{"id":1752,"date":"2017-10-12T21:00:13","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T01:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1752"},"modified":"2017-10-12T21:00:13","modified_gmt":"2017-10-13T01:00:13","slug":"response-columbus-west-myth-noble-savage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2017\/10\/response-columbus-west-myth-noble-savage.html","title":{"rendered":"My Response to “Columbus, the West, and the Myth of the Noble Savage”"},"content":{"rendered":"

My most recent article, \u201cColumbus, the West, and the Myth of the Noble Savage<\/a>,\u201d elicited a quite surprising response from a friend that took me off guard.<\/p>\n

Although no one with whom I shared this article raised a single syllable\u2019s worth of an objection to any of the facts that I stated, she proceeded to note that, though my thesis is true, it didn\u2019t justify the virtual elimination of the \u201cNative American\u201d \u201cas a people\u201d from the Earth.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, some counter-replies are desperately needed here.<\/p>\n

(1)Logically and substantively, this response to my essay is the ultimate non sequitur: I never so much as hinted that the perennial warfare in which the indigenous peoples participated against each other justified any kind of ill treatment on the part of Europeans, much less the effective \u201cgenocide\u201d mentioned in this criticism. \u00a0My<\/em> thesis, which I will not restate but again, was entirely different in meaning, and there is no logically defensible way to get from it to the dastardly conclusion that genocide was morally permissible.<\/p>\n

In fact, not that I should have needed to do so, but I explicitly<\/em> stated that none of the facts to which I alluded were intended to either deny or justify any of the injustices suffered by the original inhabitants of what would become the Americas.<\/p>\n

(2)Another claim that I made is that those who have long been referred to as Indians did not see themselves in the monolithic terms that we speak of them in today.\u00a0 They comprised numerous tribes or \u201cnations,\u201d most of which were mutually antagonistic.\u00a0 It is indeed telling that some tribes allied with Europeans in their battles against other tribes.<\/p>\n

(3)To speak of the land that we now call the Americas as having originally belonged<\/em> to the Indians is to speak anachronistically: It is to project onto the foreign peoples of yesteryear quite contemporary, incorrigibly Eurocentric categories that are simply not applicable.\u00a0 It is to be guilty, in other words, of precisely that which the Columbus despisers insist is among European civilization\u2019s gravest sins: Imperialism<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The conventional line that we <\/em>(Europeans) took their <\/em>(Indians\u2019) land is the product of the colonizer\u2019s, the imperialist\u2019s, brain.<\/p>\n

This landmass that we <\/em>call the Americas was sparsely populated.\u00a0 Indians inhabited relatively little of it. The rest was wilderness.<\/p>\n

And, again, they were no more \u201ca people\u201d than were the English and the Spaniards a single people.\u00a0 The indigenous saw themselves as peoples<\/em>, mostly enemy peoples of one another.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the concept of \u201ca natural right to private property\u201d is a European specialty. Did the Iroquois think that they were violating the private property rights of their enemies when they invaded the latter\u2019s camps, abducted their women, laid waste to their homes, and scalped them alive?\u00a0 I don\u2019t mean to suggest that there isn\u2019t some right to property rooted in natural law; rather, my point is that if there is an \u201cinalienable\u201d right to property, the Indians certainly didn\u2019t give any indication that they were aware of it.<\/p>\n

To be clear, a person no more manifests awareness of a right to private property in defending what he views as his or his tribe\u2019s own than the gazelle manifests awareness of a right to life by attempting to flee the ravenous lion seeking to devour it.\u00a0 The insistence that this territory belongs<\/em> to me and\/or mine emphatically does not translate into everyone<\/em> has a natural right<\/em> to property.<\/p>\n

If indigenous peoples were conscious of a right to property, then they would have recognized the wrongness of raiding the goods of others.<\/p>\n

By the way, isn\u2019t the left forever assuring us that the idea of property rights<\/em> is a culturally-specific, namely, a Eurocentric construct?<\/p>\n

(4)Regarding this last point, not all Indians were forcefully moved from their lands. \u00a0Some most definitely were.\u00a0 Yet there was much bartering and trading going on between Europeans and Indians as well.<\/p>\n

While there was plenty of tragedy, there is no basis in fact for regarding the whole European encounter with Indians as one grave injustice, much less genocide.<\/p>\n

(5) The idea that Europeans committed genocide against a whole race of people, nearly exterminating them from the planet, is as big a fiction as that of the Noble\/Peaceful Savage.\u00a0 In fact, the former depends upon the latter.\u00a0 To repeat, Indian numbers were kept down not just by way of warfare with Europeans, but warfare with one another. Also, the bulk of casualties stemmed from diseases that indigenous peoples contracted from Europeans.<\/p>\n

These points having been made, it is high time to put to rest once and for all the Big Anachronism at the very heart of the debate over Columbus:<\/p>\n

Columbus did not discover<\/em> America.\u00a0 And he most certainly didn\u2019t invade<\/em> America.<\/p>\n

There was no<\/em> America before the Europeans, beginning with Columbus, began creating<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

America was named after another Italian (European) explorer: Amerigo Vespucci.<\/p>\n

If monuments to Christopher Columbus need to be razed and the name of his holiday changed because of what he (supposedly) represents to the descendants of indigenous peoples, and if these perpetually aggrieved activists who make these demands had the courage to follow their logic through, then they would concede that the name of America <\/em>itself needs to be changed because of what it <\/em>must signify to these same peoples.<\/p>\n

The Columbus despisers would recognize that the label of \u201cNative American\u201d is even more offensive than that of \u201cIndian,\u201d for it is inescapably Eurocentric, affirming, paradoxically, the legitimacy of the Europeans\u2019 founding, the rightness of naming the continent(s) after the European Vespucci.<\/p>\n

To see the self-defeating moral and historical idiocy here, we need only consider the following analogy.<\/p>\n

Imagine if Jews had been the predominant population of Israel from the Biblical period straight through to, say, World War II.\u00a0 Now, further imagine that Hitler invaded Israel, renamed it Hitler Land, and decimated many, but not all, of the indigenous (Jewish) peoples.\u00a0 While we can imagine this scenario, we cannot <\/em>imagine that these Jews (or their descendants) would eventually self-regard as \u201cNative Hitlerians\u201d and charge Hitler and his Nazis with having invaded\u2026Hitler Land<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s hoping that everyone had a very happy Columbus Day!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My most recent article, \u201cColumbus, the West, and the Myth of the Noble Savage,\u201d elicited a quite surprising response from a friend that took me off guard. 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