Noam Chomsky interviewed by Heinz Dieterich
Excerpted from Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization, Ocean Press, 1999 [October 1989 and March 1992]
QUESTION: 1992 is the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. Official celebrations speak of the “fifth centenary of the discovery of America” and of the “meeting of two cultures.” Are these appropriate ways to refer to this event?
CHOMSKY: There’s no doubt that there was a meeting of two worlds. But the phrase “discovery of America” is obviously inaccurate. What they discovered was an America that had been discovered thousands of years before by its inhabitants. Thus, what took place was the invasion of America — an invasion by a very alien culture.
QUESTION: So, indigenous peoples are correct when they refer to it as the “conquest” or the “invasion”?
CHOMSKY: Obviously. One can discover an uninhabited area, but not one in which people live. If I travel to Mexico, I can’t write an article entitled “The Discovery of Mexico.”
QUESTION: Is October 12, 1492, a date that should be celebrated? [This is commonly accepted as the date of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas].
CHOMSKY: Well, I do think that people should pay attention to it; it is an extremely important date in modern history. In fact, there are few events in modern history that have had such formidable implications. In statistical terms alone — which don’t often say much about reality — a century and a half after the conquest almost 100 million human beings had disappeared.
It is difficult to think of comparable events in human history. The effects of the conquest did, of course, dramatically change the Western hemisphere and, as a result, Western civilization. Thus, it is undoubtedly a very important turning point in world history. Nevertheless, “celebrate” is a strange word. I don’t think that we would “celebrate” Hitler’s coming to power, for example, even if we certainly do pay attention to it.
QUESTION: When Columbus reached the Western hemisphere, he called the inhabitants “Indians” because he thought he was in the Indies. Five hundred years after this geographical error was clarified, these people are still being called “Indians.” Why?
CHOMSKY: Well, I think that this reflects the general contempt for indigenous peoples. If they didn’t really have any right to be where they were, it also would have mattered little what they were called. The conquerors equally could have called the animals that they found here by the wrong name and no one would have been overly troubled by it.
The situation varied throughout the continent. So, for example, in areas where the English settled or where English is spoken today, the unwritten law in force in England was imposed. According to English law, the inhabitants of these lands didn’t have a right to them because they where hunter-gatherers rather than a sedentary people. This was completely false. And many other falsifications of events took place in order to render them compatible with the law. Up until the 1970s, for example, distinguished anthropologists informed us that we should reject archeological and documentary evidence which clearly showed that these were sedentary peoples and, by their own standards, relatively advanced civilizations. On the contrary, we were to pretend that they were hunter-gatherers and that, therefore, there were few people, maybe a million north of the Rio Grande, instead of 10 million or more, which was the real figure.
And if the question is asked why for centuries these falsifications were made, the answer is, basically, that it was a matter of establishing the principle that the people who lived there had no rights over the land, given that they simply traveled across it in order to hunt, and so on. Therefore, there was no moral or legal problem in taking their land for the use of the Europeans. As far as the peoples involved are concerned, if they had no right to the land, it did not matter who they were, or whether they came from India or some other place.
As a result of events that took place in the 1960s, there has been a kind of cultural change in the last 20 years. Most of what happened in the 1960s was extremely healthy and significant. It became possible, for the first time, to face the questions about what had been done to the native American population. This produced a degree of consciousness about the racist nature of our willingness to continue to use terms such as “Indians,” as if who they were was of no importance.
QUESTION: What is the appropriate way for people in the solidarity movements to approach 1992?