Category Archives: Columbus Day

Whose Island Is This?

A WALK AND TALK ABOUT WHO OCCUPIED WALL STREET
BEFORE 1491 AND HOW NATIVE AMERICANS
CAME TO BE EVICTED FROM THEIR “ROCKY ISLAND”
With Evan T. Pritchard, author of Native New Yorkers, No Word For Time
and Henry Hudson and the Algonquins of New York


MONDAY, COLUMBUS DAY OCTOBER 8th, 11:00 A.M.

Join renowned author Professor Evan Pritchard (Vassar/Marist/Pace) as he explores the long and sometimes tragic history of lower Manhattan from a Native American perspective. Meeting at 477 FDR Drive (at Grand Street) at 11 AM, Columbus Day, Monday, October 8th, we will be drawn towards Corlears’ Hook as we discuss the massacre which occurred there, then traveling the Corlears’ Hook Trail we cross the famed Tulpehoken (“Turtle Island”) Trail (at Indian Overlook) and learn why it was the backbone of the Algonquin world. After a brief discussion of Algonquin whaling techniques at Fulton Street, we will speculate on whether or not the mastodons had a role in creating the Mohican Trail (now Broadway) as we walk to the place where the Dutch built a wall to keep the Kapsee Indians out of their own village, which the Dutch were occupying until the British invaded. We will learn how British subjects in 1775 captured and occupied City Hall at Wall Street (500 feet from Zuccotti Park) in protest of high taxes. Pritchard will discuss the significance of the First Peach War as we gaze upon the river landing where Hendrick Van Dyke shot a woman chief of the Munsee as she was eating a peach, starting a series of wars, the same site Henry Hudson had twice landed in 1609, 46 years earlier, now known as The World Trade Towers site. We will head back and conclude at 3 PM regardless of our location.

$25 per person, suggested donation, RSVP required.
Email evan.pritchard7@gmail.com, or kmandeville@webjogger.net.
Call Kathleen at (845)417-5430 or Evan at (845)266-9231 to register.

Indigenous Day of Remembrance – Honoring the Ancestors

Indigenous Day of Remembrance

“Honoring the Indigenous Ancestors”
Inter-Tribal Gathering
Sunday, October 7th 2012
12:00 noon – 3:00 p.m.

At Merchants Gate Central Park
59th Street & Central Park South
Sacred Ceremony of Unity and Peace
Guest Speakers
Indigenous Musical Performances
Activists
Please bring a chair or blanket

For more information: 646.648.9809 or iukibuel@gmail.com
http://indigenousdayofremembrance.webs.com/
A B C D or 1 Train to Columbus Circle
Public parking at Time Warner Building

Why We Should Dis Columbus

Some believe we should celebrate Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America. Lost and utterly confused about where he was, Columbus thought he had landed on the South Asian subcontinent of India. Hence he called the people he saw “los indios.”

While Columbus made no real discovery, he was under immense pressure to bring back wealth. His main supporters, the Spanish royals Ferdinand and Isabella, were nearly bankrupt from recent military adventures. Backed up by the Pope’s Law of Discovery, in four successive voyages Columbus claimed all he saw in the name of the Spanish monarchy. He claimed the land, the resources and the people of the “New World.”

This colossally presumptuous act was directly followed by some of humanity’s greatest crimes. After being greeted with gifts and kindness by the welcoming Tainos/Arawaks, Columbus famously recorded in his journal, “They do not bear arms and do not know them…They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” (1,2)

Columbus sought slaves. He captured 1500 Taino/Arawaks and sent 500 of the best physical specimens back to be sold as slaves in Seville. Two hundred died en route. He put the remaining captives to work as slaves in the mines and plantations established by his men. Any resistance was met with summary mass executions.

In this way Columbus initiated not only the genocide of the Indians but also the TransAtlantic slave trade which soon started a similar genocidal destruction of the African people. Untold millions of Indians were killed by European diseases and by the wanton murders of all who resisted.

Columbus’s journals reveal that he was most preoccupied with finding gold. Indians who failed to bring the amount of gold demanded had their arms cut off and were allowed to bleed to death.

This toxic brew of insatiable greed and murder marked the arrival of the modern capitalist world system on the shores of the “New World.”

Columbus’s landings began several trends that continue to poison the US to this day: the racist contempt that underlies US government behavior, both domestic and foreign. The US government incarcerates people of color at far higher rates than it does whites. (3)  The so-called War on Drugs is actually a war on poor people, especially people of color. And the US government – of all political parties – typically lectures the darker nations of the world on the true meaning of democracy as it declares war on them, invades their lands and forcibly seizes their irreplaceable resources, from oil to minerals to agricultural products.

This is not a legacy we should celebrate. To change the world today we need to understand how it developed and how our current problems arose. Understanding and exposing Columbus’s legacy is a vital part of any movement for social change in America.

1. Weatherford, Jack: Examining the reputation of Christopher Columbus.

2.  Zinn, Howard: A People’s History of the United States excerpt

3. Alexander, Michelle: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New Press, 2010.