Ah, Seattle. The undisputed home of grunge rock, fish markets, overpriced coffee, and an unsustainable minimum wage. If only that were enough. But of course it isn’t. In a bid to increase their city’s progressive “street-cred,” Seattle has joined the growing list of cities and states that have replaced the celebration of Columbus Day with an Indigenous Peoples Day celebrating Native American heritage instead. Minneapolis, MN, and the entire state of South Dakota celebrate Native Americans Day. Berkeley, CA, bastion of liberalism that it is, celebrated the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World by designating 1992 as “The Year of the Indigenous Peoples” – a year which culminated in a city wide and now annual “Indigenous Peoples Day Celebration and PowWow,” held on the second Monday of October.
The move to replace Columbus Day is nothing new, however. In 1977, the United Nations sponsored the International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Peoples in the Americas. During the conference, representatives from several nations expressed concern that a conquering European was being celebrated while Native American populations were still being oppressed.
Those who support such a move today claim that it is not right to honor “the man who facilitated the mass murder of the indigenous people in the Americas rather than the tribes and populations who existed in relative peace before Columbus set foot in the Americas.” That very statement was made by a professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University in a class which I attended. Without a touch of irony. She then went on to say that “we would be equally justified in celebrating Hitler.” What was truly sobering was the number of students who nodded agreement when she made those statements.
The problem is that in order to make those statements, one has to ignore a few key points. First, the indigenous populations in the Americas were fairly adept at warring with and killing each other before the “bloodthirsty Europeans” arrived. Some tribes routinely kidnapped brides and stole horses from neighboring tribes. To assume that, in the absence of European “invaders,” a group of largely nomadic and warring tribes would have built a nation that even slightly resembles America seems a bit disingenuous. It’s essentially the sociological equivalent of canonization by death – they are suggesting that because the indigenous peoples were the conquered and not the conquerors, they must have been the superior (read: less barbaric) culture.
To compare Columbus to Hitler, however, is flat out ridiculous. Hitler’s contemporaries, though slow to stop him, in large part believed that what he was doing was wrong. Columbus’ contemporaries, though some originally thought him crazy, were more likely to wish they had beaten him to his landing in the Caribbean. To assume that, in Columbus’ absence, America would have remained undiscovered by either Europeans or the Chinese is also quite unlikely.
What’s interesting is when we look at this in conjunction with recent events in Colorado. A group of students walked out of school to protest changes in their history curriculum – namely a move to include discussions about patriotism, free markets, individual liberty, and the Judeo-Christian ethics that inspired the Founding Fathers. They claimed that it amounted to the whitewashing of history and an attempt to downplay the importance of civil disobedience. (Of course, it was later revealed that the entire protest was engineered by the teachers’ union because the curriculum changes were tied to pay changes that were in dispute.)
The irony is that by demanding that Americans celebrate the indigenous populations at the expense of our European roots is a whitewashing as well. While we don’t all share the same blood as Native Americans or Europeans, because the two worlds collided in 1492, we do share their joined history. Sometimes learning that history means that we, like Senator Elizabeth Warren in regards to the Trail of Tears, must accept the fact that our ancestors may have chosen the wrong path. Sometimes it means that we must come to terms with the fact that our ancestors were wronged by other groups or even by the government. My grandfather’s family, for example, walked a good portion of the way from Independence, MO to Salt Lake City, UT, when the Mormons were driven out of Missouri and Illinois.
So by all means, study and celebrate your Native American heritage and history. But study and celebrate your European history as well, and understand where and why they intersect. To ignore any part of that history, whether or not it is comfortable to explore, is to place our children at risk of repeating it.
