Chapin Columbus Day

8/11/2019 Chapin Columbus Day

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WORLDWATCHWORLDWATCHVolume 21, Number 6 Vision for a Sustainable World November/December 2008Volume 21, Number 6 Vision for a Sustainable World November/December 2008

The Real Meaningof Columbus Day

Pollination Panic

Ainu Political RevivalEarth Ethics:

Diet and Rituals

The Real Meaningof Columbus Day

Pollination Panic

Ainu Political RevivalEarth Ethics:

Diet and Rituals


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8 World Watch | November/December 2008 www.worldwatch.org

A year ago I was walking through a shopping mall in north-ern Virginia when I passed by a tobacco shop. A life-sized

wooden Indian, clutching a handful of cigars, was guarding thedoor. Someone had taped a sign to its chest that read: Happy

Columbus Day.Shortly after, I came upon a statement made by President

George H.W. Bush in 1989, on the eve of the 500th anniver-sary of Christopher Columbuss arrival in the Americas. He

called the Admirals landfallone of the greatest achievementsof human endeavor, and added, I strongly encourage every

American to support the Quincentennary, and to discoverthe significance that this milestone in history has in his or her

own life.But just what significance does Columbus Day have, or

should it have, in our lives? It celebrates the day, 516 years ago,when three small boats carrying Spanish sailorsdiscovered

the Western Hemisphere. This Encounter of Two Worlds, asit is often called, was the first step in a process that led, in

short order, to the conquest and European subjugation of thenative peoples of this newly found continent. It determined

the direction the Americas were to take from that point on, and

when we contemplate the significance of Columbus Day in ourlives we need to take into consideration the whole package,

from discovery through conquest to domination.All of us were taught the history of the Spanish Discovery

and Conquest of the Americas early on in school. Many bitsand pieces of this history remain firmly lodged in our heads

these many years later, yet strangely, for most of us they arescattered images that, if we inspect them carefully, dont fit

together to form a very a coherent picture. They are, quite sim-ply, inadequate as explanations. This is in large part because

our school lessons were based on historical accounts that wereoften incomplete and confused, and they were one-sided,

often flagrantly so, with a strong pro-European bias.

This was the state of historicalinterpretation of the Spanish Discov-

ery and Conquest of the Americas upthrough the 1960s, and it was this way

across the hemisphere, from north tosouth. Since then, some of the drum-

beating for European superiority hassubsidedwe are less likely to be told,

for example, that the appearance ofthe Spaniards in Mexico wasthe van-

guard of the great European Advancetoward the broader knowledge of man

and of this planet, or that the Aztecswere mentally deranged and in the same league with the

Nazis*but many of the old biases and stereotypes have heldon tenaciously and still inhabit the pages of popular as well as

scholarly histories for adults and children.My subject here is the way historians have characterized

this pivotal period in our history, and the consequences these

characterizations have had on our thinking about the eventsthemselves, the peoples who took part in them, and their suc-

cessors, including all of us who currently live in this part ofthe world. I will draw primarily on the historical record from

Central Mexico, where the Spaniards took on the powerfulMexica (Aztec) Empire, but the same characterizations, in

roughly similar form, hold for the Spanish invasion of theInca Empire to the south.

*Sources for all quotes, as well as additional information and sugges-tions for further reading, can be found at www.worldwatch.org/ww/columbusday.

TheMeaning ofColumbusDay

byMac Chapin


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Discovery andConquest

On the evening of October 11, 1492, a fleet of three Spanish

shipstheNia,thePinta, and theSanta Marawas near-ing the end of a five-week voyage across theAtlantic. Their cap-

tain, a Genoese navigator named Christopher Columbus, was

standing on the deck of the Santa Marawhen what appearedto be a light was spotted in the distance. Land was sighted sev-

eral hours later, illuminated by the moon, and the followingmorning Columbus and a handful of his men took a small

boat ashore on an island (no one is certain today which oneit was) somewhere on the rim of the Caribbean Sea. The

natives who came to meet them were peaceful, generous, andaccommodating. Columbus wrote in his diary that they

invite you to share anything that they possess, and show asmuch love as if their hearts went with it. He went on to

observe how easy it would be to convert these peopleandto make them work for us.

Columbus made three more journeys to the New World,and in his wake came an ever-increasing procession of Span-

ish ships. The Spaniards made their way past the Caribbean

islands to the mainland,traveled along the coast of Mexico andCentral America, and eventually trekked across the Pana-

manian isthmus to the Pacific Ocean. Their primary questwas after riches, especially gold. During these journeys they

learned of vast stores of wealth inland in the highlands ofcentral Mexico.

Here the narrative is transformed into a story that is, as thehistorian William H. Prescott noted, too startling for the

probabilities demanded by fiction, and without a parallel inthe pages of history. In 1519, Hernn Corts led a handful

of resolute men, as one historian puts it, into the heart of theformidable and highly militaristic Mexica Empire. Two years

www.worldwatch.org November/December 2008 | World Watch 9

Christopher Columbus landing in the Caribbean, 1492, as painted by JohnVanderlyn. Vanderlyn and assistants worked on the 3.7 5.5-meter canvas for10 years in Paris. It was placed in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in 1847.

