This week, Los Angeles became the latest American city to discuss replacing Christopher Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Italian-Americans aren’t happy because they see ol’ Chris as an important part of their heritage. But what’s more important? Continuing to honour a man for discovering something that was already discovered, or celebrating the truth?
Yes, Christopher set out from Europe and sailed the ocean blue in 1492 but he didn’t find anything that hadn’t already been found by the aboriginals living on the North American continent for centuries.
The original proposal to create Indigenous Peoples Day came from an LA city councillor who has Native American ancestry. He wanted it to happen on a different day, not to replace CC Day. But as they say, a camel is a horse designed by a committee and once you share an idea, it’s no longer yours.
More than 20 US cities have switched the focus of the day to Indigenous Peoples, since Berkeley, California was the first to do so back in 1990. American states and the federal government still officially mark Columbus Day, but you have to wonder why they continue to, in light of what we know about Columbus. Ol’ Chris was brave and he started what would become lucrative (in both directions) trading between Europe and the Americas. But he was driven by greed, launching his voyage in search of gold, and took some of the Native Americans home as his slaves. He also brought diseases to the aboriginal populations, although that’s something he probably couldn’t have foreseen.
As children, we were fed the sanitized, racist version of Columbus’ adventure. Boiled down to its essence, the history lesson centred on the amazing white man who sailed into unknown dangers (true) discovered a vast land populated with primitive humans and showed them what it was like to be civilized. Poppycock. He was a greedy adventurer who finally convinced the Queen of Spain to fund his trek to line his pockets with gold, and when he couldn’t find the gold, he took people back with him instead. It’s time he was put in his rightful place and taken off the calendars on October 10th.
From memory of something I read many years ago:
… Christopher Columbus, the greatest of them all, who set out, not knowing where he was going, on arriving did not know where he was, returning, did not know where he’d been and did it all on borrowed money,