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One of the most striking things about Christopher Columbus's letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella is the casual way in which he suggests conversion to Christianity and genocide.
It evinces more than just a convenient strategy. It demonstrates a culture, a way of life that seems intrinsic to what we now recognize as the European or Western point of view.
Dr. Joy DeGruy's work deals with the axiology of European culture, revealing that it begins as adversarial to nature and extends that relationship of hostility outward to everything it encounters.
(axiology definition: the study of the nature, types, and criteria of values and of value judgments especially in ethics)
It views everything as zero-sum, dog-eat-dog, and scarce, which inspires insatiable avarice and malice as a matter of course, as a matter of simply existing. It doesn't interpret these behaviors as evil (it isn't critically self-reflective of this behavior at all)...
...but as normal, as sensible, as the very wages of being alive and human.
What's most frightening about this letter is how it continues to define European axiology more than 500 years later. Europeans have, in fact, become even more adept and sophisticated at deploying its pathologies globally--
--whether through the use of technology, advanced weaponry, and a plethora of conversion tactics including economics, politics, and religion, among others.
Aside from terrifying, it's fascinating to observe how Europeans have persuaded their prey to abandon their own ways of being in favor of European standards.
They watch as we, on behalf of Europe, engage in the self-destructive features that they use to have to do with their own hands, but no longer have to lift a finger.
Wherever in the world Europe has been, wherever its residue remains, a carefully calibrated and cultivated chaos and catastrophe is left in its wake.
James Baldwin prophesied here: "You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself."
What's also instructive about Columbus's letter is how it demonstrates the base European response to kindness and peaceful gestures.
It finds them foreign, unintelligible, strange, unusual, suspect, and appalling; an amusing, but disgusting sign of vulnerability that deserves European wrath rather than their thanks.
And we still see this today: at Standing Rock, at Mauna Kea, at the Southern Border of the United States, at Black Lives Matter protests, anywhere in the world where the racially marginalized attempt to assert our right to liberty...
we see our peaceful gestures met with rancor and a call for our blood.
So this makes me wonder: What is the point of peace in the face of a people who only see it as an invitation for war?
And where does that leave us, the strategically divided and conquered? So successfully divided and conquered that we remain so all these many centuries later.
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day.
