Indigenous People’s Day Eclipse of Columbus Day Threatened

 

Note—Just as the celebration of Indigenous People’s Day as a replacement for an official Columbus Day holiday finally seemed widely accepted the Trump DEI scourge and purge threatens to erase it—and the true story of the people it represents.  Federal institutions have been ordered to ignore it and to only mention Columbus Day.  Curricula from kindergarten to post-doc are ordered to scrub Native Americans except as a threat to European/colonialist/American expansion.  Now abetted by the Government Shutdown the “untrustworthy” National Park Service, Smithsonian, National Archives, and other institutions are silenced this day.  We are not.

Today is the Federal Holiday honoring Christopher Columbus, the alleged discover of the New World, who made his first landfall on the island of San Salvador on October 12, 1492.  Years ago, Congress, in all of its wisdom, assigned the holiday to the second Monday in October to make way for a possible three day week-end for the few people who get the day off—or possibly to extend the giant mattress sales that seem to have become one of the most visible traditions of the holiday.

The trouble is Columbus has been falling out of favor for some time, except among the Italian-Americans who used his Italian roots to claim their seat at the American table.  The Columbus Day parades in the big cities are less about the Navigator—an ironic title for someone who didn’t know where the hell he was—and more about, as an Italian friend once put it, Gumba Pride.  

 

                 Italian Americans display their ethnic pride and flex their political muscles at Chicago's big Columbus Day Parade.

In 2021 Puerto Rican Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa of Chicago’s 35th Ward sponsored replacement official recognition of Columbus Day with  Indigenous People’s Day in 2020  It did not cancel the privately sponsored Columbus Day parade which could continue to roll.  The city sponsored music and cultural events over a two day period.

The original holiday worked as long as the Columbus story told in 19th Century school primers was the only information out there.  But those damn historians insisted on poking around.  Lo and behold it turns out Columbus was not a very nice man.  In fact, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella rewarded him for his voyages with the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the job of Viceroy to rule the new lands, he was so brutal, venal, and corrupt that the Catholic Priests sent to save the souls of the natives petitioned their Majesties to have him removed.  So did various adventurers and would-be Conquistadors who he slapped in irons for horning in on his exclusive franchise.

 

Columbus was personally responsible for the genocide of the Carib nation and opened the door to centuries of atrocities, exploitation, colonialist oppression, and settler replacement across Americas.

In the end he was stripped of his titles and put in irons himself.

One of the offenses with which he was charged was virtually wiping out the Carib nation which populated most of the islands of the Caribbean by turning them into slaves.  Within ten years the once numerous people were gone and the Spanish had to replace them by buying Black Africans from Arab dealers.  

 

An early Native American protest to Columbus Day--marching at Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive in Chicago after being turned away from the Columbus Day Parade in 1970.    From such modest beginnings a mighty movement grew. 

By the 1960’s Native peoples in both North and South America were protesting celebrations of Columbus and demanding that the people who were his victims should be the honorees, not the thief.

In 1977 at a United Nations sponsored International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas held in Geneva, Switzerland the idea of replacing Columbus Day celebrations with a day honoring Indigenous Peoples was first proposed.  As the 500 year anniversary of the “Discovery” approached, Native delegates to a conference held in Quito, Ecuador in 1990 determined to plan protests and demand recognition.  “Nobody discovered us,” they asserted, “We knew where we were.”

Native groups in California were among the most vocal and organized in the protests in 1992. They persuaded the city of Berkley to become the first to rename the holiday locally to the Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People, better known as Indigenous Peoples Day.  The movement spread across the state.  Although only two other cities followed Berkley’s lead in officially adopting the name for the local holiday, school systems, libraries, and colleges began holding alternative events.  And activists began marching and sometimes disrupting official Columbus Day festivities.

South Dakota, with a large Tribal population, became the first state to jettison Columbus and adopt what they call Native American Day.  That name is also used by several Oklahoma based tribes.  Hawaii replaced Columbus Day with Discoverer’s Day, commemorating the Polynesian discoverers of the Islands. 

Several cities, including Columbus, Ohio have simply dropped the holiday entirely and canceled the traditional parades.  In San Francisco, with its large Italian community axed Columbus and simply declared the day Italian Heritage Day instead but in 2018 also adopted Indigenous Peoples Day.

By this year 20 states have joined the parade to replace or co-celebrate Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day in addition to countless municipalities, counties, and other units of local government. 

So far Congress has ignored calls to make a change on the Federal level.

This year Chicago is one of those cities still going ahead with its giant parade down State Street today but it will not be an official City celebration. 

Relations between Native American and Italian communities were completely ruptured after statues of Columbus were vandalized in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests that demanded monuments to historic figures who despite other accomplishments were perpetrators of oppression to People of Color and other minorities.  The City removed the statues for “safe keeping” but  waffled for years on restoring at least one in place until this year when Mayor Brandon Johnson finally announced that none of the three Columbus statues on City or Park District property will be restored. 

 

      Native and Afro-Mexican traditions took center stage at an Old Town School of Folk Music concert.  Events like it may draw ICE kidnappers.

Ironically this year Indigenous People’s Day observations in Chicago may be threatened by targeted ICE actions because immigrants and refugees from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, South America and elsewhere often want to celebrate their own indigenous roots.  

 

Indigenous Peoples Day Widens Lead Over Columbus Celebration but Lost Navigator Hangs On

 

The cultural, ethnic, and moral tug of war between the official American holiday Columbus Day and an insurgent Indigenous Peoples Day has taken over new dimensions in the years of Black Lives Matter protests which widened to include other persecuted and endangered minorities and then the stifling, isolating Coronavirus pandemic.  The Indigenous celebrations continued to gather momentum as more municipalities, school districts, states, and other jurisdictions dropped the old holiday for the new observance. 

In 2020 as BLM activists began pulling down Confederate monuments, Native Americans and their allies were inspired to do the same to the arch symbol of colonialist oppression, the alleged Great Navigator.  Several monuments were torn down, defaced, or removed by local authorities. 

After it was attacked and defaced by protestors this summer,Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot order the Grant Park Columbus statue covered and  removed.

In Chicago where marchers failed to pull down a prominent statue on Columbus Drive in downtown lakeshore Grant Park and tagged it with graffiti, Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered the statue temporarily removed along with two others in neighborhood parks.  Naturally there was also a backlash uproar from the Italian-American community, simple traditionalists, and promoters of respect for “European culture” A/K/A White nationalists.

For more than two years the fate of those statues was in limbo as a city panel weighed their fates.  Last March Mayor Lightfoot, who is facing a tough re-election battle, announced that she wanted to return three statues to their original pedestals with extra security protections for the prominent downtown monument.  But in August the commission charged with reviewing Chicago’s more than 500 public monuments as part of a “a racial healing and historical reckoning project” recommended that 13 monuments be removed, including the city’s three statues of Columbus.  As of this writing, Lightfoot who is juggling a bid for loyalty from the city’s large and traditionally Democratic Italian communities, and her waning appeal as a progressive with sympathetic ties to all minority groups, has not announced whether she will follow the commission’s recommendations.

Meanwhile most annual Columbus Day observances including those ubiquitous parades have resumed as the country emerges from the pandemic.  Most will not have government sponsorship or official approval.  They will be private, First Amendment protected affairs like the big Chicago parade today sponsored by the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans and the Plumber’s Union.  But with the election just weeks away politicians from both parties will be on hand with floats and marching units.

Meanwhile, Chicago Indigenous Peoples Day observation will be more muted.  The Chicago History Museum on North Clark Street will feature a day of cultural events and lectures while Indigenous Peoples’ Day Chicago, a non-profit annual artistic and cultural event to showcase Native American musicians held a concert yesterday in the Logan Square Field house and today at the Old Town School of Folk Music Maurer Hall, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave.  Unlike many pre-pandemic years, I have seen no announced protest marches or rallies.

International Indigenous Peoples Day is celebrated on August 8 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 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.

Your calendar probably marked today, October 10, 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 even though Columbus never set foot in North America—the closest he got was wandering around portions of Central America after being abandoned by mutineers and quite typically lost—he somehow became an iconic folk figure and symbol of the New World to the English and the overwhelmingly 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 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 an 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.

In 1967 a handful of protesters from the American Indian Center in Uptown showed up downtown for the first protest against Columbus Day.  The movement blossomed and grew.

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 celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day today.  I hope you do too.

Nixing a Plundering Invader and Celebrating the Peoples Nearly Eradicated by his Ilk with Murfin Verse

Today is celebrated as Indigenous People’s Day in most of the Americas and in other parts of the world.  I first blogged the still spreading and growing recognition that has its official origins in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.  But in the United States Native Americans have been staging actions, protests, and alternative events to a Federal Holiday on the Second Monday in October for decades.

That’s right, your calendar probably marked today 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 after being 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 officially adopt it 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.

In the early 1970's even before the United Nations declaration Native Americans from the American Indian Center in Uptown marched through the Chicago Loop to protest when their request to participate in the annual Columbus Day Parade was curtly turned down.  Protests, counter demonstrations, and marches grew year by year.

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.”

This year President Joe Biden proclaimed the second Monday in October as Federal Indigenous Peoples Day.  That did not, however, erase Columbus Day which was created and recognized by Congress.  The two celebrations are like bitterly divorced spouses forced to continue to live together in the same house.

Anyway, all of that is more than I intended to write about Columbus.  By now you know the story.  So I celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day.  I hope you do too.

In honor of the occasion, I am revisiting a verse I wrote in 2016 just 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.

Photo of a mural taken by my old college pal Bill Delaney at Art Alley Gallery in Rapid City, South Dakota.

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