Who Are these Gentle People?

Early in the morning of 12 October 1492, three Spanish ships settled off the beaches of San Salvador, a small island in the Caribbean, and the crew of maritime entrepreneurs scanned the spit of land before them for some confirmation that they had finally arrived at Sipangu (Japan) or one of the other rich isles of the fabled "Indies." If the island proved to be the gateway to the East, then the captain-admiral of the small fleet, Christopher Columbus, and his royal financiers were on the verge of incalculable wealth secured by a state-sanctioned trade monopoly with those who waited on shore. On the island, groups of excited and apparently friendly, naked or near naked people, probably speaking the now-extinct Taino language, also saw something good in the arrival of these strangers from the eastern seas. They waited anxiously to greet the newcomers and exchange items in their own fashion. Within a few years of this idyllic first meeting between European Christendom and what Columbus described as the "gentle people" of the New World, the European explorers would precipitate an international war that now has lasted five centuries and whose violent and often prophetic events have shaped much of the modern world. When Duane Champagne, editor of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal,agreed to a special volume, from an international viewpoint, on the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Peoples, I sought out scholars whose special perspectives might highlight some of the concerns of the world's indigenous peoples. These concerns have yet to be given a voice by the official, international 1992 Columbus commemoration carefully titled "The Encounter of Two Worlds.