nina should be aware of the political agenda which it and the discovery commemorations are being used to sell. There is a tradition which is much more worthy of celebration than the sordid history discussed above. Columbus' flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked on a reef in the Caribbean ocean. Since there was not sufficient room for its crew on the other two ships on the voyage home, they were left behind. When Columbus returned a year later, he found that their fort had been burned to the ground and they had all been killed. The "Indians" having leanred what kind of treatment they could expect from their European "friends", had carried out the first large-scale act of resistance to the conquest of the New World. In conclusion, I would like to express my appreciation and admiration of those people, the Aztec and Inca armies, Sitting Bull and the Oglala Sioux, Geronimo, the American Indian Movement, the Mohawk Warrior Society, the Zapatista Liberation Front, and all the other freedom fighters of Turtle Island, for five hundred years of resistance. May they yet win. |
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volume #2, issue #2