"Debating Columbus in A New World" by Joel Achenbach in The "Washington Post National Weekly Edition" (October 7-13, 1991, pp. 11-12) Is this about defining the past or the future? History does not know the name of the Discoverer. But he, or she, was probably one of the children of the fisherfolk, some sharp-eyed sprite swimming in the tropical blue water or collecting shells on an island called Guanahani. The Discoverer would have seen, early in the morning, a strange object on the horizon, gradually coming closer. An enormous watercraft. With vast white squares of cloth. The vessel came into the lagoon, and then six large men rowed to the shore in a skiff. They had sickly pale skin, and colorful hair that sprouted from, of all places, their chins and cheeks. They had a hard shiny covering around their bodies. They looked like gigantic beetles. The fisherfolk gathered peacefully, and welcomed these bizarre visitors. The leader, the "Captain General," as he called himself, was unintelligible. Cristobal Colon stepped on land and proclaimed, in Spanish, that this would henceforth be the property of the king and queen of Spain. He asked that his five colleagues bear witness to the deed. One took notes. Three flags were planted in the sand. Then came the cultural exchanges. The sailors gave the "Indians," as they eventually misnamed them, trinkets in return for cotton balls and parrots. One of the fisherfolk tried to pick up a sword and cut his hand on the blade. Colon wrote in his journal that these people clearly had no knowledge of warfare. "They must make good servants," he wrote on Oct. 12 of 1492. Two days later, he wrote to his royal sponsor: "Your Highness may, whenever you so wish, have them all sent to Castille or keep them all captives in the island, for with fifty armed men you will keep them all under your sway and will make them do all you may desire." To Colon, a.k.a. Christopher Columbus, this new land was ripe for exploitation. He figured he was in some islands in the Sea of China, not far from the kingdom of the Grand Khan, or perhaps in the Indies. He didn't care, so long as there were riches to be plundered. He'd already claimed the royal reward for being the first to sight land, even though another sailor, the lookout, had first shouted "Tierra!" Such are the discretions of being the Captain General--soon to be the Admiral. As for the natives, he wrote, "I say that Christendom shall make good business with them, especially Spain, to which all must be subjected." The fate of the islanders, and the fate of all the diverse nations of indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, was to be worse than mere subjugation. If indeed a child had first seen the caravel of Columbus, he or she probably did not live to see adulthood. The "Indians" endured a holocaust, a disease-borne extermination unlike anything since in human history. There were as many as 3 million Tainos on the Caribbean islands in 1492. Within a generation, there were virtually none. In the years leading up to 1892, the 400th anniversary of the "Discovery," there was a movement to canonize Columbus. But he was ultimately deemed no saint. The movement was derailed not because Columbus exploited and abused other human beings, or because his immediate legacy included the creation of a vast African slave trade, or because his vision of these new land was mercenary to the point of rapacity. It was because he had a son out of wedlock. The Quincentenary is a razor-sharp spike rising from the calendar, a hazard by which every thinking person must carefully navigate. It is sheer perverse coincidence that the mega- anniversary for Western civilization is about to pop up right when Western civilization itself, its values and prejudices and dead-white-guy heroics, is on trial. Columbus is in for a rough ride. The Columbus promoters find themselves not so much promoting the man as defending him. "Yes, Columbus was a less than perfect individual. So what else is new?" says Frank Donatelli, chairman of the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission. "Let's not forget the fact that what Christopher Columbus accomplished was possibly the most important thing that had happened to the world since the birth of Christ." "If you put down Columbus, you put down the entire Renaissance," says Anne Paolucci, president of Columbus: Countdown 1992. She says the "wonderful festivities" of the 400th anniversary added up to a "marvelous celebration," but adds ruefully, "This time around, for whatever reasons, suddenly the factionalism, which is a political thing, has reared its ugly head, and now we are faced with a Quincentenary that could easily fall apart." No, not fall apart. But the Quincentenary (or Quincentennial) is going to be messy. Only at great peril of ridicule will any event take on a triumphal, celebratory tone. Columbus is being held up to new, exacting standards, a test of political and moral correctness that will be hard to pass for someone who was not particularly humane even by the standards of the medieval world, someone who once wrote that he had been given "seven heads of women," as though the female Indians were cattle. And this time around the Indians will be something more than mere sideshow attractions, as they were at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, where they were exhibited as objects of curiosity. In one of many planned protests, a group of Indians will sail to Spain and present a list of grievances at the World's Fair in Seville. Columbus, says Alex Ewen, editor of the journal Native Nations and a member of the Purepecha Indian nation of northern Mexico, "was possessed by an ethic of destruction. The