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