We spent time on Monday thinking a bit about Christopher Columbus and his national holiday. I began by asking the kids what they already knew or had heard about Columbus. Their responses included:
I don't know anything about him. I don't know about his history.
He did not discover India but discovered a land with people.
He wanted to sail to India by taking the fastest route. He sailed only a little bit of the seven seas.
He asked many kings and queens for money to sail.
He wanted to sail West.
He sailed to some island in America. It was on the Mayflower.
He thought he made it to India.
He called the people there Indians because he didn't know where he was.
After they shared out what they had heard about Columbus we watched a video from the Animated Hero Classics series. This was a twenty-seven minute cartoon showing Columbus as an ambitious child who dreams of sailing. The video then jumps ahead to his time in Spain trying to convince the Queen to give him the money, ships, and crew to sail West to India. Throughout the cartoon the kids stopped to jot down adjectives that described Columbus based on what they were learning from the movie. Here's what they came up with...
As you can see, the video focused on many wonderfully positive traits. It ended with Columbus and his near mutinous crew finally reaching land. He returned to Spain a hero.
After talking a bit about what we had learned I next shared the book Encounter. This picture book tells the story of Columbus' landing from the perspective of a fictional Taino boy who lived there. The illustrations, story, and representation of Columbus are starkly different. This time we learned of the explorers thirst for gold and riches. At the end of the story the boy and a number of his fellow villagers are taken by Columbus' men to return to Spain as slaves. The author's note filled in many gaps for us. We learned there were about 300,000 native islanders before Columbus' arrival and within fifty years that number had been decimated to only 500. Today there are no full-blooded Taino remaining.
I also sampled a few passages from A Young Person's History of the United States. These excerpts explained that Columbus returned to the islands a second time, this time bringing 1,200 men with him to secure gold and slaves for Spain. More than 1,500 natives were taken as slaves. Those who remained were forced to bring Columbus' men gold. If they were unsuccessful (which they often were provided there was little more than gold dust to be found) they were killed. After sharing these two books I asked the kids to generate a list of adjectives, based on these texts, to describe Columbus. Here is their new list...
As you can see, there is a drastic shift. We then considered the question, "Why would these two sources of information share such drastically different information about Columbus?" Here are a sampling of the kids' responses...
I think they thought cartoons shouldn't have anything bad in it. Maybe they thought kids aren't old enough to understand this and it wouldn't be kid friendly. Like if they thought kids shouldn't know bad stuff but only happy stuff.
(another child responding to this...) I understood it. And I think we should know all the stuff because the world has bad stuff in it.
Maybe they thought it's inappropriate. Like when they cut off their hands for not finding gold. But we need to know what happened.
I think the video is trying to make Columbus seem all good. The book is showing that Christopher is not all that great because he brought back slaves.
Because the video people think it should be kid friendly but you should still have what really happened too. So I kind of like that Jane Yolen (the author) wrote it because she thought it was something kids needed to know about.
I think the video was more happy then the book and the book was telling the truth.
Well, I think the reason is in the book some things were "dramatic" or "violent" and stuff like that. Notice I put quotations in the sentence. I think it's not that bad! We're not toddlers!
Well, maybe because both sources believe different things. Or maybe it's just two different sides of one story. Two different people telling the story.
Maybe the person who made the video wanted people to think good things about Christopher Columbus and the person to wrote the book wanted people to think bad things about him.
Maybe they just don't want people to know the bad things that happen in life cause it's gruesome. But really people need to know what's happening in the world. So I just think they don't want people to know bad truth.
In terms of how people felt about Columbus, there were all sorts of opinions. Some believed him to be evil and villainous while others thought he could have been a good person in many parts of his life but not in regards to how he treated the Taino people. However, our point was not to assess Columbus. It was to consider the fact that any history we learn this year will often be told to us from a single source with a single perspective. We'll see this more and more as we progress with our studies.
How do we remedy this?
We look for multiple sources to make sure we are hearing stories (such as the American Revolution, Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement) from multiple perspectives while contextualizing these long ago events in the present-day world we live in. That is the work of a historian!
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