by Sean Begin
Many public school systems had Monday off for Columbus Day. It’s hard to find anyone not familiar with the singsong history of Christopher Columbus; “In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
The rhyme is meant to help elementary school students remember the year Columbus “discovered” America. It’s also an example of rewriting history and failing to fully acknowledge truth.
American elementary school history books whitewash Columbus’ bloody history with “the New World.” They paint him as a benevolent explorer who tamed a land of “savages.”
Reality, as is often the case, is not as pretty.
In a supreme twist of irony, Columbus never actually set foot on any soil that is now part of the continental United States. While he did discover that land existed to the west of Europe, he presumed he had reached his intended target off the West Indies.
When Columbus finally did arrive here, it wasn’t with the intent to become friendly with natives and learn from and about them. In a very 21st century-style mindset, Columbus was motivated by money and potential wealth, mainly for his monarchal Spanish backers.
Columbus and his men saw the indigenous people they found as obstacles, using them as slaves, forcing them to convert to Christianity and bringing disease that nearly eradicated entire populations.
This is fact that gets overlooked and ignored in the classroom. Something the College Board, which oversees the standards for AP courses in high schools across the country, saw fit to correct when they changed the standards for AP US History.
The changes led one conservative school board in Colorado to challenge the Board’s decision.
According to curriculum review proposal: “Materials should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
Essentially, this Colorado school board is saying it wants the students its responsible for to be force-fed the same garbage history because to talk about the truth is “unpatriotic.”
The decision led to a mass “sick-out” by teachers from two schools under the school board as well as walk-outs by hundreds of students, a direct civil disobedience act the school board looks to quell.
Maybe the school board forgot the dissent and lack of respect for authority that led the founding fathers to wage war against one of the most powerful nations in the world at the time.
It’s time to stop pushing this clean-copy version of Columbus’ history. He wasn’t even the first non-indigenous person to set foot in America (that distinction belongs to Leif Eriksson and his band of Vikings who founded a small colony in Newfoundland. Legend has it that Irish monks arrived even earlier than that).
Columbus simply gets the credit because he showed the European powers that the land existed.
It seems, with all the facts that exist, that the US should stop celebrating Columbus as a hero and instead acknowledge the bloody path he left in history. Instead, the federal government should follow the lead of Seattle.
The Seattle City Council passed a resolution to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the second Monday of October, the day traditionally set aside for Columbus Day.
Seattle didn’t replace Columbus Day but the move recognizes a truer history of America than the one currently in place. It’s time to end Columbus Day and the recognition of a conqueror in favor of the indigenous people of the Americas.