Film Paper #1

The impacts of the Columbian exchange had tremendous consequences on the Old and New World, both positive and negative. The film presents many of these impacts and points of view but some essential areas are inadequately represented or ignored.

The film stresses the importance of the exchange of portmanteau biota between the Old and New World to the point where Columbus is accredited with ì[creating] one world where there was twoî. The film does a reasonably well job when presenting the impacts of this exchange on the Irish, Germans, Africans and Europeans but insufficiently covers the Native Americans and ignores the environmental impacts.

I consider the Native Americans poorly represented in the film. The Europeans brought with them horses that altered Native American culture by allowing more time for them to develop their art, philosophy, and religion. Accordingly, the horse was deemed a monumental improvement that allowed Native Americans to master the environment, if not for only a short time. But, also in the European portmanteau were diseases, which the film simply forgets to mention. European diseases had tremendous impacts on the Native Americans. These diseases ultimately lead to the decay of Native American religious beliefs and brought about widespread wildlife destruction as seen in the Micmac transformation. Together, the destruction of disease and the buffalo slaughter allowed the Europeans to easily commit the genocide of Native Americans with little resistance. The filmís failure to include such imperative information suggests an ill-informed production or a biased narrative. Such failures are not unheard of when dealing with the relations of whites and Native Americans. American society has successfully programmed its constituents to believe that the slavery of the Tobacco South was without a doubt wrong. This is a universal, socially acceptable construction within the United States except in certain parts of the Deep South and the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately, many people do not fully comprehend the fact that we stole, cheated and murdered for Native American land, which we now call ours. Is this so much better than slavery that we should gloss over it as a simple mistake? Yet, the film may have possibly devoted such little effort to the Native American impacts of the Columbian Exchange simply due to time restraints; it would not have been my choice of editing.

Even more negligent and unacceptable is the overlooking of the environmental impacts of the Columbian Exchange. The film chiefly referred to the human-human impacts of the portmanteau biota exchange between the Old and New World but failed to account for the impacts suffered by the land even though ìno part [was] left untouched by the Columbian exchange in the Americasî. The consequences of clear-cutting for agriculture and pasture and the introduction of exotic undomesticated species (such as rats and insects) appear to have had no impact upon the environment within the film. The film does mention the replacement of the Indian by the ìfestiveî cowboy, the bison by cattle, and grass by wheat but outside of the directly obvious little is mentioned. The film neglects to notice that the European portmanteau changed the environment both directly and indirectly. As already suggested disease lead indirectly to the massive slaughtering of wildlife and assuredly wildlife, besides bison, also suffered from the introduction of exotic species. Competition for resources and habitat would increase as the land reached its carrying capacity and only the stronger would survive- this may or may not have been the native species. An example of this may be the possible competition between the rugged European rat and the native rodents of America. Lacking the environmental impacts of the exchange makes an incomplete representation of an era and therefore an unsuccessful attempt of portraying an unbiased history.

On top of the apparent shortcomings, I believe the film portrayed the exchange in a far too positive of light. Columbus may have brought the two worlds together but not in harmony. The film mentioned many of the miseries of this union but ended on a seemingly triumphant note. Was the exchange successful? Or equal? Americans may contemplate their answers but the survivors of the Native American genocide and the raped landscape have little to ponder.