The Politics of Remembering

Every year, Jews celebrate Passover to commemorate their ancestors’ deliverance from Egypt. And Christians join them in giving God credit for that deliverance and the subsequent conquest of Canaan. Nevertheless, we squirm when we think of all the men, women, children, and animals who were killed so that Jacob’s descendants might be liberated and the Promised Land purified.

Every year, when Americans celebrate Independence Day, many use the language of Canaan to credit God with bringing forth a new and different kind of nation on this continent. Yet few talk much about the indigenous peoples who were exterminated or expelled as that new nation expanded.

Every year, Italian-Americans enjoy Columbus Day festivities to honor the great Genoese navigator and celebrate the best of Italian culture. Yet in 1992, 500 years after Columbus first set foot on Hispaniola, it will be more difficult to celebrate his day. For while some are planning big celebrations of the quincentenary (a World’s Fair and the summer Olympics in Spain, for example—and even a possible beatification of Queen Isabella), other groups have been decrying any attempt to celebrate the “invasion” of the Americas.

Listening To The Critics

That invasion, most of us know but tend to forget, resulted directly in the economic rape, enslavement, and death of large numbers of native people. Entire cultures—some of them technically and artistically advanced—were crushed. And, indirectly, the oppression and displacement of millions of native Americans and Africans as well as ecological disasters were made possible.

Thus the National Council of Churches has called not for celebration, but for repentance as the appropriate way to mark the quincentenary. And pop-historian Kirkpatrick Sale has lambasted European culture for its preoccupation with “warring against species.”

One tempting response to this criticism is to dismiss it as knee-jerk, multiculturalist liberalism. Yet, noted the Utne Reader, the early complaints about the Columbian quincentenary were not coming from “the usual progressive publications,” but from “grass-roots cultural organizations.” Besides, a charitable attitude and a willingness to learn is always appropriate. So what do we need to hear?

First, the critics have reminded us that history is written by winners. Contrary to what we learned from our school textbooks, the Americas were not an empty wilderness. Native peoples had “discovered America” long before Columbus. But his arrival did open the door for the displacement of peoples and the destruction of cultures.

It is tempting to say: Our ancestors may have killed off the Indians, but that was then and this is now. But there is a second lesson: The conquistadors are a present reality. Particularly in Latin America, the old feudal system lingers and perpetuates the cultural and economic isolation of the native peoples. A statement made at a 1989 gathering of Andean peoples claimed that a major celebration of the European conquest of the Americas would be “a renewed attempt to cover up the colonization and conquest of a continent by force of arms, so that they can continue justifying the political domination of our peoples and nations.” That is the sort of observation that can be made only by people on the underside of the dominant cultural forces.

A third lesson the critics want us to hear is that in displacing indigenous cultures, we have lost a great deal. Some point especially to the relationship that native Americans had with the natural world, and they suggest that if we had learned from pre-Columbian culture, we would not have deforested, strip-mined, and smogged up our land. They blame an imported Christian (though not biblical) theology for much of what has happened.

Getting The Whole Picture

If we were to stop here, it would be hard to imagine we had anything at all to celebrate in 1992. But we need to ask some important questions.

First, how fairly have the critics represented history? If winners write the official history to justify their continued dominance, surely the losers write a version of history that may be used to justify their agenda.

Some native Americans were culturally advanced, peace loving, and sensitive to the needs of the environment. But there were also cannibals and savages among them, and some who raped the earth and moved on. Some colonizers were driven by avarice and valued human life far less than a doubloon. But others, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, were compelled by concern for both the temporal and the spiritual welfare of the natives.

Second, we need to ask, to what degree do we perpetuate the oppression that began 500 years ago? For most of us, complicity in any continuing oppression of native Americans is largely unconscious. While justice demands that we halt the economic and social marginalization of native Americans, it does not require the pursuit of a wilderness utopia or the wholesale restoration of long-lost lands. (Every system of justice knows of a statute of limitations.)

Journalist Jon Margolis writes, “Arguing about whether the European conquest of America was ‘a good thing’ is a fool’s errand. It was an inevitable thing, its cruelties and its glories both.” Whether or not Columbus had sailed to the lands across the western sea in 1492, someone else would have by 1500 or 1510. At that time, writes Margolis, “only Europeans were dynamic, curious and progressive,” and only Europeans were systematically mapping the world. Thus, we need to ask, just what would we expect of Columbus and those who followed him?

The medieval mentality idealized force in the service of true religion. In that mentality, evangelism meant the expansion of Christian political hegemony. The fifteenth-century Spanish consciousness was growing increasingly nationalistic. Imperialism seems historically inevitable. Since sin is the human condition, it is not amazing that Columbus took his pleasure with native women, shipped slaves home (against Isabella’s orders) when he could not send gold, or imperiously claimed America for the Spanish crown. It is remarkable, however, that Columbus was motivated by a love for God and a desire to finance the rescue of the Holy City from infidel hands. It is remarkable that his sense of divine calling survived years of neglect by Isabella, disease, poverty, a mutiny at sea, and imprisonment and ridicule at home.

Saints-In-The-Making

So how are American Christians to respond to the controversy surrounding the Columbian quincentenary?

There is much to celebrate about the encounter between the Old World and the New World. It was the occasion for profound changes in the course of history. For example, without the lowly potato, imported from America, Europe would have starved. And without the horse, imported from Europe, indigenous American art and religion would never have had time off from survival activities to dream and develop. Without vital exchanges such as these, neither group of peoples could have flourished.

But despite all the physical benefits, there is an underlying spiritual dimension that should make Christians cautious. Margolis calls Columbus “the first real American” because he had to know “what was over the hill.” But, says Margolis, the real question is “whether this kind of person must also inevitably want to own whatever lies over the next hill … so strongly that he is prepared to murder the people living there.”

Perhaps we can understand the discovery/encounter/invasion much the way we relate to the Israelite conquest of Canaan, with its slaughter of infants, women, warriors, and animals. We believe God is Lord of history and no Earth-shaking event happens apart from his will. Nevertheless, we know that the redemption of our planet is not yet fully realized. The consequences of sin continue to attend even divinely ordered events.

The lives of some ministers we have known provide a helpful analogy. As evangelists, they have won souls for Christ; and as fallible humans, they have finagled their finances or committed adultery. This might be called the Gantry Principle of History: Every divinely ordered event takes place in the context of sinful human reality. Columbus’s high goals were not unmixed. Economics and evangelism are not always separable.

As some try to paint Columbus as a villain and others as a hero, let us remember that villains and heroes are the crisply outlined icons of cultures and ideologies. God, however, creates saints out of sinners. The line between saint and sinner is not always distinct. Columbus’s humility, dedication, and sense of destiny are models for us. But his craven acquiescence to his era’s cruelty is not. Cultural movements demand heroes and villains, but our Reformation heritage tells us to expect something else instead: the blurred outline of flesh-and-blood saints-in-the-making.

By David Neff, a third-generation Italian-American who missed being born on Columbus Day by a mere 30 minutes.

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