ArchitectoftheCapitol


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later they laid siege to the imperial city of Tenochtitlan andafter just under three months of fighting emerged victorious,

leaving it in ruins and the majority of its inhabitants dead. Tenyears later, Francisco Pizarro marched straight into the jaws

of the equally fierce Inca Kingdom in the Andean highlands.

He had no more than 168 men under his command, yet inshort order he brought the Incas to their knees and gained con-

trol of the region.And these two civilizations were not only defeated. They

disintegrated and disappeared and were never able to recon-stitute themselves.They left behind little more than a scattering

of temples, pyramids, stone sculptures, and fragmentary his-tories of their former glory and achievements. And this hap-

pened everywhere the Europeans went. Their victories over theNew World kingdoms were swift and decisive, and within the

space of a few decades they had taken the core areas of thehemisphere from top to bottom. Those native people who

managed to survive had become either slaves or fugitives intheir own land, and the history of the New World had been

altered drastically and irrevocably.How did this happen?

The traditional narrative of the Conquest weaves togetherseveral causal threads. First, the story goes, in Mesoamerica the

Mexica thought the Spaniards were gods and were paralyzedwith fear and unable to think or act rationally. Montezuma,

the Mexica emperor, believed Corts to be the god Quetzal-coatl, the Plumed Serpent, who was returning from the east

to reclaim his throne, as had been foretold, and he was seizedwith panic. He felt his empire melting away like a morning

mist, in the words of Prescott.Another ingredient revolves around the nature of the

New World empires: while they appeared to be mighty andsubstantial, they were in fact very fragile, for they depended

on relentless exploitation of their subjects. The Mexica, weare told, enslaved their neighbors, exacted onerous tribute

from them, and took them captive for ritual sacrifice. Inshort, they were brutal tyrants who were hated throughout

the region. Corts quickly picked up on these divisions andskillfully exploited them. He enlisted the Mexicas disaf-

fected neighbors as allies, and the combined Spanish-Indianforce overwhelmed the already panic-stricken Mexica. His

advisor and interpreter (and mistress) in much of this ven-

ture was the Indian maiden Malinali (generally referred toas La Malinche in Mexico, where the wordmalinchistahas

come to mean traitor).A third element of the traditional story paints the Spaniards

as hardened, pragmatic soldiers experienced in the art of war-fare, while the Indians viewed warfare as a ritual to be fought

according to strict, and greatly limiting, rules of engagement.The Spaniards, in the Indians eyes, broke all the rules and

dove in relentlessly for the kill. Beyond this, the Spaniardsgreatly outclassed the Indians with their superior military

technology:steel swords versus obsidian-edged clubs; musketsand cannon against arrows and spears; metal helmets and

bucklers in contrast to feath-ered headdresses and shields,

according to one historian. Andof course they came with

horses and savage armored

dogs, while their opponentshad no animals to assist them.

In short,the Indians were com-pletely outclassed militarily.

A final ingredient is theEuropean diseases against

which the native peoples hadno immunological defenses.

But this was a late entry intothe historical record and it

played no important role inthe traditional narrative as it

developed initially. Lethal epi-demics of Old World diseases

were described in contempo-rary accounts, often in great

detail, yet historians had paidthem little attention until sev-

eral scholars dredged them outof obscurity in the 1960s. This

revelation, which includedclaims of a catastrophic demo-

graphic collapse among thenative peoples, was at first met

with skepticism, and althoughit has now gained general

acceptance as a rightful pieceof the puzzle, it rests uneasily

amid the other features of theConquest narrative. Many his-

torians have been uncertainabout how to handle it.

EvolvingHistory

The historical record of the Conquest begins with the first-hand accounts of the conquistadors themselves. In Mexico, the

most prominent of these were Corts and Bernal Daz del

Castillo, whoseTrue History of the Conquest of New Spainisgenerally considered to be the most accurate record of the

armed conflict. These accounts are supplemented by docu-ments produced by a succession of Catholic priests, chroni-

clers of different stripes, and assorted bureaucrats within theSpanish imperial system during the early sixteenth century.

A large portion of this material was brought together andsynthesized in the 1840s by the Boston historian William

Hickling Prescott, who wrote the first systematic and com-prehensive histories of the Conquest. Prescott publishedHis-tory of the Conquest of Mexico in 1843 and History of the

Conquest of Peruin 1847. Both books by any measure are


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remarkable achievementsall the more so because Prescottwas legally blind and was never able to set foot in either Mex-

ico or Peru.

