Article: 963 of sgi.talk.ratical
From: (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: 500 years ago: January 16, 1493--beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Keywords: "his"tory grinds on in the grey matter.
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 15:56:44 GMT
Lines: 116
The Atlantic slave trade began 500 years ago this month. Columbus's own
diary entries speak volumes about the world-mind he brought with him when
he came to Turtle Island:
"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and
many other things which they exchanged for the glass beads and
hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned....
They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features....
They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a
sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of
ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane....
They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could
subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with
their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would
believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say
no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He
concluded his report by asking for a little help from their
Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage
"as much gold as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask."
He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord,
gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent
impossibilities."
-- Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States," from chp1
Oren Lyons described it very well in a speech he gave in LA in october of
1990:
. . . nothing got wild here, the west didn't get wild until the
white man got here. And then it got very wild. And so what we had
was a clash of values and perceptions. So when our Chiefs talked with
these men, these leaders, who we met from another hemisphere, their
discussion didn't mesh, they passed one another. They weren't talking
about the same thing.
So when they sold the island of Manhattan, or, shall we say, when
the Dutch "bought" the island of Manhattan, the Indian said, `I wonder
why he's giving us all this, because it's free anyway. But he's a
nice fellow so we'll take it and we'll share this with him too.'
So the next year as the Indian came back to hunt and fish in this
great hunting ground Manhattan was . . . there was a fence and they
said `What's that?' They said, `Well that's the fence, I have just
bought this land.' And they said, `What do you mean, "bought"?'
And so began the conflict.
This conception of private ownership--of property, of the blood and sinew
of Mother Earth, of people, of life, of ideas--came from the euro-centric
world-mind. This kind of mentality is not only destructive, it is
devolutionary. It is NOT appropriate. The indigenous mind operates from
the basis of "Is it appropriate?" The euro-centric mind has only ever
asked "Is it possible?" In our species' present collective memory, such
a world-mind did not exist here on Turtle Island as it did across the
Atlantic prior to 1492. What a truly radical "way of life" was operative
here as of 1492 compared to what had been happening on the european
continent for millenia. The descendants of those people and that "way of
life" still exist and endure here. They still struggle to live by their
ancient, sacred precepts and teachings. How MUCH people like myself with
a euro-centric upbringing can learn and come to understand and appreciate
by teaching ourselves all we can about this more balanced and connective
way of being and sharing. We must all begin to reconnect with the
practice--in a daily manner--of asking the question "Is is appropriate?"
This will open us up to and reconnect us with the intelligence of the
heart and will offer our species the most potent healing opportunity to
again be aligned in a positive, constructive manner, with our infinite
potential to transcend our own self-created and self-learned limitations
and boundedness. There are an infinitude of dimensions of being beyond
this physical time-space world we have been taught to regard as being
"all there is." The ability to conceive and be aware of such dimensions
comes through reconnection with the intelligence of the heart.
Our opening to a fuller humanity closes before we even discover it really
exists, leaving us with an empty longing projected onto myths and dreams.
Yet, as you will see, we can, with a bit of effort, confound this neural
deadlock and open to this highest development. And though its inception is
designed by nature for mid-adolescence, we can make this turn at any age. .
. . Once we are in line with evolution's intent, we have that intent's
power behind us, access to other modalities opens within us, fear and anger
disappear from our life and nothing is the same. . . .
-- Joseph Chilton Pearce, "Evolution's End," p. xviii
-- ratitor
from NativeNet:
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 14:07:07 CDT
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From: NativeNet%gnosys.svle.ma.us@tamvm1.tamu.edu
Subject: 16 January 1493 (Atlantic slave trade)
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Hugh Danforth
Wisconsin 1992 Alliance
2120 University Ave., Apt. 324
Madison, WI 53705
608-233-4448
The Atlantic Slave Trade
On January 16, 1493 when Christopher Columbus began his return
journey to Spain after his first landing in the Americas in October
of 1492, he carried with him in his ships Taino captives.
On October 12, 1492 when Columbus arrived he was greeted by the
Tainos. Although he said they were "very well built, with very
handsome bodies and very good faces," he also thought they were
inferior, poor and technologically backwards. He wrote "they ought
to make good servants," and he offered to bring some of them back
with him so they could "learn to speak." He also felt "they would
easily be made Christians, because it seemed they had no religion."
According to Kirkpatrick Sale, author of "The Conquest of Paradise,"
"No clothes, no arms (modern weapons), no iron, and now no
religion--not even speech: hence they were fit to be servants and
captives. It may fairly be called the birth of American slavery."
Columbus saw the Tainos as a group of people that would be
regularly sent to Spain or held captive on the island, "because
with fifty men all of them can be held in subjection and can be
made to do whatever one might wish."
Columbus returned to the Americas in November 1493 with 17 ships
and 1200 colonists. In February 1494 several dozen Carib captives
were put aboard the first returning ship to Spain. In February
1495 when more ships were to return, 1,600 Tainos were rounded up
and, according to Kirkpatrick Sale "550 of them `among the best
males and females'*, were loaded in chains." The others were
given to "whoever wanted them". The elimination of much of the
indigenous population through genocidal destruction led to the
beginning in 1505 of the shipping of Africans to be used as slaves
in the Americas. In four decades, millions of native people in the
Caribbean were wiped out and when slavery finally ended in 1870,
according to John Noble Wilford author of the Mysterious History of
Columbus, "nine to ten million blacks were forced to migrate to
America as slaves."
And where did it all begin? It began the day Columbus stepped on
shore in this hemisphere and made an entry into his journal; an
idea; and put this idea into motion January 16th, 1493. This
January 16th, 1993 will be the 500th anniversary of the start of
the Atlantic Slave Trade.
*Michele de Cuneo, a Ligurian nobleman on the second voyage
--
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet deprecate agitation are people who want crops without
plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.
That struggle might be a moral one; it might be a physical one; it might
be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes
nothing without a demand. It never did and never will. People might not
get all that they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for
all they get." - Frederick Douglass, Abolitionist