Photo Source David Berkowitz | CC BY 2.0
Christopher Columbus has long been a patriotic symbol for the United States of America. Honored with more place names than any other figure of American history except for George Washington, he has been praised as a great explorer—courageous, resolute, and victorious. If Columbus is this hero in the American imagination, a most important ancestor of this country, on the day dedicated to him, America needs to remember the whole of his legacy. The avalanche of arrogance, greed, and violence.
In 1492, while sailing through the Atlantic, Christopher Columbus was confident of what lay ahead: fortune and fame for him, a colonial empire for Spain, converts for the Church. Yet island after island, only the smallest traces of gold had emerged, not the vast and deep mines that Columbus had anticipated. Then again, since he had promised King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella riches from the East, Columbus could not simply return the fleets with nothing to show. So began the great slave raid.
On the first of his voyages, in where we now know was the Bahamas, Columbus had encountered the Taíno people. On meeting them ashore, he described them in his journal as hospitable, good-willed, handsome, naked, and docile. And almost in the same breath, he reflected: “They ought to be good servants and of good skill. . . . And I believe that they would easily be made Christians.” Even as he praised the gentleness and generosity of the natives,…