idea that people could be property, that the earth could be property, was an idea alien to Indians. We see him sort of like a creature out of science fiction, an alien from another planet who sort of zipped down and imposed a new way of life, against which there has been a guerrilla struggle to this very day." The guerrilla struggle has mainstream assistance. The American Library Association has passed a resolution urging libraries to approach the Quincentenary with materials that "examine the event from an authentic Native American perspective, dealing directly with topics like cultural imperialism, colonialism and the Native American holocaust." The Smithsonian is following the revisionist line by calling the discovery an "encounter." The New World is "the Western Hemisphere." This is not a celebration but a "commemoration." There are backlashes to the Columbus backlash, Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska has attacked the Smithsonian for the institution's first major Quincentenary exhibition, "The West as America," which appalled traditionalists with its dismissive, heavily politicized commentary on the romanticization of the West by 19th century painters. The National Endowment for the Humanities has taken a conservative position, declining to give funding to two TV programs that attack Columbus. Call it the Orthodoxy War. Just as the Indians were stick figures to Columbus, so too has Columbus become a stick figure in the middle of the fight between those who embrace and those who reject Western Civilization. The old orthodoxy holds that Western civilization is self- evidently a great achievement of the human mind, a linear progression from barbarism toward individual freedom and intellectual utopia. Columbus represents enlightenment, liberty, the catalyst for that exceptional nation, the United States. The new orthodoxy claims that western civilization is racist, sexist, imperialist, exclusivist and generally contemptuous of anything that smacks of otherness. Columbus is no longer just a resourceful sailor; he represents the White Man. He is capitalism. He is Eurocentrism. The peculiar thing about all this is that history is already fixed, it has already happened--and yet both sides treat the rigid past as though it were flexible, unshaped, something to be redesigned, something to be won. Perhaps the idea, unstated but implicit, is that whoever controls the past also controls the future. Perhaps the argument is not about the past 500 years, but the next 500. History is a progressive march from barbarism. History is a cruel joke on the meek and powerless. History is ... up for grabs. Ingri and Edgar D'Aulaire's 1955 children's book "Columbus" credits the sailor for figuring out that the world is round. (The truth is that every educated person in the 1400s knew the world was round.) When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, the authors say, "All he could see were naked, red-skinned savages. They threw themselves to the ground and worshiped Columbus and his bearded men. The Spaniards did not mind being treated like gods by these gentle heathens to whom they had come to bring the Christian faith." The book has only two passing references to Spanish greed and nothing about murder or slavery. Columbus's decision to kidnap six Indians and take them back to Spain is described in the most benign of terms: "He had even brought along some Indians to show." Adult biographies are more realistic. The standard volume on Columbus has been Samuel Eliot Morison's acclaimed 1942 opus "Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus." Morison does not hesitate to note that Columbus enslaved and exploited the natives he encountered, but the historian's greater fascination is with Columbus's nautical achievement. At the time, Morison's work was regarded as a daring piece of revisionism, mainly because the previous standard work was Washington Irving's four-part biography published in 1828. The Irving account is still in print around the world, and says of Columbus, "His conduct was characterized by the grandeur of his views and the magnanimity of his spirit." Now, in some circles, even Morison is thought of as an apologist for Columbus. John Yewell, a Minnesota writer, is editing one of the many anti-Columbus books in the works, and the first line of his introduction states flatly. "The United States honors only two people with holidays bearing their names: Martin Luther King Jr., who gave his life combating the legacy of slavery, and Christopher Columbus, who initiated it." Yewell says: "Up until now, trying to write the truth about what Columbus did when he came here, and the outright murder of indigenous people, has been branded as revisionist history. What we hope to do is to put the people who up till now have written about Columbus as a benign sailor of the ocean blue, we want to put them on the defensive, and brand that version of history as revisionist." He adds pointedly, "We're not striving for balance here, by the way, we're striving for truth." This "truth," however, is hardly original. The first Columbus critic was his contemporary, Bartolome de las Casas, a friar who documented and protested the awful process by which the Indian population of the New World was wiped out. Las Casas wrote that Columbus's exploitative behavior "was very far from the purpose of God and His Church." Ever since, there has been vibrant intellectual debate as to whether the cost of the Discovery was worth the reward. Among true historians, there was never much doubt that Columbus and his followers were in many ways unsavory and despicable. Columbus's men were rapists and killers. The conquistadors Cortes