[On Valentine’s
Day, I gave a Fitchburg
State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to
Define America. These histories and stories couldn’t be more important
to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some
of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual
non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American
history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a
crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]
On an easily
overlooked exclusion in a letter that helped originate far too many of them.
Given that in
this January 2017 post I compared Christopher Columbus’s perspective and
voice in his famous February 1493 letter from the Americas back to his Spanish
ally and backer Luis de Santangel to those of none other than Donald Trump,
it’s fair to say that I’ve already made my opinion on Columbus and his letter
pretty clear. Moreover, for this past fall’s Columbus Day I had the chance to
contribute to Bryan
Brown’s really interesting Junior
Scholastic magazine article on “Challenging
Columbus,” and made the case there that in this letter
specifically, and in many of his initial choices and actions overall, Columbus
helped the stage for (if he did not indeed directly originate) such horrific
atrocities as genocide and slavery. For example, Columbus begins one paragraph
in the letter “I understood sufficiently from other Indians, whom I had already
taken, that this land was nothing but an island” a clear reflection of his
willingness to kidnap and use native peoples for his purposes of exploration
and conquest.
So it’s fair to
say that Columbus’s letter is exclusionary in some central and sweeping ways.
But it’s just as exclusionary in seemingly smaller aspects of its language and
perspectives, ones that I would argue also helped originate particular ways of
thinking about the Americas and our cultures and identity that have likewise echoed
down across the subsequent centuries. I would focus especially on a crucial
turn of phrase in the letter’s opening paragraph, where Columbus is describing
his voyage and initial encounter with “the Indies” to Santangel. He writes, “And
there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of them all
I have taken possession for their highnesses, by proclamation made and with the
royal standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me.” In the sentence’s
first clause Columbus directly acknowledges the existing native peoples (and
indeed just how many of them there are), but in its second clause he literally
elides their identity as separate cultures; the fact that it’s not clear
whether he means the islands or the people or both with the phrase “of them all
I have taken possession” is, to my mind, precisely the point. These innumerable
people are just part of the landscape, at most an inoffensive obstacle to be
overcome in the taking of that setting for Spain.
That attitude of
course made the horrific histories of genocide and slavery that much easier to
both perpetrate and justify. But I would argue that it also contributed to less
aggressive but also destructive effects such as the development of the Vanishing
American narrative. As I have written in posts such as this
one, the concept of the Vanishing American was even adopted by reformers
who imagined themselves to be “Friends of the Indian,” as a way to mourn the
destruction of Native American cultures but see it as both inevitable and (by
the 19th century, at least) largely completed and past. Adopting
that narrative depended in significant measure on linking Native Americans to a
broader American past, seeing them as a part of the continent and hemisphere’s
origin points rather than its ongoing and evolving present and future identity.
That perspective overtly excludes Native Americans from contemporary definitions
of America, and makes it far more difficult to consider their stories and
voices, communities and identities, in our own moment. And like so many other
destructive attitudes, we see that form of exclusion in Christopher Columbus’s
initial response to the Americas and their cultures.
Next
anti-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?
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