History Of American Holocaust: Columbus And The Conquest Of The New World

Kyle Jakubeck
8/18/14
AP US History
Dr. Dohle
American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

Who was Christopher Columbus? Every educated person knows, he discovered America. Well according to history textbooks distributed at schools at least. Actually, America had been discovered by Native Americans thousands of years before. As a result of European colonization in the Americas after Columbus supposedly “founded America,” we lost the incredible variety of cultures and the impressive achievements Native Americans had developed throughout the millennia. When Columbus and a handful of Spanish sailors landed in the Caribbean, this was the beginning of “far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world” (pg. x), and cost more than a hundred million lives in five centuries. “To put this in a contemporary context, the ratio of native survivorship in the Americas following the European contact was less than half of what the human survivorship would be in the United States today if every single white person and every single black person died” (pg. x).
Columbus and the other Spaniards actually caused this genocide through firstly, bringing foreign European diseases into the Americas.
This was not intentional, but it was, rather the start of “The American Holocaust.” The Native Americans, not being Christian and living off different standards than the Europeans, were automatically assumed as inferior. The Europeans forced them into slave labor, which killed off millions of them as they were treated like animals. Little did they know that along with these thought to be worthless people they were killing, they were also killing off many great traditions, cultures and
ideas. How well known is the fact that most Native Americans were living in towns and villages as farmers, long before Columbus and that the majority of Native societies in Northern America were organized democratically, including women’s right to vote, long before such an idea was conceivable to Europeans? The Native Americans were actually had a much more sophisticated society then our history textbooks let on. Unlike European cities of the time, the magnificent capital of the Aztec society had a system of aqueducts that brought spring water to the cities. Unlike popular belief, the cities of Natives also had an amazing cleanliness and order having “at least 1000 public workers employed to maintain the city’s streets and keep them clean” (pg. 5). All of this, along with the culture of these great civilizations is lost forever because of the Europeans. Columbus may not be the hero that most consider him to be due to watered down information about the Americas during this time. Rather, some may compare him to that of Adolph Hitler, due to the damage he did to a respectable population. The Americas lost something that may still have been a big part in the world today if not for the colonization of the Europeans. Contrary to popular belief, the Native Americans played a huge role in what the Americas are today.