[IPSM] Columbus Day: Celebrating a Holocaust

[Stefan Christoff]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:56:19 -0600
From: Yolanda Fobister <yolanda_fobister at hotmail.com>


I received this a while ago and didn't want to forget the message. It made
me think about the children in my family, and how I couldn't stand to have
this happen to them.

Columbus Day: Celebrating a Holocaust
Brenda Norrell - Indian Country Today
Oct 10, 2004

DENVER - While Americans celebrate Columbus Day, American Indians
remember one little toddler who played on the quiet banks of Sand
Creek, until the morning in 1864 when the American soldiers came.

''Then, as one of the cavalrymen later told it, while his compatriots
were slaughtering and mutilating the bodies of all the women and all
the children they could catch, he spotted the boy trying to flee,''
wrote David Stannard in ''American Holocaust.''

''There was one little child, probably three years old, just big
enough to walk through the sand,'' wrote a Calvary man.

''The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind
following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked,
traveling on the sand. I saw one man get off his horse, at a distance
of about seventy-five yards, and draw up his rifle and fire - he
missed the child. Another man came up and said, 'Let me try the son
of a bitch; I can hit him.'

''He got down off his horse, kneeled down and fired at the little
child, but he missed him. A third man came up and made a similar
remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.''

Stannard, board member of the new American Indian Genocide Museum
being established in Houston, said the most massive act of genocide
in the world followed the arrival of Columbus in the Americas.

''The danger lies in forgetting,'' said Elie Wiesel, in a book of
oral histories of the Jewish Holocaust.

''Forgetting, however, will not effect only the dead,'' Stannard
said. ''Should it triumph, the ashes of yesterday will cover our
hopes for tomorrow.

''To begin, then, we must try to remember.''

When Columbus first sighted land on Oct. 12, 1492, the American
Indian Holocaust began. The Spanish were driven by their lust for
gold and silver and the English fueled by their desire for property.
Christians killed with zeal those they believed defiled with sin.
Spain needed labor and set up missions in order to convert Natives.
The English, however, did not bother. Their goal was exterminating
the Indian race.

''Just 21 years after Columbus' first landing in the Caribbean, the
vastly populous island that the explorer had re-named Hispaniola was
effectively desolate; nearly 8 million people - those Columbus chose
to call Indians - had been killed by violence, disease, and
despair.''

Within a handful of generations, following their first encounters
with Europeans, the vast majority of indigenous peoples in the
Americas were exterminated.

Overall, 95 percent were obliterated.

''What this means is that, on average, for every 20 Natives alive at
the moment of European contact - when the lands of the Americas
teemed with numerous tens of millions of people - only one stood in
their place when the bloodbath was over.''

While remembering the millions that were tortured, enslaved, murdered
and eliminated by spread of diseases, Stannard said it is important
to remember that each was a sacred and treasured human life.

Putting a human face on the Indian people who died, like the little
boy whose remains were mangled at Sand Creek, Stannard said life
should be remembered, as one reads of the Jewish Holocaust and
horrors of the African slave trade, because the genocide has never
stopped.

The Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States
observed that 40,000 people simply ''disappeared'' in Guatemala
during the 15 years preceding 1986. Another 100,000 were openly
murdered.

''That is the equivalent, in the United States, of more than 4
million people slaughtered or removed under official government
decree - a figure that is almost six times the number of American
battle deaths in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean
War and the Vietnam War combined.''

Almost all the dead and disappeared were Indians, direct descendants
of the Mayas. Still today, indigenous in the Americas are tortured
and slaughtered, their homes and villages bombed, while more than two-
thirds of their rain forest homelands have been intentionally burned
and scraped into ruin.

Hispaniola was only the beginning.

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