DO YOU REALLY KNOW ABOUT CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS?

There was nothing trivial about Columbus’ violent destruction of Taíno people. While the sailor and his crew are sometimes lumped in with all the other conquest-crazy Europeans of their era, their particular cruelty can’t be so easily exonerated and shouldn’t be ignored.

Natives were regularly whipped for what Columbus considered minor offenses — but stealing a vegetable or animal could result in cutting off a Taíno’s nose, ear, or hand; the offender was sometimes forced to walk around with their severed body part in shame. Columbus took and gifted Taíno women to his crewmen, who would violently beat and rape them. Pregnant Taíno women who were taken captive gave birth to babies who were sometimes thrown to hungry dogs. Columbus established a business in the sale of 9- and 10-year-old Taíno girls for sexual slavery. He also kidnapped and enslaved Taínos themselves — personally initiating the transatlantic slave trade in his voyage back to Europe.

In short, Columbus was a murderous, enslaving, sexual-abusing, treacherous colonizer to the peoples he encountered in the Caribbean. Only two-thirds of the Taíno survived just four years after Columbus’ arrival; some were killed, others succumbed to diseases, and fully half of the dead killed themselves rather than live with his tyranny.

Columbus was also responsible for creating a system in which Taíno land was treated the way Taíno women were. Not that the Taíno didn’t resist: Columbus left behind 39 colonizers in the first European settlement in the Americas, which he called La Navidad, in present-day Haiti. When he returned from Spain several months later, he found that all the Europeans were dead. That didn’t stop him; Columbus’ practice of settling on other peoples’ lands in the Americas sparked the European imagination, and those lands would soon be the backbones of empires.

What followed was centuries of oppression — to the human beings who lived there, and to the land they lived on. Spain cleared land for massive tobacco plantations, beginning a long process of deforestation and soil erosion. After France came into possession of Haiti, it cleared even more land, and brought in enslaved Africans to cultivate sugar to satisfy European palates. The first place Europe settled in the Americas also became the first place that successfully revolted against it — but the destructive practice of monocropping for overseas consumption had already taken hold.

We shouldn’t forget that Columbus is responsible for launching an ecocide as well as a genocide. The wealth from resources like sugar, tobacco, and cotton ushered in the start of the Industrial Revolution, which began emitting carbon at an unprecedented record level.

I refuse to celebrate Columbus Day!