person,” wrote George P. Horse Capture, “can celebrate the arrival of
Columbus.”^90 Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not
American history.
Columbus’s conquest of Haiti can be seen as an amazing feat of courage and
imagination by the first of many brave empire builders. It can also be
understood as a bloody atrocity that left a legacy of genocide and slavery that
endures in some degree to this day. Both views of Columbus are valid; indeed,
Columbus’s importance in history owes precisely to his being both a heroic
navigator and a great plunderer. If Columbus were only the former, he would
merely rival Leif Eriksson. Columbus’s actions exemplify both meanings of the
word exploit—a remarkable deed and also a taking advantage of. The
worshipful biographical vignettes of Columbus provided by most of our
textbooks serve to indoctrinate students into a mindless endorsement of
colonialism that is strikingly inappropriate in today’s postcolonial era. In the
words of the historian Michael Wallace, the Columbus myth “allows us to
accept the contemporary division of the world into developed and
underdeveloped spheres as natural and given, rather than a historical product
issuing from a process that began with Columbus’s first voyage.”^91
We understand Columbus and all European explorers and settlers more
clearly if we treat 1492 as a meeting of three cultures (Africa was soon
involved), rather than a discovery by one, and several of the new books do
this. The term New World is itself part of the problem, for people had lived in
the Americas for thousands of years. The Americas were new only to
Europeans. Discover is another part of the problem, for how can one person
discover what another already knows and owns? Textbook authors are
struggling with this issue, trying to move beyond colonialized history and
Eurocentric language. Boorstin and Kelley begin their first chapter with the
sentence, “The discovery of America”—by which they mean Columbus’s
—“was the world’s greatest surprise.” Five pages later, the authors try to take
back the word: “It was only for the people of Europe that America had to be
‘discovered.’ Millions of Native Americans were already here!” Taking back
words is ineffectual, however. Boorstin and Kelley’s whole approach is to
portray whites discovering nonwhites rather than a mutual multicultural
encounter. Indeed, they are so Eurocentric that they don’t even notice they left
out “the people of Africa and Asia” from their sentence of people who had yet
to “discover” America.