READING STRATEGY HOMEWORK

NAME: Alejandra choez González COURSE: 10”B” DATE: 7 de junio del 2020

TITLE: Christopher columbus real story

SETTING:
Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the island we know as Haiti 523 years ago, he wrote of the Taíno people
who inhabited it, “They never refuse anything that is asked for. They even offer it themselves, and show so
much love that they would give their very hearts.”
CHARACTERS:
Columbus established a business in the sale of 9- and 10-year-old Taíno girls for sexual slavery.
He also kidnapped and enslaved Taínos themselves — personally initiating the transatlantic slave trade in his
voyage back to Europe.

RELEVANT EVENTS :
● Years later, the Taíno would be reduced to a tiny fraction of their population of approximately
300,000 — and Haiti would lose 98 percent of those trees Columbus coveted.

● Natives were regularly whipped for what Columbus considered minor offenses — but stealing a
vegetable or animal could result in cutting off a Taíno’s nose, ear, or hand; the offender was
sometimes forced to walk around with their severed body part in shame.

● Spain cleared land for massive tobacco plantations, beginning a long process of deforestation and soil
erosion. After France came into possession of Haiti, it cleared even more land, and brought in enslaved
Africans to cultivate sugar to satisfy European palates.

● We shouldn’t forget that Columbus is responsible for launching an ecocide as well as a genocide.
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE:
I know that Christopher Columbus, when he returned from Spain several months later, he found that all the
Europeans were dead. That didn’t stop him; Columbus’ practice of settling on other peoples’ lands in the
Americas sparked the European imagination, and those lands would soon be the backbones of empires.
NEW LEARNING:
Haiti remains the poorest country in the all of the Americas; the European Union region remains one of the
wealthiest in the world. This isn’t because of some innate curse on Haiti. It’s because its peoples, their labor,
their lands, and their resources have long been embezzled without reparation. The insidious nature of the
colonization of the Americas, which started in Haiti, not only terrorized the people who lived there at the time;
it also created a system that kept indigenous peoples in slavery or perpetual poverty, while Europe basked in
wealth.
OPINIONS
In my opinion, this story with facts had not been seen only by some things about him, but in my opinion about
the story, colon thought differently from the others towards something that he discovered or when he wanted
to keep most of the things and so Haiti was left with few trees.