and Pizarro were butchers. The debate is still not really about what happened. There's only a debate about what politically oriented people call "spin." The spin has been such that, for 500 years now, Columbus has remained an untarnished icon at the popular level, the level of Columbus Day parades, of children's books, of that George Gershwin song that goes, "Everyone laughed when Columbus said the world was round." If there is a single person armed with more tarnish than anyone else, it's Kirkpatrick Sale. Sale's vitriolic, immensely readable book, "The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy," is the Holy Koran of Columbus-bashers. The book's title is not meant to be merely lyrical. Sale thinks that the New World was a kind of Paradise on Earth, despoiled by Europe. He faults the Europeans for exploiting the natural world rather than living in harmony with it, as the Native Americans did. The New World was just another resource to be mined. This attitude has remained a part of the American culture and contributed to the dire (in Sale's opinion) prospects of the modern, polluted, denatured planet. For radical environmentalists, Columbus began the process of the world's destruction. Europe and its progeny created the Industrial Revolution and thus Global Warming. Sale's view of Columbus is informed by his conviction that the planet is in peril of annihilation. What hath Columbus wrought? Until recently, the biggest Columbus controversy was over whether he was really the first. (He obviously wasn't. It has been well established that, nearly 500 years before Columbus's voyage, Vikings settled for a few years on what is now Newfoundland. Some scholars argue that European fishermen knew of the continents across the sea for many years before 1492 but did not want to reveal the location of their secret fishing grounds. There are even cases made that ancient Phoenicians or Africans first crossed the Atlantic.) But this is all irrelevant. Uncontestably, Columbus's voyages started something big. In the mid-1980s, it appeared that the Quincentenary would be an uncontroversial conduit of hype for corporate America. Adweek magazine called it an "Olympic-sized marketing opportunity." And the U.S. government called it a "jubilee." The Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission was created by Congress in 1984 to coordinate all the Columbus- related events throughout the nation. Seven years later, by February of this year, it had managed to put together only two projects, and the chairman, Republican fund-raiser John Goudie of Miami, resigned after his personal financial dealings were questioned. Goudie was replaced in February by Donatelli. That an Italian American would be put in charge is in keeping with tradition in the United States. Italian Americans are the biggest boosters of Columbus Day. (In the "Old World," it is Spain that leads the hype.) Donatelli quickly realized that, in addition to all the other problems, the commission's board of directors didn't include a single American Indian. "It is clearly an oversight," says Donatelli. "In 1984 this sounded like a good idea, did not seem to be controversial, so I don't think the attention was paid to having a good balance on the board so that everyone who has a stake in the Quincentenary was represented." He promises that a Native American will join the 30-person board. Herman Viola is caught in the middle. Viola is curator of "Seeds of Change," the Museum of Natural History's major offering on behalf of the Quincentenary, a huge exhibition. He wants to avoid friction. His show is carefully scrubbed of any political markings. He has chosen to focus on the geographical transfer of horses, potatoes, sugar, corn and diseases. "I think if you get in a politically charged debate you are going to miss the fundamental issues that we should be talking about," he says. Such as? "A lot of good came out of 1492. We wouldn't be here today." Viola likes to point out that Italian food was prepared without tomatoes before 1492. "Can you imagine Italian cuisine today without tomato sauce?" And: "If it weren't for Columbus, we wouldn't have Swiss chocolate." This detached, scientific view is not going to please either the Columbus bashers or the Columbus boosters. But in many ways it is the most authentic account. Despite all the rhetoric, the conquest of "Paradise" was affected not by Europe's superior technology but by a biological quirk. The Old World had large animals that could be easily domesticated. Those animals transferred diseases to humans. Though the Old World genetic pool became immune to those diseases, there was no such immunity in the New World. The Europeans were killers, but they conquered the diverse and powerful nations of the Western Hemisphere because the indigenous people sickened and died right in front of them. The holocaust can hardly be described as genocide. It was an accident caused by things unseen, by microbes, transferred in an era when no one knew germs existed. Nor did Columbus change merely the Western Hemisphere. The corn imported into Africa led to a tripling of the population there, despite the burgeoning slave trade. The existence of the new continents and of the Indians provoked a philosophical revolution in Europe. There was no place in the biblical explanation of the world for these new, racially ambiguous people. The medieval world disintegrated--the first achievement, one might argue, of what would centuries later be called "multiculturalism." The rejection of modern America requires a kind of intellectual surgery in which society is carefully tweezed apart into incompatible and confrontational elements. The idea of the "melting pot" is considered reactionary; it robs people of their ethnic heritage. "The history of the past 500 years demonstrates a commonality of oppression and also resistance on the part of all the minority groups," says Sanford Berman, a Minnesota librarian who helped draft the American Library Association letter on the Quincentenary. Berman says the Quincentenary is a protest opportunity for many groups, not just Native Americans. He runs down the list: African Americans can point to Columbus as the catalyst for the New World slave trade; Asian Americans came to America as exploited, underpaid laborers; working-class people have suffered from the greed of capitalists who emerged from the European economic system; Jews and Moslems have a special interest in 1492 because that year they were expelled from Spain as the Catholic monarchs solidified their rule; and so on. But what about people who don't fit those categories? What about "European Americans," as whites are sometimes labeled? "I think white or European American people, no matter what their station, need at some level to recognize that they have been the beneficiaries of a racist system, if you will, an exploitative system, that has over these 500 years oppressed people of color," Berman says. In other words, whites can feel lucky, and guilty. The irony is that a few decades ago the liberal agenda was based on the belief that people were similar and deserving of equal rights regardless of their skin color or national origin or religion. Now the liberal agenda, or at least the multiculturalist appendix, requires that everyone be labeled by race, ethnicity, sex, economic, status, sexual preference, religion, etc. Everyone can thereby be categorized as either oppressor or oppressed. Who you are matters less than what you are. Perhaps the biggest danger of multiculturalism is that, when adopted by previously conservative institutions, it might become simply dull. In the hands of a fire-breather like Kirkpatrick Sale, multiculturalism is intensely provocative. But in the hands of an institution that wants to make everyone happy--and the Smithsonian did tone down the wall plaques in "The West as America" after critics made noise--multiculturalism can turn into the blandest of ideologies, little more than a census of opinions in which the only ambition is to go around the room and let everyone talk for five minutes. The glorious concept of "inclusiveness" becomes not the means to an end, but the end itself. The idea of Difference can become fetishistic. Even the peoples of the so-called Old and New worlds were not so terribly different as one might expect. They were eons apart biologically--isolated from one another for at least 10,000 years, probably much longer, and yet they independently developed agriculture, astronomy, mathematics. Both hemispheres had great empires. Both had wars. Both had environmental catastrophes caused by such misguided human practices as excessive irrigation of cropland. It is true that many natives in the Western Hemisphere were peaceful, but they were not incapable of violence. Columbus left 39 sailors on the island of Hispaniola after the Santa Maria was shipwrecked. All were killed by natives (probably with good reason, say many historians). The historian Doug Foard, who edited the special Quincentenary edition of the Magazine of History, says that although Europe conquered the new lands, "Does that mean there's something fundamentally flawed in the European character? I think it just means that given this great disparity of power, people can be very cruel to each other." It's human nature, he says. And he adds, "I don't think human nature has changed very much." Perhaps it is also human nature to fight over the meaning of history, to try to impart the spin that best serves the interest of your own kind. The people hurt worst will fight hardest. For Suzan Shown Harjo, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian nations, a woman who grew up on a reservation in Oklahoma, who hauled water from a well and burned kerosene lamps for light and used an outdoor john, who saw her people suffering from poor diets and high rates of disease and suicide--for her, the Columbus quincentenary is not just an abstract debate. "We're not talking about being a skunk at someone's tea party or spoiling someone's parade. We're talking about life-or-death matters," she says, sitting in her office at the Morning Star Foundation on Capital Hill. What Harjo wants is fundamental: She wants to be treated as fully human. She points out that Indians are still treated as archaeological artifacts, their bones dug up and exhibited in museums; tons of human remains are kept in storage in the Smithsonian. She is tired of her people being used as brand names, like the Jeep Cherokee or the Winnebago. She is appalled that Washington's football team is called the Redskins, the most derogatory name for her people. She is slightly annoyed that Kirkpatrick Sale, a "European American," has gained so much attention for presenting the Indian viewpoint. "People aren't being authentic when they're telling other people's stories," she says. There is also the nagging fact that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is in the Interior Department, the agency that handles inanimate resources, like National Parks and offshore oil deposits. "We are always where the nonhumans are," she says. "That's what we're up against, the entire perception that we aren't human." A perception that goes back to that first day, long ago, on the shore of the island called Guanahani. "We're beginning in 1991 to mark the Quincentenary of 1491, which we call the last good year," she says.