Word: columbians
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Thus Part I of the anti-'92 crusade is calumny for Columbus and his legacy. Part II is hagiography, singing of the saintedness of the Indians in their pre-Columbian Eden, a land of virtue, empathy and ecological harmony. With Columbus, writes Sale, Europe "implanted its diseased and dangerous seeds in . the soils of the continents that represented the last best hope for humankind -- and destroyed them...
Last best hope? No doubt, some Indian tribes (the Hopis, for example) were tree-hugging pacifists. But the notion that pre-Columbian America was a hemisphere of noble savages is an adolescent fantasy (rather lushly, if ludicrously, animated in Dances with Wolves...
...truth, there is much to censure and correct in the record that begins with Columbus. U.S. textbooks are just beginning to give proper emphasis to pre-Columbian cultures. Sale's iconoclastic biography is as one-sided as a lawyer's brief, but the evidence of European disdain for the conquered Eden and its inhabitants is hard to challenge. Between 1492 and 1514, as a result of disease and accumulated atrocities, the native Taino population on the island of Hispaniola shrank from an estimated 8 million to 28,000. By 1560 the Taino were extinct...
...turning out to be a good year for the Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz. Last spring, to celebrate his 76th birthday, Mexico City's Cultural Center of Contemporary Art staged an exhibition ranging from pre-Columbian artifacts to modern paintings and called the show "Octavio Paz: The Privileges of Sight." Last week the Swedish Academy selected him for a privilege he had reason to believe was out of sight...
...find it hard to imagine such a society, not because it was so cruel -- in that regard, pre-Columbian Mexico was no worse than 20th century Europe with its wars and concentration camps -- but because its cruelty, as Paz points out in his catalog essay, was indissolubly part of its "senseless and sublime" theological and moral system. "The Mesoamerican vision of the world and of man is shocking. It is a tragic vision that both stimulates and numbs me. It does not seduce me, but it is impossible not to admire it." So might some Russian of the 3rd millennium...