Seattle Replaces Columbus Day With Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Christopher Columbus was a genocidal maniac who is celebrated annually for “discovering” a land that was already inhabited by a people he would go on to enslave, torture and kill.

On that basis, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously Monday to do a holiday swap.

The second Monday in October will now be known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and it will honor first Americans rather than first conquistadors.

A contingent of Italian Americans was on hand at Monday’s meeting to protest. Columbus may have been Italian, but so was Benito Mussolini. This Italian-American blogger would just as soon we not celebrate the worst of our ancestors.

Here then, to send him off, is a remembrance of Christopher Columbus, written by Howard Zinn in his “A People’s History of the United States:”

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the day they were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.” Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

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— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer