American Genocide: Columbus and the colonization of the Native Americans

American Genocide: Columbus and the colonization of the Native Americans
Introduction
David Stannard`s American Holocaust (1992) chronicled how the Native American population as a whole had been largely exterminated since the arrival of the Spaniards. The first chapter of Howard Zinn`s Voices of a People`s History of the United States (2004) also showed how Columbus and the Spanish colonizers as a whole committed atrocious crimes against the people of Hispaniola and how these people resisted the enslavement and eventual genocide before the Spanish Royal Council. Thus, it can be seen how the Spaniards only brought repugnant devastation upon the Native American population which is clearly unlike the accounts of the colonizers themselves, such as Columbus.
Body
Early European explorers attest to the large number of population and the vast expanse of territory in the areas now known as California. According to Father Ascension, "this realm of California is very large and embraces much territory, nearly all inhabited by numberless people" (Stannard, 1992: 135). This also attests to the civilization the indigenous population had constructed long before the Spaniards came. However, this was not for long because the Spaniards brought with them disease and cruelty of colonial expansion that took its toll among the indigenous population. According to the accounts of one historian, "a decade later, there still remained macabre reminders of the malaria epidemic: collapsed houses filled skulls and bones, the ground littered with skeletal remains" (Stannard, 1993: 137). The territories in California once-populated by Indians were reduced to a no-man`s land where "between 95 and 98 percent of California`s Indians had been exterminated in little more than a century" (Stannar...