VivirLatino

Thankfully my daughter’s teacher opted not to mention Columbus Day, being observed today by some, me not included. Some relatives here from Chile had a hard time understanding why Columbus Day was the holiday here and not Dia de la Raza, celebrating the survival and resistance of indigenous Latino cultures rather than celebrating the guy who got lost and laid claim to “discovering” something that had been around for a while. Refer back to last year’s post on the subject:

…he actually didn’t discover a thing (lands inhabitated by indigenous peoples don’t need to be “discovered”) and he didn’t even actually set foot on North America proper. What he did set off was a cycle of violence that violated the land and human rights of Indigenous, Native and First Nation people across the Americas.

Don’t buy what I’m selling? According an organization/coalition called Transform Columbus Day:

During Columbus’ tenure as “viceroy and governor” of the Caribbean Islands and the American mainland from 1493 until 1500, he instituted policies of slavery (encomienda) and the systematic murder and rape of the Taino population. Dominican priest, Bartolome de Las Casas was the first European historian in the Americas. He was an eyewitness and wrote in painful detail of the tortures he witnessed. In a survey conducted in 1496, he estimated that over 5 million people had been exterminated within the first three years of the Columbus rule. [Actual survey conducted in 1496 by Bartolome de Las Casas, cited in J.B. Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, Vol. 2 [Source: New York: Putnam Sons Publishers, 1903-1904), p. 348ff. cited in Churchill.] Later accounts that gloss over the horrors of the Columbus regime are the revisions of history.

See that’s not something worth celebrating in my mind.