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June 18, 2010
 
The American / European Encounter

Back in 1992, people celebrated Columbus Day on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the Americas.

However, Columbus ended up devastating the Taino people who welcomed him with open arms. Columbus believed their generosity to be a sign of complicity and desire to have their "savage" ways civilized. Over the next century, millions of natives died from slavery, war and plague. The Taino people are now extinct. This is not something worth celebrating.

In fact, there are few America/European encounters worth celebrating. Carl Sagan in the television miniseries "Cosmos" describes an encounter between French traders and the Tlingit people where no one was harmed and only goods and good words were exchanged.

The true first known encounter between Americans and Europeans occurred almost exactly 1000 years ago, give or take a decade, and it was not a peaceful encounter.

Sometime probably between 1000 and 1020 CE, Leif Ericson and his crew were the very first known Europeans to land in the Americas. They built a very small settlement on the coast of what they called Vinland, which now is probably Newfoundland, and lived there for about a year, through a mild winter. They were driven off when it was discovered that despite the bountiful land, including wild grapes and rivers full of salmon, the place was already inhabited.

Local natives, whom the Vikings called "scrailings" (essentially "savages") raided the settlement one night and killed Leif's brother Thorvald, whom they also scalped, flayed, and hung from a tree as a warning. American Homeland Security began right around 1000 years ago in Newfoundland or Massachusetts with a brutal reminder to the Europeans not to ever come back.

Ericson and his crew retreated to Greenland and Iceland, never to return. White men did not set foot in the Americas again for almost 500 years, and they didn't set foot in the American northeast for over 600 years afterwards.

Columbus Day is usually observed either the second Monday of October or October 12th, while Leif Erikson Day is observed on October 9th. I recommend we observe, on the weekend just before Columbus Day, the Weekend for the Americas, an international and multicultural celebration and remembrance gathering, to remember the misunderstandings of different cultures, and to honor the suffering and joys these interactions have caused for our ancestors and ourselves over the last millennium.