Note—Getting stuck in Chicago Saturday night and then
trapped in the Loop a huge chunk of Sunday by endless rivers of Marathoners discombobulated
the production schedule here at Heretic,
Rebel, a Thing to Flout. Sunday’s planned post on the Great Fires of
1871 got bumped to Monday when this post should have run. Sorry for the delays. Blame it on the physically fit.
Monday
was celebrated as Indigenous People’s Day in most of the Americas and in other parts of the world. I
have blogged the still spreading and growing recognition that has its official origins in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples ten years ago in 2007.
But in the United States Native
Americans have been staging actions,
protests, and alternative events to
Federal Holiday on the Second Monday in October for decades.
That’s
right, your calendar probably marked
yesterday, October 9, as Columbus Day
in recognition of Cristoforo Colombo/Cristóbal
Colón/Christopher Columbus. I’ve blogged
about him, too, and his alleged
discovery—alleged because he didn’t
know where he was going, “found”
what was never lost, claimed what wasn’t his to take, and didn’t
even know where the hell he was. When
just about everyone else in Europe had
figured out that he never reached the East Indies or Asia he continued to lie about it.
None-the-less
the mercenary mariner was rewarded with fancy titles—Admiral of the
Ocean Sea for one—and made Viceroy
over half the damned world. And he screwed
that up by being so brutal that
he virtually wiped out the once numerous Carib peoples who inhabited
the islands under his immediate effective sway. He also bullied and oppressed potential
rivals—would be Conquistadors of even richer
realms on the mainland, many of
whom had better connections at Court
than a Genoan hireling. He was stripped of his titles, wealth confiscated, and shipped to Spain in disgrace and chains.
Not
much to celebrate there.
Yet
despite the fact that Columbus never set
foot in North America—the closest he got was wandering around portions of Central
America abandoned by mutineers and
quite typically lost—he somehow
became an iconic folk figure and symbol of the New World to the English and
overwhelming Protestant colonists hugging
to the Atlantic shore far to the north
of any of his voyages.
Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian sailor with even less to justify it, swooped in and got his name attached to
two continents just because he knew the right cartographer. But Columbia
was a popular alternative name for
Western Hemisphere lands and some Patriots wanted to adopt it officially for their new
Country. Think of the song, once
almost an unofficial national anthem, Columbia the Gem of the Ocean and
other evidence. When Thomas Jefferson’s pal Joel Barlow, a diplomat and literary dabbler, wanted to create a national epic poem he churned
out The Columbiad, a turgid contemplation
of Columbus and the new world.
Around
the 400th anniversary of the alleged discovery in 1892 interest in him was elevated by events
around the world, but particularly at Chicago’s
World Columbian Exposition. American
Catholics—a struggling and despised
minority—looked to the notoriously
pious Columbus who had slaughtered all
of those natives in the guise of converting
them to the One True Church to
establish their bona fides as worthy Americans. Thus the Knights of Columbus became the Catholic
answer to the WASP Masonic Lodges.
But
it was urban Italians, among the
last European immigrants to become White, in the big cities of the East Coast
and Midwest who made Columbus
Day and lavish annual parades and answer to the earlier immigrants—especially the Irish—in their struggle for
a fat slice of the patronage and privilege pie of the Democratic Party machines.
As
protests against honoring a figure who represented centuries of land theft,
colonial subjugation, genocide, and cultural
annihilation has grown, support
for the holiday has waned. City after City and several States have officially dumped Columbus Day and most have adopted some form on Indigenous
Peoples Day in its stead. Support had
dwindled to indignant Italian civic
organizations and the kind of cultural
fuddy-duddies who cannot stomach
change of any kind.
More
recently, however, a sub-set of the Alt-Right and neo-fascist movements who claim
to honor and preserve European culture and secure its dominance in American
society, have begun to make war on
the anti-Columbus Day warriors,
especially attacking Native Americans and a “cultural elite of race
traitors.
Anyway,
all of that is more than I intended to write about Columbus. By now you know the story. So I celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day. I hope you did to.
In
honor of the occasion I am revisiting a verse I wrote just one year ago during
the most important Native American
resistance in decades—the camps
to block the Dakota Access Pipeline which threatened to pollute the Missouri River and
defile traditional Sioux lands. May their long and valiant prayerful
witness be inscribed in the sacred winter
count and sung of around the
campfires for all of the generations
they were trying to protect.
Tonto Will Not Ride into Town for You
For The Camp of the Sacred Stone 9/30/2016
Tonto will not ride into town for you, Kemosabe,
and be beat
to pulp by the bad guys
on your
fool’s errand.
Pocahontas will not throw her nubile, naked body
over your
blonde locks
to save you
from her Daddy’s war club.
Squanto will not show you that neat trick
with the
fish heads and maize
and will
watch you starve on rocky shores.
Chingachgook will save his son and lineage
and let you
and your White women
fall at
Huron hands and be damned.
Sacajawea and her babe will not show you the way
or
introduce you to her people,
and leave
you lost and doomed in the Shining Mountains.
Sitting Bull will not wave and parade with your Wild West
Show
nor
Geronimo pose for pictures for a dollar
in fetid
Florida far from home.
They are on strike form your folklore and fantasy,
have
gathered with the spirits of all the ancestors
to dance on
the holy ground, the rolling prairie
where the
buffalo were as plentiful
as the worn
smooth stones of the Mnišoše,
the mighty
river that flows forever.
They are called by all the nations from the four corners
of the
turtle back earth who have gathered here,
friends and
cousins, sworn enemies alike,
united now
like all of the ancestors
to kill the
Black Snake, save the sacred water,
the soil
where the bones of ancestors rest,
and the
endless sky where eagle, Thunderbird, and Raven turn.
Tonto has better things to do, Kemosabe…
—Patrick Murfin
This
poem was included in my homemade
chapbook Resistance Verse which I
created last March in conjunction
with Poets
in Resistance reading at the Tree
of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, Illinois. If you
are interested, I can mail a copy
for $4 including postage or send you a pdf
version for free. Just e-mail your contact information to pmurfin@sbcglobal.net,
message me on Facebook, or mail to 522 W.
Terra Cotta Avenue, Crystal Lake, IL 60016.
No comments:
Post a Comment