Early Modern World

 Empires and Encounters

Reading this chapter was a bit different then what I remembered reading in high school or any other history class I have taken in the past years.  I remember several weeks ago our professor had a question regarding Columbus Day.  Something to that affect as: Should we get rid of Columbus Day?  Well according to chapter 14, Native Americans already have objected to this 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the America.  The president, Winona LaDuke, of the indigenous Women’s Network writes: “Columbus was a perpetrator of genocide…, a slave trader, a their, a pirate, and most certain not a hero” (p. 403).  Those are pretty harsh words to say about someone that we have been celebrating his discover for five hundred years.  So then if all what is said about Columbus is true, why and the world would anyone want to celebrate it after all what he and his soldiers did to the Natives.  Are the old history books still being used in elementary school still?  if so, these children are going to have a shock of their life, like we all have.  

As I read on through the chapters, to my dismay, there were 60 million to 80 million Native Americans (precise number remain the subject of debate), living prior to pre-Columbian.  Once Columbus arrives he brought European disease that the Natives not been immune to.  From those diseases around 90 percent of Native American populations were dead.  That percent of have clearly destroyed the whole Native American community for the Caribbean.    Even in Central Mexico the population ended up being 1 million by 1650 from just from all the dieses that the European brought to the Natives.  What got me a bit boiling inside was when I read what Governor Bradford said, “such conditions represent the “good hand of God” at work, “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives… that he might make room for us” (p. 407).  What I would like to read more about him and find out how he died.  I bet those words bit him in his dying years.  I always say, “What goes around, comes around.”

Since there was much Native mortality, it created a labor shortage in the Americas.  The dying of all the Natives did not make room for immigrant newcomers.  They migration of Europeans and African slaves created an entire new societies of people.  Besides bringing their germs, the Europeans brought plants and animals to the Americas.  All of these spread widely in the Eastern Hemisphere, especially potatoes, which brought a huge population growth. 

This exchanged with the Americas reshaped the world economy and in addition, slaves were imported to the America.  The network of communication, migration, trade, transfer of plants and animals is known as “the Columbian exchange”.  When I hear this, to me it should be called “The death exchange.”  The Europeans got most of the reward, because the brought new information which helped lead to the Scientific Revolution, but did all the Natives really had to die in such enormous quantity?  Life and history is so wonderful to learn about, but also painful to know about what people had to endure to get to where we are now.  I wonder what the future student will be reading about us in centuries to come.