phisticated, and although Nomadic tribes did exist, several permanent settlements arose throughout the centuries preceding Columbus' arrival. Berliner does accredit "endless, bloody wars" to Native American civilizations, but again, his argument goes unsupported: the concept of full war or violent warfare was not introduced in the Americas until English and French conquest. Columbus and Cortez used military violence to subdue a previously free people, and with it, launched a tradition of public violence and death. Berliner ignores this, as it contradicts his argument that Western civilization is the objectively superior culture, a saving grace to the "nasty" and "brutish" existence of civilizations prior to its domination.Weatherford, an anthropologist at Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote his article for the Baltimore Evening Sun. His target audience is both the American public, whom he accuses as "embroidering many legends around Columbus" (par. 4) and the academic community. Weatherford's arguments focus on popular folklore that has been embellished to the point where it wipes out historical truth almost entirely. While Westerners remember Columbus as a pioneer for the integration of Western virtues and values into "underdeveloped" American Indian communities, academics and the ancestors of Columbus' victims recall the horror and tragedy that he brought to the New World. Weatherford recalls the Taino people who became virtually extinct after Columbus captured them as slaves, hunting them for sport and profit, "beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs" (par. 7). While Berilner makes sweeping generalizations of the Western encroachment of North and South America with statements like "whatever the problems it brought, the vilified Western culture also brought enormous, undreamed-of benefits, without which most of today's Indians would be infinitely poorer ...
