Today is Columbus Day and I wonder how many people even give the day much thought. It is a pretty bland and low key holiday that really doesn’t have any traditions or practices associated with it. We don’t eat Columbus-shaped cakes or travel to statues of Columbus to leave bottles of liquor or roasted chickens. I supposed if pressed, people would guess that it is a holiday that is devoted to celebrating Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the Americas…but I’ll bet more people only think about it because the US Post Office and banks are closed.
You might be surprised to discover that a similar day is commemorated throughout the Americas. Many Latin American countries—like Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Costa Rica—celebrate or have celebrated Día de la Raza (day of the race or day of the people). You might also be surprised to learn that it has been a US federal holiday since 1937 and was first celebrated in Colorado in 1906. Colorado just doesn’t strike me a hot bed of Columbus love, but what do I know.
You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Native Americans and indigenous people of other countries in the Americas kind of really hate Columbus Day. And you should be a little ashamed of yourself if you don’t know why. Here’s a little refresher: disease and suffering, the taking of land, slaughter and enslavement, the destruction of belief and culture. If you worked at the UN, you’d call this genocide and ethnic cleansing…and you’d probably sponsor a stiffly worded resolution condemning it…only to be vetoed by China and Russia.
Really, it is a pretty crappy thing to celebrate when you think about it. It’s like the Protestants celebrating their victories over Catholics in Northern Ireland by having parades in Catholic neighborhoods. Oh wait; they do that, don’t they? Anyway, Columbus Day is kind of an in-your-face reminder of what happened to indigenous people, and its continued celebration seems to show that American society and the federal government really don’t think what happened was so bad. Not particularly cool.
Given the unsavory message it sends, some states and cities in the US don’t celebrate Columbus Day at all. Hawaii celebrates Discoverers’ Day—a day devoted to celebrating the Polynesian discovery of the islands. South Dakota celebrates Native American Day instead of Columbus Day, while Alaska just skips the whole thing. Berkeley, Sebastopol, and Santa Cruz, California have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. They’ve named every other day of the year “A Great Day to Smoke Pot.”
Even in many Latin American countries—places we in the great US of A think of as backwards or under-developed—the dialog has shifted. Día de la Raza has been turned into a day celebrating resistance to the arrival of Europeans—countering Columbus Day. Everyone’s favorite socialist democratically elected dictator Hugo Chavez captured this sentiment by changing the day in Venezuela to Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance).
This highlights the true meaning of Columbus Day. You know, the true meaning….like the true meaning of Christmas is mass commercialism and over-consumption vaguely sanctioned by the Holy Trifecta. The true meaning of Columbus Day has to do with an outdated political and social agenda. Columbus Day became a federal holiday back in 1937 after intense lobbying of President Roosevelt and Congress by the Knights of Columbus. Who are the Knights of Columbus? First of all, let’s get it out in the open—they are good people who do a lot of good around the world. They are a Catholic fraternal service organization—the largest in the world, by the way. They were formed in 1882 to counter discrimination suffered by Catholic immigrants. Apparently in the middle to late 19th century Catholics were not hired for certain jobs and generally treated badly, especially Catholic immigrants. They latched on to Columbus because he seemed to be an appropriate guy to use a symbol of the rights of Catholic immigrants here in the New World—he was, after all, a Catholic and he did discover America (well he discovered that Europeans hadn’t known about an entirely new landmass filled with millions of people...errr, well he discovered that Europeans forgot that they already had discovered a new landmass with millions of people on it some 492 years before). So the Knights of Columbus got the whole thing started as a way to legitimize the rights of Catholic immigrants by tying them to patriotism and the founding of the greatest country on earth—pretty slick marketing, eh?
Now for me, there are a couple of ironies associated with the Knights of Columbus and their importance in getting Columbus Day on the federal calendar. One is that many see Columbus Day as a celebration of Italian-American heritage—it’s an Italian holiday. So, you’d think that the organization was founded by some of my Italian immigrant kin, right? Nope. It was founded by an Irish Catholic priest. Now traditionally, the Irish and the Italians—as ethnicities in American cities—have not gotten on that well. So it’s more than a little funny that an Irishman is responsible for getting an Italian holiday on the calendar.
To me, the greater and sadder irony comes from the fact that the Knights of Columbus was created to battle discrimination and injustice perpetrated by one set of European immigrants against another set of European immigrants. And that organization worked hard to establish a holiday that actually celebrates the discrimination and injustice perpetrated by European immigrants against the indigenous people of the Americas.
So on this Day of Indigenous Resistance I challenge you to think just a little bit about what it all means and what it all means to different people. Are the Knights of Columbus bad guys for pushing Columbus Day? I don’t think so. They weren’t really celebrating the crushing of indigenous populations—at least not directly and not intentionally. They had a political and social agenda—protecting and raising the social standing of Catholics—and they picked a likely symbol to do that. Does that mean celebrating Columbus Day was or is a good idea? Taking the broader sweep of history into account, I think most reasonable people—those not protecting other agendas that having nothing to do with indigenous people’s rights—can agree that Columbus Day is a bad idea whose time is long past.
So let’s just put Columbus Day with the rotary telephone, the Chrysler K-Car, parachute pants, and Milli Vanilli…into the dustbin of history.
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