Columbus philosophy still thrives in the Americas
Estela Ortega (R) wipes her eye during an emotional Indigenous Peoples' Day celebration at the Daybreak Star Cultural Center on October 13, 2014 in Seattle, Washington.
Dead for five centuries, it’s difficult to imagine what Christopher Columbus would make of penances for ills inflicted on indigenous people in the Americas.
In what’s becoming politically correct in the United States, beginning with Berkley, California, in 1992, it’s now a mark of penance, without using the word but implicitly so, to re-brand Columbus Day as Indigenous People/Peoples/People’s Day.
To jog memories, the Medieval directionally challenged Italian from Genoa working for the Spanish monarchy as an admiral, stumbled on an island in the Bahamas archipelago on October 12, 1492.
Columbus planned to go looting in eastern Asia. Heroically happy to have discovered a New World, he returned home. He made three additional voyages. European imperialism in the Americas, which survives in different versions today, was on.
The latest re-branding occurred in Seattle, a city in the US state of Washington, a week ago. CNN reported the Seattle City Council did so to honour “the thriving cultures and values of Indigenous Peoples in our region.”
That was hot in the heels of Minneapolis, Minnesota, in April. There, the city approved the re-branding “to reflect the ongoing struggles of Indigenous people on this land, and to celebrate the thriving culture and value that Dakota, Ojibwa and other indigenous nations add to our city.” Struggles! That’s honesty. Thriving! Think of outright hypocrisy.
Many countries in the Americas, the so-called New World—to European, of course, and some other countries, celebrate the consequences of Columbus landing.
Columbus Day became an official federal holiday—second Monday in October—in 1968, although President Benjamin Harrison called upon the Americans to celebrate it during the four hundredth landing anniversary in 1892 and had been traditionally marked.
Now, a federal holiday is a paid off-day only for none essential federal employees. Because establishing or recognising a public holiday in the US is a prerogative of individual states, not all 50 recognise all federal holidays.
Opponents of Columbus Day celebration argue it amounts to glorification of atrocities hordes of pillaging European settlers inflicted on Indigenous People.
Indeed the settlers were so stupid they glorified their plunder, destruction of life, homesteads, cultures, and languages in terms of honour, bravely and, Oh yes!, shepherding the savages along the path proclaimed by the Christian deity. In some parts, indigenous people were “civilized” to near extinction.
In the US, for example the plunder was in full swing in polygamist Harrison’s lifetime. To understand the extent and the brutality, one only needs read of the attempted flight to Canada by Chief Joseph of Nez Perce tribe and about 700 companions. They fought their way for 2,735 kilometres.
Finally, Joseph surrendered: 87 men, 184 women, and 141 children. They were 40 miles from then British-ruled Canada. Their fault: refusal to cede ancestral land to the invaders. A New York Times editorial called the campaign a crime.
Since then Indigenous People in the US ceased to count in national affairs equations.
The same fate befell Indigenous People in the Americas, except Bolivia. An indigene, sort of semi, is president. Distracters are latter-day Conquistadors. Their type still crow all over the Americas. So do Josephs.
