Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 15, 1991 TAG: 9104130451
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GARRY ABRAMS LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Snapped awake by visions of a world-class public relations disaster, Columbus dashes to the helm and orders his three tiny ships to turn home toward Spain. One day short of immortality, Columbus abandons the discovery of America to another day and another explorer.
If it had really happened that way, a lot of people might have a more peaceful 1992.
But it didn't, and next year, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landfall, promises to be about as serene as an alley cat fight over fish heads. Or a weekend with Saddam Hussein.
From the harsh highlands of Bolivia to the post-modern jungles of Manhattan, the powerful symbolism of the anniversary is spurring assaults on the heroic image of the world's most famous explorer. The goal of the anti-Columbus forces is to portray him as the spark for centuries of slaughter and environmental destruction that left American Indian peoples with only tatters of their rightful heritage.
Although the battle will not be fully joined for almost a year, opening shots have already been fired in the struggle over the Columbian legacy. Early skirmishes indicate that American Indians and other activists here and in Latin America will wage a sort of guerrilla war against ceremonies honoring the meeting of the Old and New Worlds. Anti-Columbus groups are planning counterdemonstrations, compiling how-to manuals for staging their own protests and drawing up lists of demands regarding reparations and land claims.
These forces will try to erase long-ingrained perceptions of Columbus as a daring mariner, a perception embedded in the education of generations of schoolchildren.
But the odds may be against the anti-Columbus forces - they will compete with a host of global government-sanctioned events marking Columbus' first voyage to the New World. After all, the discovery is too big to ignore, say defenders of the observances. For good or ill, Columbus' landing on a Caribbean island permanently enlarged the world and changed the course of history in one monumental stroke.
"We have a responsibility to recognize great events whether we like them or not," says UCLA's Norman Thrower, the geographer and cartographer heading up publication of "Reportorium Columbianum," an ambitious 12-volume compilation and translation into English of source materials related to Columbus.
In fact, the anniversary has become a magnet for almost any group that can stake a claim to the Columbian legacy, no matter how peripheral. By one count, Columbus commemorative commissions have been set up in at least 30 countries, 39 states and 100 cities.
Billions will be spent on ocean-spanning pomp and pageantry as these and other groups seek their moment in the semi-millennial spotlight. The most traveled and telegenic of these celebrations will be copies of Columbus' three ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, now under construction in Spain. Following Columbus' route, they will sail across the Atlantic and visit several U.S. ports.
Not surprisingly, the biggest backer of Columbus observances is Spain, whose rulers financed Columbus. That country will be the site of a world's fair honoring Columbus as well as the Summer Olympics in 1992.
The Spanish government also has established the Spain '92 Foundation in Washington to coordinate a wide range of events in this country, including "the Honeymoon Project," described as "a succession of visual arts projects revolving around the symbolic marriage" of the statue of Christopher Columbus in Barcelona and the Statue of Liberty in New York.
Although they may not be able to compete with such spectacles next year, some anti-Columbus forces are striving to eventually have the last word about the Columbian legacy.
"There seems to be a tremendous interest out there in rewriting history, especially among Native Americans," says Jack Weatherford, author of "Indian Givers," an account of the broad and deep Indian contributions to North American and Latin American culture that has sold more than 100,000 copies.
Last year Weatherford, an anthropologist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., got a taste of the support Columbus still commands when he wrote a newspaper opinion article calling for the abolition of Columbus Day. Among other things, Weatherford argued that Columbus sparked a transoceanic slave trade that was an "evil enterprise all the way around" and that the explorer "never hit the North American continent."
"Lots of people were ticked off about that [article]," he says, recalling the angry letters that poured in, denouncing him for portraying Columbus in anything less than flattering terms.
But Weatherford also was struck by the number of anti-Columbus groups that seem to be springing up spontaneously around the country, including one in Montana that has styled itself Submuloc, or Columbus spelled backward. The group says its name symbolizes "the reversing impact of Columbus on the indigenous way of life."
Elsewhere, too, there are plenty of signs that disaffection with Columbus is widespread:
Last summer about 300 Indians and allies from throughout the Americas gathered in Quito, Ecuador, for the "First Continental Meeting of Indigenous Peoples - 500 Years of Resistance."
A Guatemalan Indian at the conference declared: "These 500 years have meant nothing but misery and oppression for our people. What do we have to celebrate?"
Reports noted that the conference voted to send a 500-member delegation to Spain in 1992 to demand reparations for the Spanish Conquest.
In the United States, spokesmen for Indian groups say that they may try to disrupt some ceremonies, particularly when replicas of Columbus' ships visit American ports on their voyage from Spain. The chief tactic apparently will be counterdemonstrations by Indians in canoes. Organizing meetings have been reported around the country, from Manhattan to San Francisco. In New York, Indians are publishing a magazine, Native Nations, about their ripostes to the quincentennial.
A major early literary broadside was unleashed by environmentalist Kirkpatrick Sale, whose "The Conquest of Paradise" portrays Columbus' landing and subsequent behavior as the model for later explorers who plundered the New World for gold and set in place a civilization that committed genocide and "ecocide" against the natives and their environment.
If there is a manifesto for the anti-Columbus movement, Sale's book probably is it. Aside from blaming Columbus for fathering exploitative, enslaving colonialism, Sale paints the navigator as a man to be loathed for his personal qualities - ignorance, superstition, insensitivity, greed, dishonesty and authoritarianism.
Sale's Columbus took little interest in the natural marvels he found, merely describing "big and little birds of all sorts" and noting that he saw "many trees very different from ours."
Published last fall to mixed reviews, the book has gone through three printings and has put him in demand on the lecture circuit, Sale says.
But although it does much to debunk Columbus, "The Conquest of Paradise" also reminds that Columbus' historic importance cannot be denied.
For centuries that historic moment and the man who made it were celebrated lavishly and adored uncritically, Sale notes. Columbus the intrepid explorer was lionized in countless histories, biographies, novels, movies, paintings, school pageants and expositions. His name went on streets, buildings, holidays and historical periods.
by CNB