Date posted: 10-15-01

Editors: You are encouraged to use this story in your publication. Please credit the author and DeKalb News Service as shown. And, please send two tearsheets to: Jim Killam, Department of Communication, Watson Hall, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115.

Christopher Columbus: Hero, monster ... or both?

By Ryan Ator

DeKalb News Service

ROCHELLE -- Was Christopher Columbus an American hero or a cruel conqueror driven by greed?

Seventh graders at Rochelle Middle School seem to think he was a hero.

"He was a great discoverer," Anthony Reed said.

"Yes he's a hero, 'cause he proved that the world wasn't flat," Rob Kuehl said.

"He helped find America," said Andy Rogde. "He needs recognition."

"We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him," Ashley Glover said.

Alan Terry, a social studies teacher at Rochelle Middle School, agrees.

"I would call him a hero," Terry said. "He's a watershed personality in world history. After Christopher Columbus, everything changed for people who were in Europe. … I would say he was probably among the most important people in Western Europe in the first 500 years of the millennium."

Gabe Logan, teacher certification adviser for the history department at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, said it is inaccurate to say Columbus discovered America. Africans, Native Americans and the Vikings all had explored North America before Columbus arrived in the late 1400s, he said. Columbus is credited with discovering America, he added, because he left a more "lasting impression" on Europe.

Columbus left another lasting impression, Logan said, and it is not nearly so positive: his relationship with Native Americans.

"Brutal, absolutely brutal," Logan said. "I think Columbus' true claim to fame in history is that he was the man who invented and perfected the trans-Atlantic slave. When Columbus first came to America, he described (Native Americans) as finely bodied people, quick of intelligence, curious about his instruments, and by his third or fourth voyage there he saw the profit that could be made by taking Indian slaves back to Spain."

Logan said Columbus used Native Americans for purposes that "dehumanized" them.

"They were good for collecting gold that he coveted," he said. "The Indians were forced to wear a trinket that showed that they had brought enough gold on a monthly basis to the Spanish conquistadors. If they hadn't, their noses were cut off or their hands were cut off."

Logan believes celebrating Columbus Day disrespects Native Americans.

"It's disrespectful in that it doesn't tell the truth," he said. "It doesn't tell the complete story. …Where he landed on Haiti, his genocide policies make Hitler or Stalin look like a Boy Scout."
Terry went as far as calling Columbus "a monster." But he was also quick to clarify that statement.

"He was a man of his times," he said. "We're judging him as a monster from 2001. He wasn't a monster necessarily to his people in 1492. So we have to be careful what we're doing there."

And, Terry sees nothing wrong with celebrating Columbus Day.

"It honors the Italians," he said. "It also commemorates a man who was a great man of the millennium. He was a guy that because of the attention paid to him and so forth, it focused people on the fact that there was an option to the life that they had. That option was maybe go to the New World and change things. There was an opportunity there. You could get rich there. Now it may not have been true that you could've gotten rich, but people thought that there was a chance for that, so he gave them hope."

Terry said Columbus keyed westward exploration and development. He agrees that Native Americans were treated horribly.

"But nonetheless, because of what he did, and the gold that was found and went back, it caused tremendous incentive for other Europeans to go to the New World," Terry said.

Logan agrees that Columbus is portrayed as a hero in elementary and even high schools. But Logan said Columbus was no hero.

"What he is important for is beginning world domination by Europe and the slave trade," Logan said. "I don't know if you'd consider that heroic."

Still, Terry said, "Christopher Columbus was probably… the greatest man of his time."

So perhaps Columbus was both an American hero and a cruel conqueror driven by greed. One thing is certain: school kids everywhere liked having a day off in his honor.

# # #

Sources
Gabe Logan, NIU : 815-753-5903
Alan Terry and students, Rochelle Middle School: 815-562-7997