He also only had the Spanish side of the story. While theIndians had incipient writing systems involving pictographs

in Mesoamerica and knotted strings (quipu) in the Andes,these were rudimentary in comparison to the European alpha-

bets and were effectively obliterated by Spanish priests in thefirst years after the Conquest. And even if they had possessed

more sophisticated writing systems, its likely that they wouldhave been too confused and distressed to record their thoughts

as they were being sucked into the chaotic maelstrom of theSpanish invasion. Some decades later, Catholic priests trained

a select group of surviving Mexica to transcribe accounts oftheir vanished society in Nahuatl, their native language. But

these codices contain no first-hand glimpses into the militarycampaign. Records exist of what the Spaniards thought the

Indians were thinking, or wanted their readers to think theywere thinking, but these are poor substitutes for hearing

directly from the Indians, and the Spanish accounts are fre-quently self-serving and misleading.

Moreover, Prescott was writing during the infancy of his-toriography, and his works are best seen as fusions of litera-

ture and the first tentative steps toward scientifichistory. Inhis day, he was often compared to the historical novelists Sir

Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, and over the yearsanalysis of his work has been the province of literary critics as


From a series of eight paintings on the conquest of Mexico painted in thesecond half of the seventeeth century by unknown artists, this canvasinkey respects pure fantasydepicts Corts attack on Tenochtitlan.

JayI.KislakCollection,

RareBookandSp

ecialCollectionsDivision,

LibraryofCongress


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ended up highlighting cannibalism andhuman sacrifice, and native society in general

(not just the Mexica) was depicted as cruel,twisted, and generally abominable. In the

late nineteenth century, the educator and

historian Justo Sierra, minister of educationunder President Porfirio Daz, effused: Ah!

Mother Spain, your great shadow is presentin all of our history; to you we owe civiliza-

tion. And in Breve Historia de Mxico(1937), Mexican historian/philosopher Jos

Vasconcelos wrote that Spain destroyednothing, for nothing worth preserving

existed when she arrived in these territories,unless one sees as sacred all of those weeds

of the soul that are the cannibalism of theCaribes [Indians of the Caribbean], the

human sacrifices of the Aztecs, the brutaliz-ing despotism of the Incas.

Similar arguments flowed from the pensof North American historians such as

Hubert Herring and Henry Bamford Parkes,both writing in the 1960s.

A closely associated, if somewhat lessstrident, assertion is that with the Conquest

the Spaniards simply decapitated the indige-nous leadership of the two empires and took

its place, leaving the body (the masses) moreor less intact.In Central Mexico, writes John

Edwin Fagg in Latin America: A General His-

tory(1963),those who accepted Corts in

place of Montezuma paid tribute and permitted Christianmissionary activities and lived very much as before. He adds,

If anything, the new regime was more agreeable than theAztec despotism. This concept, which I remember clearly

from my school days, has had considerable staying power andis still a strong feature in history books. Within these Indian

kingdoms and communities, writes Edwin Williamson in The

Penguin History of Latin America(1992),traditional life went

on much as before, and, having accepted their new masters, itmade sense also to accept their religion.The top of the pyra-

mid had been lopped off, writes Marshall Eaken inThe His-

tory of Latin America: Collision of Cultures(2007), and theSpanish replaced the Aztecs as the rulers of the Mexicans.

TheDiseases

As already noted, until the 1960s historians made no morethan passing mention of disease epidemics in their accounts of

the Conquest. Prescott injects but one brief description of aterrible epidemic, the small-pox, which was now sweeping

over the land like fire over the prairies, smiting down prince andpeasant, and adding another to the long train of woes that

followed the march of the white men. This occurs as theSpaniards are heading for the final assault on the Mexica cap-

ital, and it sounds like a major development, one that wouldhave a profound impact on the entire Spanish enterprise.

Yet Prescott suddenly drops it, leaving it behind like atiny, inconsequential island in the middle of his onrushing nar-

rative of military and diplomatic adventures. When the

Spaniards enter Tenochtitlan and come upon buildings whosefloors are covered with prostate forms of the miserable

inmates, some in the agonies of death, others festering withcorruption; men, women, and children, inhaling the poison-

ous atmosphere, Prescott sees the cause of this appallingspectacle as starvation and dysentery, not smallpox. Later

historians similarly mentioned epidemic outbreaks, especiallyof smallpox, but assigned them little importance.

It is generally accepted today that 5080 million peoplewere living in the Americas in 1492, and that shortly after

this time they suffered a precipitous demographic collapse. Thecollapse radiated throughout the hemisphere, hitting hardest


The Equestrian,likely the worlds largest equestrian bronze, erected in 2007at the El Paso, Texas, airport. Pictured with it are the sculptor, John SherrillHouser, and the associate sculptor, his son, Ethan Taliesin Houser. The origi-nal title of the monument was Don Juan de Oate, icon for The Period ofSpanish Settlement of the Southwest (1598 to 1680). The title and site werechanged after controversy developed about honoring a conquistador. It is one

of 12 monuments planned to commemorate 400 years of El Paso history.

