What will We do Without Columbus? American History and American Indians after the Quincentennial

Abstract

Many scholars of American Indian history watched with trepidation as 1992 approached. Although the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's landfall was sure to put their cherished subject fairly in the limelight for once, they had good reason to apprehend that serious scholarship might be buried in an avalanche of T-shirts and bumper stickers. At the very least, solid research was likely to be pushed aside by books and films chumed out to catch the wave of popular interest. Certainly, the Columbian Quincentenary had its share of hoopla and drivel, but it could have been far worse, and there was much that was good. During the Columbian Quadricentenary of 1892, the United States celebrated four hundred years of progress, excluded Indians from the ceremonies except as relics of the past, and looked forward to a future without Indians. In 1992, native people and native protests were prominent and persistent, reminding us that they were here long before Columbus, are still here, and intend to be here for the next five hundred years. No longer the unqualified hero of American mythology, Christopher Columbus, in some people's minds, came to personify the evils of Westem civilization. He was blamed for everything from the slave trade to the current ecological crisis. Where one stood on Christoforo Colombo was taken as a measure of one's scholarship, one's political correctness, even one's humanity. But as the strident voices and the furor over tomahawk chops subside, one can hope for results of lasting benefit as the nation confronts some of the hard questions the dissident voices raised. If 1992 was not for most people an occasion for mourning and national flagellation, neither was it a time of unrestrained jubilation. When even the popular media recognizes that American history did not by a long shot begin with Columbus, we are surely better placed to discard some old mythologies, rethink American history as a story of