This weekend’s set of readings emphasized to me how unaware I was of the world around me at a young age. Reading Zinn’s description of the history of the America’s has an incredibly different feel to than school textbooks. More so than anything else, he highlights that the America’s were not filled with barren forests when the Santa Maria arrived, but instead quite the opposite. He states that Native American populations were as large and densely populated as Europe itself, and that a significant culture had developed. They had laws, established communities, and peace throughout the land. It is an absolute shame that the Arawak tribes greatest weakness was their desire for peace. They were easily overtaken because rather than defending themselves upon Columbus’s arrival, they swam out to the ships to greet the explorers. They offered food and other goods, emphasizing their welcoming culture. They had not yet discovered Iron, likely because they had need for such strong metals within their communal culture. These were not the ‘savages’ that textbooks often make Native Americans out to be, they were an advanced tribe with stronger egalitarian principles and environmental consciousness than anywhere else in the world.
Growing up, I was unaware of all of this information. Reading this article sparked a conversation with my sister about our assumptions about Christopher Columbus. We were always told that Columbus was an absolute hero, who discovered empty lands that had not existed before. The most shocking realization within this is that we were well aware of the Native Americans at this age, yet we still withheld the assumption that the lands were up for grabs. Our elementary school teachers, without knowing it, convinced their classes that Native Americans had no right to land. There was no mentioning of the fact that Columbus deceived and enslaved these people. He was not a hero in any sense. Columbus did not even achieve his goal of reaching Asia, making him far less than a great explorer. It is time for schools to teach the truth about the colonization of the America’s
Hayder’s piece on voting rights acts as an interesting foil to the Zinn piece. It also uproots classic assumptions about the “greatness” of the United States. In this case, the civil rights movement is often thought of as the start of African American equality within the US, yet this could not be further from the truth. Children learn that in the 1950’s, the U.S. government gloriously granted African Americans voting rights in an effort to achieve equality. In reality, nobody’s lives are improved in America unless they fight for it. African Americans, in this case, went through absurd hardship to gain the ballot. This ought to be recognized at a young age as to prevent kids from devaluing injustice.
I agree that there is a huge problem among early education about Columbus. It was made to seem like the Americas didn’t exist and weren’t developed until Columbus arrived, when in reality there were flourishing, well-developed societies that were destroyed by Columbus and the other “explorers”.
I think that the part about the American Indians swimming out to greet that Europeans is important to consider in thinking about the perception that European settlers and American history has painted of these people. The American Indians were not harmful to the Europeans but because they were different, because they did not subscribe to the same religion as the Europeans, because they had different societal structures, the Europeans painted them as “other.” This otherness grew into a fear of them which grew into the negative or lack of portrayal throughout history.
I really liked your response. I think both examples in the two readings exemplify how we are taught over-simplified versions of our country’s nation, typically filtered out to emphasize the positive parts and skim over the negative repercussions.