JodySchwartz


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in the tropical lowlands and areas of dense settlement. Fewregions escaped its reach, including remote corners where

Europeans had never set foot.A number of scholars estimatethat 9095 percent of the native population died during the

first century after contact. Others are more restrained, but all

agree that the death toll was immensethe most catastrophicpopulation disaster in human history.

What caused this massive die-off?When the Spaniards laid anchor in the Caribbean they

brought with them a cargo of virulent and utterly foreignpathogens: smallpox, measles, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid,

influenza, whooping cough, bubonic plague, malaria, yellowfever, and others. The peoples of the Americas had been iso-

lated from Eurasia for more than 20,000 years, had had noexposure to these diseases, and were without immunological

defenses against them. Diseases that were generally mild in

the Old World, such as smallpox and measles, became lethalin the New World ecosystem. Soon after they came ashore

they morphed into what epidemiologists call virgin soil epi-demics and began to make the rounds, with disastrous effect.

Community death tolls of 5070 percent in a single passwere common.

The depopulating of the Caribbean islands was well

under way by the end of the first decade of the sixteenthcentury, and the Indians there were virtually extinct by mid-

century. An array of different illnesses was most certainlyinvolved. Smallpox, the most murderous of the lot, reached

the Yucatn Peninsula by 1518 and the Mexica capital in1519, just before Cortss final assault, and the Inca Empire

by 1526, fully five years before Pizarro and his 168 menshowed up. The rulers of both kingdoms died and were

replaced; lesser political and military leaders were alsostricken, along with a sizeable portion of the general fight-

ing force, and in the Andes civil war had broken out betweenthe followers of the two remaining sons of the royal family.

Both regions were in a state of turmoil, and the ground waswell prepared for the Spanish invasion.

And the epidemics did not stop with the Conquest. Theycontinued to rage unfettered, passing through in waves, some-

times arriving in tandem. Before communities were able to

recover from one attack, they were pummeled again,and again.Between 1520 and 1600, at least 14 distinct major epidemics

of various illnesses were recorded in central Mexico, and nofewer than 17 passed through the Andes.Add to these all of the

unreported minor epidemics and assorted Old Worldscourges making the rounds, and we can begin to understand

the unrelenting ferocity of the microbial onslaught.When they struck, the epidemics immobilized entire com-

munities and regions. With the majority of the people infectedand many dying or dead, there was no one to care for the

sick. Children and the elderly were utterly defenseless. Tradi-tional social mechanisms broke down, work in the fields came

to a halt, and crops were left unharvested; trade networks andfood distribution systems were cut. And then came famine,

not because of want of bread, but of meal, for the women donothing but grind maize between two stones and bake it. The

women, then, fell sick of the smallpox, bread failed, and manydied of hunger. And, of course, there were not enough liv-

ing people to dig graves for the dead, so that death itselfassumed the role of gravedigger.Great was the stench of the

dead, recorded the Cakchiquel Mayas.After our fathers andgrandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields.

The dogs and vultures devoured the bodies. The mortalitywas terrible.

AnUneasyFitThe evidence we now have for epidemics and the demographiccollapse of the first century after contact is substantial. Much

of the new information has been mined from the chroniclesof Catholic priestsBartolom de las Casas, Bernardino de

Sahagn, Motolina, and others and the reports of bureau-crats and Spanish landholders complaining about the disap-

pearance of their labor force. The conquistadors, by contrast,barely mention epidemics (Corts, for example, has just two

brief mentions of smallpox, in his third letter to Carlos V) andthis may at least partially explain their absence in the works

of later historians, for history has traditionally been seen as a

chronology of armed conflict and political intrigue, not theactions of microbes. Some historians have suggested that the

conquistadors, with their attention quite understandablyfocused elsewhere, simply failed to pick up on the implications

of the epidemics.The result of the new information is that virtually every

history dealing with the European Conquest and domina-tion of the New Worlds peoples now includes something

about the epidemics and the population decline. Even chil-drens histories and elementary school texts contain short dis-

cussions of these matters. Yet there is considerable varianceregarding the role given disease in the drama that unfolded,

A Mexica illustration showing the effects of smallpox, from Book XII of theFlorentine Codex, created between approximately 1540 and 1585.


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and figuring out how to deal with this has proved difficult.At one end we have William McNeill and Alfred Crosby,

along with a small but well armed band of scholars,who arguethat the epidemics, especially those of smallpox, played a

major if not decisive part in the Spanish Conquest. Absent the

epidemics,neither Corts nor Pizarro would have prevailedand it is likely, Crosby suggests,that Corts would have ended

his days spread-eagled on the sacrificial altar of Huitzil-opochtli, the Mexica Sun God. There would have been no

catastrophic population disaster, and if the Spaniards hadsucceeded in colonizing the New World, it would have been

