Happy Genocide Day!
By 
Everyone have a Happy Genocide Day (observed) today. 522 years ago, Christopher Columbus arrived in Hispanola. The terrible treatment of Native Americans began almost immediately.
On Christmas night, his biggest ship, the Santa Maria sank on a harbor of the island. With its remnants, Columbus built the fortress of the Navidad. He left thirty-nine men at the fortress and sailed to Spain on January 16, 1493 taking with him six Taino captives and a cargo of parrots, plants and gold. The purpose of Columbus’s second voyage was to colonize, control and exploit the island. His goal was to bring to the Spaniards “as much gold as they need…and as many slaves as they ask.” His fleet thus comprised 17 ships and 1,300 men as well as 20 horsemen to terrorize the native people.
When Columbus returned to Española, he found that the thirty men he had left on the Navidad were all dead, killed by the Indians after they had invaded the kingdom of the Maguana governed by the intrepid Caonabo. Guillermo Coma who had accompanied Columbus wrote that “bad feeling had arisen and had broken out in warfare because of the licentious conduct of our men towards the Indian women, for each Spaniard had five women to minister to his pleasure.” Columbus then built a new town, Isabella, forty leagues east of Navidad, near the river where Pinzon had found gold in the Cibao. After Isabella was built, Columbus set out for the gold mines of Cibao with his horsemen and infantry. Several forts were built on the way, especially in the plains of the Yaque River, which he named Vega Real. During their invasion of the interior of the island, thousands of Indians were killed. By the end of 1494 the Taino were in open revolt. Columbus had hoped to put down the resistance by kidnapping Caonabo the chief of the Cibao region and making an exemplary spectacle of him.
Columbus sent troops to occupy the north east of the island and had more forts built in the Cibao region. He immediately instituted a system requiring a quarterly tribute in gold from the Taino, which was calculated according to the number of people over the age of fourteen. He introduced Indian slavery suggesting that it would be lucrative enough to compensate for the meager supply of gold found. In 1495, he and his men went on a raid in the interior of Española capturing as many as fifteen hundred Taino, men, women and children. Columbus picked the 500 best specimens and sent them to Spain. Two hundred of these five hundreds Taino died en route to Spain. Columbus’s reaction was to exclaim: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
Columbus and his brother Bartholomew as well as Alonso de Hojeda undertook a series of military expeditions all over the island. Villages that could not pay the tribute imposed on the Taino were brutally repressed. Las Casas charged that two thirds of the population was thus wiped out. On July 22, 1497 the Crown authorized the distribution of lands to the Spanish colonists (Repartimiento) to sow grain and plant gardens. This land was designed to encourage permanent Spanish settlers in Espanola who were expected to establish small farms with Spanish labor. Columbus on the contrary instituted a Repartimiento where native communities were allocated to Spaniards for their own use. This system was the first concrete measure to colonize and annihilate the Taino population of Española.
Highlights of European-indigenous interactions in what became the United States include Juan de Oñate chopping off the feet of the Acoma, the Puritans committing genocide against the Pequot in 1637, Nathaniel Bacon massacring friendly Indians in his campaign against William Berkeley in 1676, the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, the Dawes Act in 1887, Wounded Knee in 1890, the repression of indigenous languages and cultures at the Indian Schools, termination in the 1950s, and well, the list could go on and on and on.
But it’s Columbus Day because that guy was awesome.