People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [374]
Preparations for the quincentennial began on both sides of the controversy. Official commissions, nationally and in the states, were set up long before the year of the quincentennial.
This spurred action by Native Americans. In the summer of 1990 350 Indians, representatives from all over the hemisphere, met in Quito, Ecuador, at the first intercontinental gathering of indigenous people in the Americas, to mobilize against the glorification of the Columbus conquest.
The following summer, in Davis, California, over a hundred Native Americans gathered for a follow-up meeting to the Quito conference. They declared October 12, 1992, International Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People, and resolved to inform the king of Spain that the replicas of Columbus’s three ships, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, “will not receive permission from the Native Nations to land in the western hemisphere unless he apologizes for the original incursion 500 years ago. . . .”
The movement grew. The largest ecumenical body in the United States, the National Council of Churches, called on Christians to refrain from celebrating the Columbus quincentennial, saying, “What represented newness of freedom, hope and opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation and genocide for others.”
The National Endowment for the Humanities funded a traveling exhibition called “First Encounter,” which romanticized the Columbus conquest. When the exhibition opened at the Florida Museum of National History, Michelle Diamond, a freshman at the University of Florida, climbed aboard a replica of one of Columbus’s ships with a sign reading “Exhibit Teaches Racism.” She said: “It’s a human issue—not just a Red [Indian] issue.” She was arrested and charged with trespassing, but demonstrations continued for sixteen days against the exhibit.
A newspaper called Indigenous Thought began publication in early 1991 to create a link among all the counter-Columbus quincentenary activities. It carried articles by Native Americans about current struggles over land stolen by treaty.
In Corpus Christi, Texas, Indians and Chicanos joined to protest the city’s celebrations of the quincentennial. A woman named Angelina Mendez spoke for the Chicanos: “The Chicano nation, in solidarity with our Indian brothers and sisters to the north, come together with them on this day to denounce the atrocity the U.S. government proposes in reenacting the arrival of the Spanish, more specifically the arrival of Cristóbal Colón, to the shores of this land.”
The Columbus controversy brought an extraordinary burst of educational and cultural activity. A professor at the University of California at San Diego, Deborah Small, put together an exhibit of over 200 paintings on wood panels called “1492.” She juxtaposed words from Columbus’s diary with blown-up fragments from sixteenth-century engravings to dramatize the horrors that accompanied Columbus’s arrival in the hemisphere. A reviewer wrote that “it does remind us, in the most vivid way, of how the coming of Western-style civilization to the New World doesn’t provide us with a sunny tale.”
When President Bush attacked Iraq in 1991, claiming that he was acting to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, a group of Native Americans in Oregon distributed a biting and ironic “open letter”:
Dear President Bush. Please send your assistance in freeing our small nation from occupation. This foreign force occupied our lands to steal our rich resources. They used biological warfare and deceit, killing thousands of elders, children and women in the process. As they overwhelmed our land, they deposed our leaders and people of our own government, and in its place, they installed their own government systems that yet today control our daily lives in many ways. As in your own words, the occupation and overthrow of one small nation . . . is one too many. Sincerely, An American Indian.
The publication Rethinking Schools, which represented socially conscious schoolteachers all over the country, printed a 100-page