similar to European colonization inAsia and Africa, with the eventual

withdrawal of the colonizers.Hugh Thomas positions himself

at the other extreme, calling theclaims of Crosby and McNeill

extravagant. For him, the Spanishachieved victory over the Mexica

because of their military and diplo-matic superiority, aided by allies

recruited from among disgruntledneighbors of the Mexica. He esti-

mates roughly 100,000 Mexica killedin the final battle for the city, with

perhaps 100 Spanish soldiers dead.He concludes, The difference be-

tween the numbers of conquistadorsand Mexica dead may be held to indi-

cate the superior fighting skill of theformer. He makes no mention of

smallpox, which was raging throughthe city at the time, and while his

800-page book contains severaldescriptions of epidemics, they are

slim and walled off from the mainnarrative. A similar approach is evident in the works of a

number of other prominent scholars who deal with the Con-quest; they mention the epidemics but assign them little

importance in their narratives, which are dominated by bat-tleground heroics and the political skills of the Spaniards.

Now, one might consider it reasonable to assume that an

army stricken by a disease that kills half its soldiers and sick-ens most of the rest would be seriously impaired in its ability

to fight. One might also reasonably assume that wholesaledeath among the native peoples, where they were dying in

heaps,like bedbugs, as the Franciscan priest Motolina put it,while the Spaniards remained healthy, would have some

impact on the course of events. Might not the decision of theTlascalans and their neighbors to join forces with the bearded

white men whose language was unintelligible to them havebeen influenced by the hope that such an alliance would pro-

vide them with some measure of protection against the unseenand thoroughly mysterious plagues?

We know that the Black Death in fourteenth-centuryEurope, which left a death toll roughly one-third as devastat-

ing as the epidemics of the New World and had a much shorterduration, filled the residents with paralyzing feelings of despair,

anxiety, and flat-out terror. The apparition of Antichrist was

announced many times and in many places, writes PhilipZiegler. Floods, famines, fire from heaven were perpetually

around the corner. The Turks and Saracens planned a descenton Italy; the English on France; the Scots on England. The

major difference, of course, was that while it was only theEuropeans imaginations that were running riot, the Ameri-

cans actuallywerebeing invaded. Would not all of thisthe

phantom, deadly diseases; the breakdown in traditional socialorder; famine; and armed conflict by a handful of resolute

men armed with steel swords and mounted on four-legged

beastshave had a profound influence on the collective psy-che of the native Americans?

The impact of the epidemics was of course huge, buthow might one go about explaining what it was? We have no

solid evidence to argue a case one way or another. The Indi-ans left us no testimony; none of the Spaniards was system-

atically monitoring this particular angle at the time; and inany event, neither the Indians nor the Spaniards understood

where the diseases had come from or how they were trans-mitted. Yet beyond these considerations, historians have tra-

ditionally ignored the effects of epidemics, largely becausethey feel uncomfortable with them. The epidemics are as


Equestrian statue of Francisco Pizarro, in the central plaza of his birthplace,Trujillo, Spain.

Q u i n o k / W i k i m e d i a


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vaporous as mist; they work quietly behind the scenes and outof sight, and pinning down and describing their impact is

essentially impossible. How, for exampl e, would event shave unfolded if no diseases had made their appearance?

We cant begin to answer this question without diving head-long into pure speculation.

In short, the role played by epidemics defies rigorous analy-sis. Discussions of disease and its impact are now obligatory,

but they are generally framed as little more than add-ons thatexist as capsules, insulated from the body of the narrative,

which for most historians remains largely as Prescott createdit. ThomassConquest: Montezuma, Corts, and the Fall of Old

Mexicois essentially an update, with additional sources, of the

work of Prescott,and the epidemics have no particular part toplay in it. There have been no more than a few partial, and not

entirely successful, attempts to integrate this new dimensioninto history books in organic fashion, and many historians

simply ignore it.Yet just because the ravages of deadly epidemics and the

dramatic population disaster elude historical analysis doesntmean that they didnt take place and had no effect , or min-

imaland unstatedeffect. It also doesnt negate the factthat what happened was a human tragedy of monumental

proportions. Disease, of course, didnt account for the entiredeath toll, at least directly, but it made all that followed pos-

sible and even inevitable. The epidemics swept across theAmerican landscape like shock troops, and in their wake came

starvation, the destruction of traditional institutions, and aprofound sense of demoralization and spiritual confusion.

They most certainly influenced the way the different Indiangroups dealt with the foreigners, how they weighed the advan-

tages and disadvantages of becoming allies of the Spaniards.Wouldnt the groups that joined the Spaniards have been

more concerned for their own survival in a world suddenlyturned treacherously lethal than in mounting a full-scale

attack on the Mexica, however resentful they may have been?There is another problem with any project to reconfigure

the story of the Conquest. The traditional, epidemic-free nar-rative served us very well for generations.We all grew up with

it, we learned it in school, and most people in academia and

in the general public feel entirely comfortable with it the wayit stands. Itexplains the Discovery and Conquest of the New

World in a manner that is coherent, elegant, and thoroughlysatisfying, and it is exciting to boota true epic in prose, as

Prescott put it. Can anyone imagine how the story would playin school texts, or on the silver screen for that matter, if the der-

ring-do and heroism of the battlefield, with Corts and hisarmored followers hacking their way through armies of

bronzed warriors with plumed headdresses and obsidian-tipped war clubs, were to be replaced by communities over-

flowing with dead and dying men, women, and childrencovered with suppurating sores and gasping for air?

