Columbus: A Perpetrator of Genocide (a Native American view)

by Chris Mato Nunpa, PhD
retired professor of History at Southwest Minnesota State University and author of the upcoming (Sept. 2019) The Great Evil: Genocide, the Bible, and the Indigenous People of the United States

Back in October of 1947, I entered first grade at the Granite Falls Public Schools, Granite Falls, Minnesota, USA. This is when I first heard about a man named Christopher Columbus. As far as I can remember, I never heard my father or mother mention this person. When one of my teachers talked about Columbus, she taught us a poem which began, “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” This is a line that I have remembered, now that I am 78 “winters” on. The teacher taught us that Columbus “discovered” America. The second thing I remember is a picture of Columbus on the shore with a cross. In my mind, I thought, “Columbus must be a Christian. So, he must be a good man.” The Christian missionaries had taught us Dakota children, in the late 1940s, that Christians are good people because they are serving God, and that the cross was good and sacred. The white man’s educational system did, and does, very efficient teaching, or indoctrination, or brainwashing, along with help from his religious theology system, and the missionaries.

Later, as I grew up and became educated, I discovered that the things which I heard and learned not only in first grade in 1947, but also in the other grades up to 1959 when I graduated from high school, were mostly lies. Columbus DID NOT DISCOVER America, and that there were approximately 16 million, if not more, Indigenous Peoples already here in the continental United States. Columbus may have been the first western-European to make it to the Americas and even there, there is some debate about that. The other thing I learned was that Columbus was a bad man, a very bad man – that he and his soldiers killed millions of our Native Peoples on the islands of the Caribbean Sea. Columbus was a Genocidaire, a perpetrator of Genocide. This Genocide of the Native Peoples began what I call “The Great Evil,” which I discuss at length in my book of the same name, The Great Evil (Wosice Tanka Kin): Genocide, the Bible, and the Indigenous Peoples of the United States, to be published in September 2019.

Let me provide an incident which illustrates the cruelty and brutality of Columbus and his soldiers. In the course of Columbus’ making of war, what the Spanish called “pacification” to describe their campaign of terror and killing against the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Las Casas, a Catholic missionary, witnessed an event. And I quote:

Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties, the more cruel the better, with which to spill blood. They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen natives at a time in honor of Christ our Saviour and the twelve Apostles.

Note that Las Casas mentions that the Spaniards hanged and killed thirteen Native Peoples at a time “in honor of Christ out Saviour and the twelve Apostles.” In the upcoming book, The Great Evil (for September 2019 release), I’ll provide many specific Bible verses that were quoted by the killers of Indigenous Peoples in hundreds upon hundreds of genocidal massacres in the first four centuries the invaders, stealers, killers, and destroyers were here — the 1500s, the 1600s, the 1700s, and the 1800s.

Here are a few of the genocidal actions that were perpetrated against the First Nations Peoples of the Caribbean: using “ferocious dogs that had been trained to kill and disembowel”; Columbus’ troops “went wild, stealing, killing, raping, and torturing natives”; “would test their swords and their manly strength” on captured Indigenous Peoples by “slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow”; “cutting off of hands” of Native Peoples if they did not bring in their quota of gold; tearing “babes from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks” (see Psalms 137:9, KJV); the soldiers would “rip open the bellies, to cut and kill those lambs – men, women, children, and old folk”; etc. In twenty-one years, 8 million Indigenous Peoples “had been killed by violence, disease, and despair” (compare with the more than the 6 million Jews killed by Hitler and his Nazis in WWII. These examples and information can be found in David Stannard’s book American Holocaust (1992, pp. x, & 69-72).

Let me quote a few comments from Dr. Ward Churchill:

As a symbol, Christopher Columbus vastly transcends himself. He stands before the bar of history and humanity, culpable not only for his deeds on Española, but, in spirit at least, for the carnage and cultural obliteration which attended the conquest of Mexico and Peru during the 1500s. He stands as exemplar of the massacre of Pequots at Mystic in 1637 . . . His spirit informed the policies of John Evans and John Chivington as they set out to exterminate the Cheyennes in Colorado during 1864, and it rode with the 7^th U.S. Cavalry to Wounded Knee in December of 1890 . . . .  (A Little Matter of Genocide p. 92)

The arrival of Columbus began the period of “The Great Evil,” or Wosice Tanka Kin (a Dakota phrase), which has lasted for the past 526 years. In that period, 16 million people have been murdered in the continental United States, and anywhere from 110 to 125 million slaughtered in the Americas primarily by U.S. Euro-Americans and western Euro-Americans. Stannard writes, “The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world (Stannard, American Holocaust, p. x).

Columbus was an evil man.