It’s Columbus Day – What are we celebrating for?
“We shall take you and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, … and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, … and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault …” - Christopher Columbus
Each October children in classrooms around the nation will dutifully recite their Columbus Day “facts”: the ships (“the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria…”), the year (“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue...”), and even the fruit that the explorer thought best resembled the Earth (that would be the orange ). Our national leaders take time out of their busy schedules – raising money and covering up scandals – to commemorate the man who “found” America.
Of course by now many of us know that Columbus was not the first European to sail to North America – a Viking did that nearly 500 years earlier – and that the arrival of the Spanish empire wasn’t exactly a blessing to the hemisphere. What many of us don’t know, and what many more of us willfully ignore, is what Columbus really was the first to do on our side of the pond.
Christopher Columbus, you see, was a slave trader, a gold digger, a missionary, and even a war profiteer in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella. The arrival of Columbus’s small fleet on what is now San Salvador (that’s Spanish for “Holy Savior”) was greeted by the “decorous and praiseworthy” Taino Indians (Columbus’s words) and was followed almost immediately by mass enslavement, amputation for sport, and a genocide that claimed over four million people in four years. That’s quite a saving.
His arrival also marked the beginning of 500 years of imperialism, enslavement, disease, genocide, and a legacy of impoverishment and discrimination that our nation is only beginning to come to terms with. Today American Indians lack adequate healthcare and housing, receive pitiful education, face daunting barriers to economic opportunity, and see their lands (that would be the whole of the continent) overrun with pollution and big business.
Columbus Day has been celebrated as a federal holiday since 1971, making it the first of only two federal holidays to honor a person by name. The other celebrates the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It isn’t Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors, though, that resemble the selflessness of the Rev. King and the best traditions of the American ideal. From the hospitality of the Taino Indians toward Columbus’s crew, on which he remarked at length in his diaries, to the generosity of the Wampanoag in sharing their traditional feast with the Pilgrims, the history and tradition of Indian cultures have characterized the values of a plural and welcoming community. Even today American Indians proudly serve a country that has given them so little and taken so much.
A disproportionate number of young men and women fight and die for our country and for the constitution (based on the Iroquois Confederacy) that did so little to protect their own freedoms. Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier, became the first Indian woman to die in combat for the US military, when her convoy – famous for her friend Jessica Lynch – was ambushed outside Nasiriyah, Iraq. Her memory, like the sacrifices of so many of our Indians, is too often forgotten or obscured by the mass media and the general public.
So today we honor their sacrifices. We honor the dedication of American Indians to the best aspirations of people everywhere, the commitment to democracy, to the constitution, and to the right to vote. And we honor the generosity and selflessness of our best Americans, especially those tribes that greeted our nation’s first immigrants with curiosity and open arms.
While many people, including the entire federal workforce, take Monday off for Columbus Day, INDN’s List will be hard at work protecting the rights of Indians everywhere. We believe in this democracy everyone ought to have a right to vote, a right to run for office and a voice to be heard. Please continue supporting our work and our candidates, and lodge your protest of Columbus Day by contributing to INDN's List on “his” day. Paid for by INDN's List - 406 S Boulder, Mezzanine Ste 200, Tulsa, OK 74103
SURVIVING COLUMBUS!
Submitted by the Western Shoshone Defense Project As Native Americans in this day and age, we are survivors, we have survived the genocide, the federal Policy to “kill the Indian, and save the man”, and all the other atrocities that are not covered in US history books. I wish a beautiful victory song to all Native Americans today, we have survived and, for most of the tribes and bands, our cultures are intact, alive and well. We have overcome the onslaught, we must however never forget, and strive to better our Native communities and homelands by educating ourselves and our people so that they can represent our people to preserve our land, our resources, our cultures, and our religions.
Steven Chischilly COLUMBUS DAY - NO REASON TO CELEBRATE
Article Last Updated: 10/06/2006 By Mary Annette Pember
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue on a mission of plunder for Spain. When he arrived here, he commenced the virtual annihilation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. A culture and nation founded on the murderous, exploitive philosophy of this act has two choices: apologize and make reparations, or cunningly twist the facts and make it an opportunity for celebration. The United States has chosen the latter. In many ways, the whole Columbus Day debate is a big yawn for native peoples, just another in the ongoing pinches in the rear that define being Native American in America. Mostly, we simply say, "Ouch," and go on with the business of surviving the policies borne out of a ruling government's mindset that sees Christopher Columbus as a national hero.