Indigenous supporters of the government demonstrate against a Santa Cruzprovince autonomy referendum declared illegal by Bolivian President Morales.

BorisHeger/PeterArnold

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ConsequencesYet we must concern ourselves with historical interpretations

of the Conquest. The events themselves are beyond our reach,buttheway weview themis not,and it ishere thatwe are con-

fronted with a long tradition of vilification of the native peo-

ples of the Americas.Beginning with the Spanish chroniclers, historians have

variously described the Mexica and the Inca,and by extensionIndians in general, as defective. They are viewed as weak, irra-

tional, ruled inordinately by superstition, incapable of think-ing for themselves, degenerate, unreliable, untrustworthy,

passive, and fatalistic. Prescotts characterization of Mon-tezuma as a simple-minded coward has been recycled time and

again and has been firmly lodged in our heads as symbolic ofall Indians. Cannibalism and human sacrifice are consistently

brought forth as proof of Indian savagery, and both the Mex-ica and the Inca are portrayed as bloodthirsty and tyrannical,

traits that brought about their downfall. The Indians wereoutclassed on the battlefield, outmaneuvered diplomatically,

and lured from their pagan ways with the more enlightenedChristian religion, as evidenced by the mass baptisms that

harvested upward of 10,000 new souls in a matter of hours(Motolina estimated that he had performed over 400,000

baptisms over the years). Finally, the Indians proved to beinefficient as laborersso weak that they can only be

employed in tasks requiring little enduranceand had to bereplaced with Negroes, a race robust for labor. In other

words, they didnt even make good slaves.Yet the native peoples had evolved an impressive variety

of languages and cultures and levels of development, withtwo powerful and highly sophisticated empires standing atop

a landscape dotted with towns and villages of all sizes andconfigurations. When the Spaniards first descended into the

Valley of Mexico in 1519 they were awestruck. They had neverwitnessed anything even remotely similar. And when we saw

all those cities and villages built in the water, wrote BernalDaz,and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and

level causeway leading to Mexico [Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco], wewere astounded. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether

it was not all a dream. By comparison, Madrid at that timehad fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.

All of this intricate diversity began to unravel with the

arrival of three Spanish ships, and events soon grew into atragedy too great, and too horrific, to be grasped by the human

imagination. The native peoples today have been reduced toethnic minorities mired in chronic poverty. Most of them have

taken refuge in or been pushed into remote regions, out ofsight, where they lack the most basic social services. They are

without political clout and are now being newly overrun bymultinational oil and mining companies, soybean farmers,

cattle ranchers,and loggers. It is,in effect, the Second Conquest.But there is some hope this time around. Indian organi-

zations have sprung up to confront the outside threats and theyhave begun to assert themselves in national politics in key

areas of Latin America.The age of extreme vulnerability to dis-ease has passed and, with the exception of a few of the more

isolated tribes, epidemics are no longer a factor. Their increas-ing involvement in politics has had considerable impact in sev-

eral countries, to the point where non-indigenous elites have

sounded the alarm. The recent election of Evo Morales, anAymara, to the presidency of Bolivia is one sign of a resurgence

of indigenous self-confidence and determination.Certainly, huge economic, political, and economic obsta-

cles still stand in their way. Although Indian peoples are mak-ing progress, the going is rough and they must still contend

with the powerful prejudices and scurrilous stereotypes ofIndians that have accumulated on Latin Americas collective

consciousness like barnacles on the underbelly of an old ship.These prejudices are ever-present in daily life, manifesting

themselves in expressions such as Dont behave like anIndian! when someone behaves stupidly or obnoxiously.

They are also laced throughout the seemingly innocuous his-tory books our children read in school. Just cast a glance

around and you will see them, everywhere.

VisualizingColumbusDay

The traditional image of Columbuss discovery of the New

World shows the Admiral stepping onto land with a flag in onehand and a sword in the other. He is surrounded by his fellow

sailors, some of whom are carrying guns and swords. A friarstrides next to Columbus holding a cross on high. The three

Spanish caravels are behind them, bobbing in the sun-drenchedCaribbean. Observing this triumphal scene are several diminu-

tive, semi-naked Indians hiding in the bushes off to the side.I would like to suggest an alternative image, one that bet-

ter represents what really occurred when the two halves ofthe world came together on the morning of October 12,1492:

Four horsemen spur their steeds off the Spanish ships and

make their way up the beach to high ground. The first horsemanis Pestilence, and he is the most formidable of the lot. His com-

panions are Famine, War, and Death. They pause briefly to sur-vey the landscape stretching out before them, then set off in the

direction of the nearest community. The natives come out, ten-tatively at first, to greet them. They are healthy and well formed,

and they invite the strangers to share their food and whatever else

they might desire.

