suffered: the trans-Saharan trade collapsed, because the Americas supplied
more gold and silver than the Gold Coast ever could. African traders now had
only one commodity that Europe wanted: slaves. In anthropologist Jack
Weatherford’s words, “Africans thus became victims of the discovery of
America as surely as did the American Indians.”^89
These vast changes were given the term “the Columbian exchange” in 1972
by Alfred W. Crosby Jr., in his book of that title. In the 1990s the term caught
on, owing to the quincentenary. Not one textbook in my original sample told of
these geopolitical implications of Columbus’s encounter with the Americas,
but gradually the concept seeped into American history textbooks. Today most
books credit American Indians with having developed important crops.
Authors also recognize that Europeans (and Africans) brought diseases as well
as livestock to the Americas. The two-way flow of ideas, however, still goes
unnoticed, especially from west to east.
Instead, Eurocentrism blinds textbook authors to contributions to Europe,
whether from Arab astronomers, African navigators, or American Indian social
structure. By operating within this limited viewpoint, our history textbooks
never invite us to think about what happened to reduce mainland Indian
societies, whose wealth and cities awed the Spanish, to the impoverished
peasantry they are today. They also rob us of the chance to appreciate how
important American Indian ideas have been in the formation of the modern
world. Thus, they keep students from understanding what caused the world to
develop as it has—including why Europe (and its extensions: the United
States, Canada, etc.) won.
Some people have attacked the portrait of Columbus presented here as too
negative. But I am not proposing that we should begin courses of American
history by crying that Columbus was bad and so are we. Textbooks should
show that neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by
history. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts
and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more
complicated than that.
Again we must pause to consider: Who are “we”? Columbus is not a hero in
Mexico, even though Mexico is much more Spanish in culture than the United
States and might be expected to take pride in this hero of Spanish history. Why
not? Because Mexico is also much more Indian than the United States, and
Mexicans perceive Columbus as white and European. “No sensible Indian