President Trump has proclaimed that on Columbus Day, 2025, Americans should honor Christopher Columbus as “the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth.”
What followed Columbus’s encounter with America in 1492 was a legacy, not of “faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue” but of conquest, disease, and slavery. While I will admit that Columbus probably did not intend the entire Native population of two continents to be slaughtered and enslaved, and all their resources grabbed by force, he certainly began the process. While we may not necessarily condemn Columbus, neither should we revere him. He was NOT the original American hero, as if the indigenous people who were already in America did not even exist—there is no mention of them in Trump’s proclamation.
To listen to Trump, you would get the impression that the white domination over Native America was a completely good thing. This is false, as I explained in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.. My book is not a vicious liberal attack on Columbus, but a scientific evaluation of what America was like before Columbus and what happened after him.
Native American history has, in the popular mind, largely been erased. Most Americans know nothing about Native Americans, other than as dark inconvenient people who stood in the way of white progress, and continue to do so today, as explained in detail in Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.
We had been making progress so that even in many red states the Monday nearest to October 12 was recognized either as Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day. Under Trump, we have gone back to exclusively the white version. In this as in many other ways, Trump is leading us fearlessly into the twentieth century.
If you agree with Trump that Columbus was inspired completely by the desire to “spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands”; that evangelism consists of killing some of the people who had not yet heard about Jesus, enslaving others, and taking their land, then you are welcome to join President Trump in celebrating Columbus. And you should get out your guns and go on an evangelistic expedition into whatever hotspots of anti-Christianity you might choose.
No comments:
Post a Comment