And that was the beginning of their long and terrifyingjourney through the heartland of the New World

Mac Chapinis an anthropologist who has worked withindigenous peoples in Latin America for over four decades.

He is the co-founder and director of the Center for theSupport of Native Lands, a non-profit organization based

in Arlington, Virginia.


For more information about issues raised in this story, visitwww.worldwatch.org/ww/columbusday .


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The Meaning of Columbus Day

General reading

Books for general audiences dealing with disease epidemics and population in the Americas in 1492 are Guns,Germs, and Steelby Jared Diamond (1997, W.W. Norton & Co.);1491: New Revelations of the Americas

Before Columbusby Charles C. Mann (2005, Alfred A. Knopf); and Stolen Continents: The New WorldThrough Indian Eyesby Ronald Wright (1992, Houghton Mifflin Co.).

Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill (1976, Anchor Press/Doubleday) deals with the role of diseaseepidemics in affecting the course of world history; andEcological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of

Europe, 900-1900by Alfred W. Crosby (Cambridge University Press, 1986) shows the biological basis for thespread of European colonialism, with a focus on the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. An earlier book

by Crosby,The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (originally published in1972, second edition 2003, Praeger), is a classic and contains a revised version of his 1967 seminal articleConquistador y Pestilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires, whichoriginally appeared inThe Hispanic American Historical Review.

Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 14921650by Noble David Cook (1998, Cambridge Univer-sity Press) is a comprehensive run-down of the various diseases that flourished in the Americas after Europeancontact; andSecret Judgments of God: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, ed. by NobleDavid Cook and W. George Lovell (1992, University of Oklahoma Press) contains a useful selection ofarticles dealing with epidemics and their effects in colonial Latin America.

The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, edited by William M. Denevan (second edition 1992,University of Wisconsin Press), and Denevans article The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Ameri-cas in 1492 (1992, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82:369-85) contain populationestimates of the native peoples at the time of European contact. Numbers from Nowhere: The AmericanIndian Contact Population Debateby David Henige (1998, University of Oklahoma Press) provides adetailed, and highly critical, assessment of attempts to estimate pre-Hispanic populations.

Endnote sources

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He called the Admirals landfall.

Message from President George Bush inChristopher Columbus and the Great Voyage of Discovery,JoAnne B. Weisman and Kenneth M. Deitch (Lowell, Mass.: Discovery Enterprises, Ltd., 1990).

the vanguard of the great European Advance

Salvador de Madariaga,Hernn Corts(1941)), quoted in John A. Crow, The Epic of Latin America(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 82.

...Aztecs were mentally deranged...

Maurice Collis,Corts and Montezuma (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 137.

...in the same league with the Nazis....

Miguel Leon-Portilla,La Filosofia Nahuatl (Mexico:Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1956), p.177.

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Then he went on to observe: how easy it would be to convert these people.

Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner (New York: New American Library, 1942), p.43.


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Herethe narrative is transformed into a story that is too startling for the probabilities demanded byfiction.

William H. Prescott,History of the Conquest of Mexico(New York:Bantam Books, 1964 edition), p.610.

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Beyond this, the Spaniards greatly outclassed the Indians with their superior military technology.Robert Ryal Miller,Mexico: A History(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 92.

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Prescott informs us that the Mexica were doomed.

William H. Prescott,History of the Conquest of Mexico(New York:Bantam Books, 1964 edition), p.606.

Yet we cannot regret the fall of an empire,

Prescott, p. 610.

By contrast, his Mexica counterpart is portrayed as dim-witted, vacillating, cowardly, and effeminate, apathetic figure.

Prescott, p. 675.

EvenThe Rough Guide to Mexico.

As an additional example, a recent obituary for the anthropologist William T. Sanders, who specializedin early Mesoamerican civilizations, contains the following comment: In part inspired by reading

William H. Prescotts classic book History of the Conquest of Mexico, he earned his doctorate inanthropology from Harvard in 1957 (New York Times, July 16, 2008).

Pages 12 and 13

The school textbooks they eventually produced.

Enrique Krauze,La Presencia del Pasado(Mxico: Tusquets Editores, 2005), pp. 86 and 87.

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In the late nineteenth century, the educator and historian Justo Sierra.

Quoted in Mara del Rosario Peludo Gmez, Enemigos de la Patria y guerras inevitables: El discursode la identidad nacional en Mxico y Espaa, Instituto Universitario de Inestigacin Ortgega y Gasset,Biblioteca Virtual Espaola, 2006, p. 8.

And inBreve Historia de Mxico(1937).

