Howard Zinn's Story Of Columbus Through The Arawak

Although they dressed well with various types of feather earrings and gold necklaces and earrings, they did not hold any value on gold or any other type of precious things they had. Whereas, the Spanish wanted gold because of money and this lead to them treating the Indians horribly so that they would become their slaves and help find them more gold to send back to their kingdom. The Arawak people were beaten to death, hung and endured other types of torture because the Spanish wanted more gold, but there was only a limited supply of gold on the land they were living on. Thus, this lead in many casualties of the Arawak people, and numerous Indians were later sold into slavery and brought to Spain, where they would endure even more hard labor

In order to prove that the Arawak people were being abused by the Spaniards, Zinn uses sources from both Christopher Columbus and Bartolome De Las Casas. Zinn talks about Las Casas because he had the only information on what happened after Columbus met the Arawak people. One example that Las Casas states that Zinn brings up to display the cruelty of the Spanish people was “Las Casas tells how ‘two of these so-called Christians net two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.’ ”.4 This quote alone gives the reader the proof that the Indians were mistreated horribly and that this changes how we should view Columbus and the Europeans in the New World. Thus, Zinn basically explains how numerous people’s viewpoints on Columbus are being warped into thinking Christopher Columbus was a heroic adventurer who did not cause any bloodshed, when in fact, he and many Spaniards killed and captured numerous Arawak people because of their greed for conquest, slavery, death, and the most precious of them all,

I would give his story of Christopher Columbus and the New World because I felt he approached this topic fairly well and his sources were reliable and credible. I learned about Christopher Columbus in high school and was also exposed how Christopher Columbus is not the heroic adventurer we all make him to be and learned how he mistreated and imprisoned numerous Indians because of greed. I feel like this description made by Howard Zinn is accurate and I would agree with Zinn’s approach compared to other history books I have read. The reason I would agree with Zinn and his approach because I feel his approach accurately depicts what happened and by using sources from Christopher Columbus and Bartolome De Las Casas it helps showing two sides of what happened to the Indians. Bartolome takes on the side of the Indians, whereas Christopher Columbus takes on the side of the Spanish