As noted here, Worcester Councilor Sarai Rivera has failed (at least for now) in her bid to have a statue of Christopher Columbus removed from the city's Union Station.
Rivera, a Pentecostal Minister, is quoted as having said that, "the statue should be removed because of atrocities and devastation caused for indigenous people in the Caribbean, Central America, and North America."
Rivera identifies as Afro Taina and claims descent from the Taino indigenous people of Puerto Rico. She said she never participated in Worcester's annual Columbus Day Parade.
“I could never go to celebrate someone who committed genocide on my ancestors,” she said, according to the Worcester Gazette & Telegram.
“Columbus is not about heritage. Columbus is about hate,” Rivera said to the council meeting, according to the Boston Globe."
Rivera is obviously no historian. Columbus never committed genocide on any people. This is explained by noted historian Warren Carroll, Ph.D here.
In fact, as Dr. Carroll explains:
"Upon the islands that he first discovered on the other side of the Atlantic, Columbus found native inhabitants, whom he called Indians, believing himself to be in 'the Indies' of Asia. And here began the long and troubled story of Columbus' interaction with the native Americans.
Before going into the historical details of that interaction, it is essential to clear away the fog of idealization and special pleading that now surrounds so much talk about the American Indians. First of all we have to understand the situation that existed in the world of the Indian of the Caribbean and mid-America when Columbus arrived.
It seems to be true, as is so often repeated today, that when Columbus found them, the Indians inhabiting the Bahama Islands, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the great island the Spanish called Hispaniola (now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) were a gentle, happy, attractive people living peacefully in good ecological balance with their surroundings. They were known as Taino, or Arawaks.
But they were not destined to remain in their Eden-like situation for long, even if Columbus and the Spanish had not come. Advancing steadily northward from the long chain of Caribbean islands called the Antilles was one of the most ferocious people in recorded history, the Caribs. They were savage conquerors who practiced cannibalism, not as an occasional cultic ritual, but as a regular diet. Captured prisoners were immediately eaten. Conquered peoples were systematically devoured. On every island they seized, the Caribs soon exterminated every Taino. On no island did the two tribes coexist.
Across the island-studded Caribbean Sea lay Mexico. Though politically and culturally advanced beyond most other Indian cultures, the Mexica had a large army, a well-developed governmental administration, a system of writing, and stone temples, their empire, which we call Aztec, carried out ritual human sacrifice on a scale far exceeding any recorded of any other people in the history of the world. The law of the Mexica empire required a thousand human sacrifices to the god Huitzilopochtli in every town with a temple, every year; there were 371 subject towns in the empire, and the majority had full-scale temples. There were many other sacrifices as well. The total number was at least 50,000 a year, probably much more. The early Mexican historian Ixtlilxochitl estimated that one out of every five children in Mexico was sacrificed. When in the year 1487 the immense new temple of Huitzilopochtli was dedicated in Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), more than 80,000 men were sacrificed, at fifteen seconds per man, for four days and four nights of almost unimaginable horror."