The same year, respected Guatemalan historian and novelist Salom Gil commented in Historia de laAmrica Central: When the Conquest of America took place Spain was perhaps the strongest and mostadvanced nation in the world. It brought to these countries a religion that was more pure and spiritualthan the idolatry and animal worship that ruled in them, with the odious and barbaric practice of humansacrifice and cannibalism. It brought civil law that it had received from the most cultured and greatnation of antiquity; a sonorous and harmonious language, a civilization, in short, that was a reflection ofGreece and Rome (Coleccin Juan Chapn Tomo I. Guatemala, Julio de 1937, p. 552).

Similar arguments flowed from the pens of North Americas historians

Hubert Herring declares in his A History of Latin America from the Beginnings to the Presentthat Spain


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did not introduce cruelty and war: exploitation was an old story to the Indians. Spain did not destroyhuman freedom: it had never been enjoyed by Maya, Aztec, Inca, or Chibcha [Colombian Indians].Spain did not destroy ancient systems of noble moral standards: the Indians were masters of gluttony,drunkenness, sexual excesses, and refined torture. Spain brought changes to the Indian world, some forill, some for good. It is possible that the Indians of Mexico and Peru had more to eat under Spanishrule, more protection against each other and against their masters, more security of life and happinessthan they had had under Indian nobles and priests (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961, p. 153).

In his enthusiastic introduction to a 1964 edition of Prescotts history of Mexico, Henry BamfordParkes states: it can be agreed that the Spaniards brought to Mexico a higher civilization higher inits technological development, its intellectual and aesthetic heritage, and its political and religious insti-tutions (p. 10).

In Central Mexico, writes John Edwin Fagg in Latin America: A General History.

John Edwin Fagg,Latin America: A General History (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 131.

Within these Indian kingdoms and communities, writes Edwin Williamson.

Edwin Williamson,Penguin History of Latin America(London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 86.

The top of the pyramid had been lopped off, writes Marshall Eakin.

Marshall Eakin,The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures(New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2007), p. 74. Even Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa rolls up his sleeves and steps into the ring withan essay titled Questions of Conquest, published in Harpers Magazinein 1990. He claims that pre-Hispanic Indian society in the Andes was ant-like and similar to a beehive; the masses had a follow-the-leader mentality and lacked the ability to make their own decisions. With the Spanish victory, theytransferred automatically from the Incas to the new masters. (This essay ended up in a collection ofthe best essays of the year, compiled by Joyce Carol Oates: The Best American Essays 1991, New York:Ticknor & Fields.)

Prescott injects but one brief description of a terrible epidemic.

Prescott,History of the Conquest of Mexico, p. 479.

When the Spaniards enter Tenochtitlan.

Ibid., p. 587.

It is generally accepted today that 5080 million people were living in the Americas in 1492.

These figures have been, and still are, debated endlessly by scholars. William Denevan has taken an evenhand in reviewing the conflicting estimates and has come up with this figure; see The Pristine Myth:The Landscape of the Americas in 1492, Annals of the Association of American Geographers(1992)82:369-85; andThe Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed., Madison: University of Wiscon-sin Press. Also see David HenigeNumbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact PopulationDebate(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press), 1998.

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Community death tolls of 50 to 70 percent. and Soon after they came ashore they morphed intowhat epidemiologists call virgin soil epidemics.

See Readings, above.

And then came famine.

Lpez de Gmara, quoted in Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 ,p. 67.


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After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed.

FromAnnals of the Cakchiquels, p. 16, quoted in Crosby 1967, p. 337.

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If they had not made their appearance when they did, neither Corts nor Pizarro would have

prevailed.McNeill 1976, Crosby 1967.

Hugh Thomas positions himself at the other extreme of the argument.

Hugh Thomas,Conquest: Montezuma, Corts, and the Fall of Old Mexico(New York: Simon and Schus-ter, 1993), pp. 741-2; Footnote 78.

He concludes: The difference between the numbers of conquistadors and Mexica dead.

Ibid., pp. 5289.

A similar approach is evident.

See, for example, J.H. Elliott, The Spanish Conquest and Settlement of America in The CambridgeHistory of Latin America, Vol. 1 (Colonial Latin America), ed. by Leslie Bethell (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 149206; Inga Clendinnen,Aztecs: An Interpretation(Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty: Corts and the Conquest ofMexico inRepresentations 33(1991), pp. 65100; and Ross Hassig The Collision of Two Worlds,inThe Oxford History of Mexico, ed. by Michael C. Meyer & William H. Beezley (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 2000), pp. 79112.

The apparition of Antichrist was announced many times.

Philip Ziegler,The Black Death(Gloucestershire, U.K.: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1991), p. 223.

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Finally, the Indians proved to be inefficient as laborers.

Eric Williams, Economics, Not Racism, as the Root of Slavery, inThe Atlantic Slave Trade,ed. by DavidNorthrup (Florence, KY: Wadsworth Publishing, 2001), p. 4. Williams was a prominent politician and histo-rian from Trinidad-Tobago.

And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water

Bernal Daz del Castillo (translated and edited by J.M. Cohen), The Conquest of New Spain(New York:Penguin Books, 1974), p. 214.

Documents

Chapin Columbus Day