In A Legacy of Genocide: The San Salvador, (SanDiegoFreePress.org, February 14, 2014) Will Falk, an attorney and poet, precisely pinpoints what is wrong with the nearly completed reconstruction of the Spanish designed ship San Salvador (“Holy Savior”). Once completed, the vessel is to be a replica of a ship built under brutal conditions with Indian slave labor under the command of the conquistador Juan Rodíguez de Cabrillo. In September of 1542, Cabrillo sailed the San Salvador into the vast bay of the Kumeyaay territory.

The project is an attempt by the San Diego Maritime Museum to celebrate Spain’s shipbuilding prowess, and navigational skills, while ignoring the fact that the original ship, and many others, were built in Guatemala using Indian slaves. The museum and a number of supportive scholars seem to be doing their level best to draw attention away from the horrific genocidal consequences of Spain’s sea-faring imperial expansion under the so-called “right of Christian discovery.”

For his part, Mr. Falk, a non-Indian ally, has done a masterful job in a fairly short article. He has pulled the lens back enabling us to focus on the broader historical context and the horrific consequences that colonization has had for the Original Nations of this continent and this hemisphere. Those consequences should not be ignored relative to the slave-built ship San Salvador, and relative to the entire so-called “Age of Discovery.”