Columbus Day

Police Arrest 83 Protesters at Denver Columbus Day Parade
A quote:
"Denver's parade, which was started in 1907, has a troubled history of arrests and confrontations between Columbus supporters and detractors. Protesters have called him a slave trader who touched off centuries of genocide and oppression against native people."

Let's explore the other side of the story.

The Crimes of Christopher Columbus
"When Cortes captured the Aztec emperor Montezuma and his attendants, he would only permit them temporary release on the promise that they stop their traditional practices of cannibalism and human sacrifice, but he found that "as soon as we turned our heads they would resume their old cruelties." Aztec cannibalism, writes anthropologist Marvin Harris, "was not a perfunctory tasting of ceremonial tidbits." Indeed the Aztecs on a regular basis consumed human flesh in a stew with peppers and tomatoes, and children were regarded as a particular delicacy. Cannibalism was prevalent among the Aztecs, Guarani, Iroquois, Caribs, and several other tribes.

Moreover, the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of South America performed elaborate rites of human sacrifice, in which thousands of captive Indians were ritually murdered, until their altars were drenched in blood, bones were strewn everywhere, and priests collapsed with exhaustion from stabbing their victims. The law of the Incas provided for punishment of parents and others who displayed grief during human sacrifices. When men of noble birth died, wives and concubines were often strangled and buried with them. "

1492 and All That
"While some remarkable art and architecture was produced over more than a millennium of Indian civilization, there were no fresh impulses, such as had occurred elsewhere on the globe, that would lead to the development of metals and the wheel, or the training of animals for agricultural work. Whatever evils the Spaniards eventually introduced— and they were many and varied—they at least cracked the age-old shell of a culture admirable in many ways but pervaded by atrocities and petrification that should he repugnant to any modern person. Anyone who wishes to defend the rights of surviving Indian tribes and help preserve their cultures—two noble undertakings—must nevertheless he aware of what should and should not be retained from their heritage. A sentimental belief in the equal validity of all cultures leads necessarily to defense of such practices as sacrificial murder. "


Columbus and the Beginning of the World
"Conquest aside, the question of even peaceful evangelizing remains very much with us. Today, most people, even Christians, believe it somehow improper to evangelize. The injunction to preach the gospel to all nations, so dear to Columbus’ heart, seems an embarrassment, not least because of the ways the command has been misused. But some of the earlier missionaries tried a kind of inculturation that recognized what was good in the native practices and tried to build a symbolic bridge between them and the Christian faith. The Franciscans in New Spain and the Jesuits in Canada, for example, tried this approach. Not a few of them found martyrdom.

Many contemporary believers do not think that there was much need to evangelize. This usually arises out of the assumption that native religions are valid in their own way. It will not do, however, given the anthropological evidence, to make facile assumptions that all spiritual practices are on an equal plane. The early explorers who encountered them did not think so, and neither should we. For example, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, no special friend of Christianity or the Spanish conquest, in the very act of admiring the richness of Aztec culture, characterizes the Aztec gods as "a whole pantheon of fear." Fuentes deplores the way that missionaries often collaborated with unjust appropriation of native land, but on a theological level notes the epochal shift in native cultures thanks to Christian influence: "One can only imagine the astonishment of the hundreds and thousands of Indians who asked for baptism as they came to realize that they were being asked to adore a god who sacrificed himself for men instead of asking men to sacrifice themselves to gods, as the Aztec religion demanded."

These articles combat some of the modern, liberal, politically-correct protesting of Columbus Day. In a nutshell, the natives weren't all as peace-loving and sophisticated as you might think, and while the European explorers weren't perfect men, the Church was overall very generous and protective of natives' rights.

Reason #4,325 to homeschool: You can teach your kids to appreciate the evangelization of the New World, and to defend the honor of Columbus and Cortes and the missionaries who shed their blood to spread the one true faith to the wicked pagans.

Happy Columbus Day! Celebrate by burning your copy of that stupid Pocahontas movie.

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Update: In a wonderful coincidence, I learned that the leader of the protest in the first story above, Russell Means, played the voice of Pocahontas' dad in the movie. Ha!