American Indian Culture and Research Journal

I believe that if I pass below the Equator . . . I shall find a much cooler climate and a greater difference i n the stars and waters . . .for I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here. -Christopher Columbus, 1498 During his third voyage, Christopher Columbus became convinced that the river Orinoco, located in what is now Venezuela, was the northernmost point of the Garden of Eden as described in the second chapter of the Bible’s book of Genesis. Columbus was in error, and an assumption he made plagues Native Americans to this day: that Judeo-Christian history as understood by Christians is also the history of the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Simply stated, the Christian nations of the world had to fit Native Americans into European notions of the history of the world, and that meant fitting them into biblical history. It was obvious to Columbus that the people he encountered had no knowledge of the Christian New Testament teachings of Jesus and therefore must be Old Testament people. Later writers would echo Columbus’s conclusion that Native Americans shared Christian history. However, they quickly dismissed the notion that Columbus’s ”Indians” were residents of the Garden of Eden and therefore were ”without sin,” as Adam and Eve were before the temptation and ”fall of man.” Instead, Indians were described as relatives of the east “Indians” (hence the name), the Chinese, the Jewish tribes, and, in the modern era, the “mongoloid” racial group. Each has been an attempt to place the “New World” inhabitants into “Old World” religious and scientific creation stories. Such an effort deprives Native Americans of their own history. It also deprives Native Americans of their own cosmologies, their own worldviews, and their own creation stories.