http://www.journalstar.com/articles/...f936438266.txt
On Columbus Day, a different view of 'discovery'
BY KEVIN ABOUREZK / Lincoln Journal Star
Only days after 200 Native demonstrators were arrested while protesting a Columbus Day parade in Denver, educators and students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln staged a protest of their own Monday.
It was a different kind of protest. A quieter one.
Devoid of the spectacle of the Denver demonstration — where Natives held banners that read "Christopher Columbus, America's First Terrorist" — those who took part in Monday's protest nevertheless presented a powerful message.
And their message was: Columbus was a murderer of Native people and should not be remembered as the "discoverer" of America, a land already populated when he accidentally found it while searching for the East Indies. "A lot of people just think Native Americans are just being silly and oversensitive about the use of the word ‘discovery,'" said Victoria Smith, a UNL assistant professor of history.
The occasion for Monday's "protest" was a panel discussion and presentations on the "real" history of Columbus held on the UNL campus. The event was hosted by the University of Nebraska Intertribal Exchange and was held to educate people on the historical myths surrounding Columbus' voyages to the Americas.
Among those myths: That Columbus was friendly with the indigenous people he met and had little effect on the small numbers of Natives who existed at the time of his arrival in the New World.
Not so, said Donna Akers, a UNL assistant professor of history.
On the island of Hispaniola, site of present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Columbus was responsible for the systematic murder of nearly nine million indigenous people over the course of 40 years after his arrival there in the late 15th century.
"In less than a normal lifetime, a whole culture was destroyed," Akers said.
She related stories of the cruel and torturous treatment of indigenous people by Columbus.
Stories of infants fed alive to hungry dogs as their mothers watched.
Stories of Natives impaled on swords and thrown down cliff walls with slit throats.
Stories of 70,000 infants lost to starvation and murder in Cuba over the course of three months.
It is a history you won't find in textbooks, Akers said. In those pages, Columbus is a hero.
"That's what we're teaching our children," she said.
James Garza, an assistant UNL professor of history, described how Columbus only came to be seen as a hero during the 19th century as Americans searched for a past of their own.
"He was reinvented to suit the needs of 19th-century nationalism," he said. "It's the sort of simplistic history that ignores reality."
The reality, he said, was that Columbus initiated the genocide of indigenous people throughout the Americas. And that genocide continues today, said Carleen Sanchez, a UNL assistant professor of anthropology and geography.
She cited the assassinations of indigenous leaders in Honduras and the sterilization of female Central American textile workers in recent years.
"We're not here to talk about something that happened 500 years ago," she said. "We can still see the effects of genocide."
Greg Chappelle, a 21-year-old UNL elementary education student, said he never knew the extent of Columbus' cruelty toward Natives.
"I hadn't heard those details before," he said. "I knew he wasn't the greatest person in the world."



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