At the time of European "discovery" in the 15th century, there were more than 10 million native peoples in North America. But by the beginning of the 20th century, our numbers had dwindled to less the 230,000. So, we're pretty ambivalent about the whole celebration idea surrounding our near-demise. The Columbus attitude has justified U.S. Indian policy all the way from stolen lands and broken treaties to recent attacks on tribal sovereignty and the failure to make good on Indian trust funds. Currently, mainstream America has a "just get over it" attitude to native peoples, dismissing our grievances as political correctness gone awry. But in the recent words of an elder, "If the shoe were on the other foot, Americans would carry laminated copies of their ancestors' treaties until they got their just dues." Asking the U.S. government to abandon Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day is akin to asking for a sea change in the national psychology. It demands a soul-searching objectivity that is simply too threatening to the mainstream culture and economy. The European "discovery" of America is a misnomer. This victor's history is still very much at the heart of the American psyche. By ignoring the fact that that the place was already inhabited by millions of indigenous peoples, the celebration of Columbus Day exalts a criminal act. This philosophy has allowed the current Christopher Columbus reincarnation, George W. Bush, sufficient national support in his efforts to bring democratic light to the darker regions of Iraq.
Submitted by the Western Shoshone Defense Project As Native Americans in this day and age, we are survivors, we have survived the genocide, the federal Policy to “kill the Indian, and save the man”, and all the other atrocities that are not covered in US history books. I wish a beautiful victory song to all Native Americans today, we have survived and, for most of the tribes and bands, our cultures are intact, alive and well. We have overcome the onslaught, we must however never forget, and strive to better our Native communities and homelands by educating ourselves and our people so that they can represent our people to preserve our land, our resources, our cultures, and our religions.
Steven Chischilly COLUMBUS DAY - NO REASON TO CELEBRATE
Article Last Updated: 10/06/2006 By Mary Annette Pember
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue on a mission of plunder for Spain. When he arrived here, he commenced the virtual annihilation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. A culture and nation founded on the murderous, exploitive philosophy of this act has two choices: apologize and make reparations, or cunningly twist the facts and make it an opportunity for celebration. The United States has chosen the latter. In many ways, the whole Columbus Day debate is a big yawn for native peoples, just another in the ongoing pinches in the rear that define being Native American in America. Mostly, we simply say, "Ouch," and go on with the business of surviving the policies borne out of a ruling government's mindset that sees Christopher Columbus as a national hero.
At the time of European "discovery" in the 15th century, there were more than 10 million native peoples in North America. But by the beginning of the 20th century, our numbers had dwindled to less the 230,000. So, we're pretty ambivalent about the whole celebration idea surrounding our near-demise. The Columbus attitude has justified U.S. Indian policy all the way from stolen lands and broken treaties to recent attacks on tribal sovereignty and the failure to make good on Indian trust funds. Currently, mainstream America has a "just get over it" attitude to native peoples, dismissing our grievances as political correctness gone awry. But in the recent words of an elder, "If the shoe were on the other foot, Americans would carry laminated copies of their ancestors' treaties until they got their just dues." Asking the U.S. government to abandon Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day is akin to asking for a sea change in the national psychology. It demands a soul-searching objectivity that is simply too threatening to the mainstream culture and economy. The European "discovery" of America is a misnomer. This victor's history is still very much at the heart of the American psyche. By ignoring the fact that that the place was already inhabited by millions of indigenous peoples, the celebration of Columbus Day exalts a criminal act. This philosophy has allowed the current Christopher Columbus reincarnation, George W. Bush, sufficient national support in his efforts to bring democratic light to the darker regions of Iraq.
As a native woman, experienced in the repercussions of American policy-making, I'm waiting for the president's supporters to propose establishing a George W. Bush Day in Iraq, celebrating the civilizing of that country. I bet few Americans would see the irony. Mary Annette Pember, Red Cliff Ojibwe, is past president of the Native American Journalists Association. She currently lives and works as an independent journalist in Cincinnati. TO SUBMIT an ARTICLE or OPINION PIECE to the Native Unity Digest, e-mail bobbieo@digitaldune.net. NATIVE UNITY - A place for Native American Peoples to solidify their tribes to make a positive impact on the cultural, social, economic and political fabric of American society and a place for non-Natives to better understand the ways of the American Indian.