Today, Christopher Columbus has and will take a lot of flak from many directions, and probably justifiably so. A murderer he was, a conqueror—by our definition of the word—he was, and a catalyst for the trans-Atlantic expanse of explorers and the eventual devastation of native populations he was. But was this so unusual for the time, or for any period in history? Does he deserve to have his holiday ridiculed and slandered?
No, I don’t believe so. First of all Columbus Day was never meant to be a day to celebrate terror, torture, or the destruction of civilizations. Columbus Day celebrates the beginning of a new age in the Western world: the Age of Exploration, which paved the way for the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the modern era. Today celebrates the embarkation of three tiny ships made of popsicle-sticks crammed with poor souls that took a brave and major step toward the advancement of the world in general. Today we celebrate a great accomplishment for man-kind, just as we may celebrate Neil Armstrong’s first lunar walk or Benjamin Franklin’s realization that lightning was electricity. We hold Columbus Day as worthy of celebration by the simple fact that without the voyage of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria our world may have been drastically different.
To say that we should not celebrate Columbus Day because it also sparked the decline of the Native American is a hypocritical statement to make. Like most pivotal events in human history there was a winner and there was a looser. In the case of the natives of the Americas it was a brutal and devastating lose. But like so many holidays it is the positive that we prefer to commemorate. Should Christians not celebrate the birth of Christ every year because it would later inspire the Crusades, the Inquisition, or the Thirty Years War? Should we forget about celebrating Veteran’s Day because, by definition, it is commemorating people that at one point had to kill other human beings? I do not believe so, because I chose to uphold the good that I believe these holidays represent. It is because of Christ that many of us believe in salvation. It is because of veterans that the United States stayed the United States.
And it is because of Columbus and his voyage that I am here today, whether or not he did terrible things or inspired terrible or unfortunate things.
To consider the foul treatment of Native Americans at the hands of European expansionists as a historically tragic event is to forget how human civilization was established. It is true that Europeans conquered the Americas by destroying long-established civilizations. But many of these indigenous civilizations were also formed through conquest. Historians are generally in agreement that the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Algonquians (to name only a few) were built when one group of people decided to expand and take over their neighbors, often with bloody and devastating results. They all maintained their supremacy through fear, torture, intimidation, and death. In one year, the Aztecs reportedly sacrificed as many as 10,000 enemy prisoners (about 28 per day) to their Sun God. When the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire in the 16th century, they didn’t do it alone: They were helped by local tribes that had lived in fear of the Aztecs for centuries. The Inca of the Andes region performed sacrifices similar to those of the Aztecs, though not as numerously. And the Algonquians of North America violently subjugated enslaved, tortured, and murdered their neighbors to maintain power. When the Europeans brought violence to the Americas, it was nothing new to the natives.
Violence has been a natural part of human development since people first began to live in large groups. Anthropologists today are hard-pressed to find a group of people that has lived in the same place they always have for as long as any human being has lived there. In other words, most, if not all, civilizations and cultures are what they are because of conquest. The Anglo-Saxons are not the original people of Britain. There ancestors stole the island from the Celts. The Celts in turn stole the island from the Druids. The people of present day France have their ethnic roots in west-central Asia. The modern Japanese came from mainland Asia, displacing the natives that inhabited the islands before them. The Zulu of southern Africa likewise migrated from somewhere else, pushing the indigenous people out of their way. To claim that Columbus inspired something evil is to claim that all of human history is evil as well.
Finally, I want to acknowledge that I do not condone or agree with in any way the treatment the natives received from the Europeans, or vice versa. I personally believe the death of so many great civilizations was a tragic and sad event. I simply wish to point out that it is in no way unusual in the history of mankind. It did not occur in a vacuum, and to say that he imposed his evil will on innocent, peaceful people is blatantly and historically false. Such behavior was also a norm in Europe. Just imagine how terrible white people have been to their own kind throughout history and you will realize that European expansionism was not something reserved exclusively for “weaker people.”
Perhaps critics of this holiday are right about Columbus, but this should never detract from the incredible impact they had on history. Maybe instead of calling it Columbus Day it should be called “Exploration Day.”
