As a Native American, I think Indigenous Peoples Day is a day we acknowledge true history and recognize the atrocities Columbus committed instead of honoring him. All are certainly entitled to their own opinion. This is an opportunity to highlight the history and contributions of Native peoples. Indigenous People’s Day represents a much more honest and fair representation of American values.
It is not to divide us in any way. Indigenous People’s Day is an opportunity to celebrate the thriving cultures and positive values of Indigenous Peoples and bring communities together. ~L.G
Does your school recognize Columbus Day as an official holiday? What do you know about Christopher Columbus?
In this 2014 piece, “Columbus Day, or ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’?,” Jake Flanagin writes:
It’s a controversial day with a turbulent history. “This historically problematic holiday — Columbus never actually set foot on the continental U.S. — has made an increasing number of people wince, given the enslavement and genocide of Native American people that followed in the wake of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria,” writes Yvonne Zipp for The Christian Science Monitor. “The neighborhood wasn’t exactly empty when he arrived in 1492.”
Back in 1992 — 500 years after Columbus’s fateful landing in the Caribbean — Berkeley, Calif., was the first American city to repurpose his day in honor of Native America. “Talk of an alternative Columbus Day dates back to the 1970s,” writes Nolan Feeney for Time, “but the idea came to Berkeley after the First Continental Conference on 500 Years of Indian Resistance in Quito, Ecuador, in 1990. That led to another conference among Northern Californian Native American groups.” Attendees brought the idea in front of the Berkeley City Council, after which they “appointed a task force to investigate the ideas and Columbus’ historical legacy.” Two years later, council members officially instated Indigenous Peoples’ Day in lieu of Columbus by a unanimous vote.
The California state senator Lori Hancock, then the mayor of Berkeley, remembers encountering Italian-American pushback similar to that in Seattle. “We just had to keep reiterating that that was not the purpose,” she told Mr. Feeney. “The purpose was to really affirm the incredible legacy of the indigenous people who were in the North American continent long before Columbus.”
And it’s worth noting that not all Italian-Americans tote Christopher Columbus as a symbol of cultural pride. “Those supposed leaders in the Italian-American community who oppose Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the same day as Columbus Day do not speak for all of us of Italian descent,” writes Margaret Viggiani of Seattle in a letter to The Seattle Times. “They certainly don’t speak for me. I, and many others, agree wholeheartedly with the long-overdue change and applaud the Seattle City Council for doing it.”
“Why should anyone take pride in honoring the life of a man who brought misery and degradation of the native peoples of this hemisphere?” she asks. “It’s time to give due to the important and overlooked accomplishments of the many indigenous people who inhabited this hemisphere long before it was named the Americas.”
New York Times
By
Comments
Right now I am overwhelmed by the maps shown in Protect the Wolves news pages: I did not comment, but as a student of population ecology, I KNOW that they look exactly like the maps made by disease control organizations – by using guns to inoculate every wolf they can, they will WILL, cause the extinction of the wolf. this is done through isolation in the fragments of landscape were there is some protection like parks and roadless areas.
Such maps were the same as the reservations and exclusion of the native peoples who lived on the land of this continent as well.
Only one difference occurred: the mixing of wolves with distant wolves is not allowed – the intentional recipe for loss of erterozygosity – artificial islands that slowly make successive generations of wolves more like siblings. Read up on Isle Royale for a general public understanding of what is being done to wolves.
I know that GOAL (GUardians of Our Ancestors’ Legacy) has gathered together many tribes to protect the Grizzly Bear, and in some ways Protect the Wolves follows a similar course for the Wolf. Yet I have not seen the Ojibwe, the people who regard the Wolf as their Brother and Sister, yet a part of PtW.
I am saying this in preparation for something.
There are Ojibwe who have reachhed out to include all others to help protect Ma’iingan, the Wolf.
In a mysteriously similar way, the once-cornered indigenous have included and shared themselves with many, slowly breaking the walls of the mind that would corral and cause the death of involuted two-leggeds. This is an ongoing and too-slowly changing thing.
Columbus was Italian, working in the service of Spain, a nation that had just survived a foreign invasin that had lasted for several hundred years. Because it was warlike in nature, it used its technology to invade and take over. All humans seem to far too easily get all eager to do this, and I’ve traced (and surely mentioned here) that the invaders of the land who killed wolf and bison and griz, were of a more recent explosion especially of the US civil war and annexation of the southwest. Yet, the ranching industry was one of European opportunist wealth who saw the death of the great herds of bison, pronghorn and other animals as opening up empty land for them (as did the mormon cult).
Those euro-nobles did not want regulation, and so they created a false history that to this day, claims themselves as the “old” west, when in fact I knew a man born in 1850, before and rigtht at the beginning of the massive immigration/takeover in the mountains, valley, rivers, and bays of the west.
Well, to segue to the falsehood of Columbus, his second voyage was the first to bring the rapers to Hispaniola. The Conquistadores (Remember most of two continents were destroyed by the Spanish) were deadly violent wealthhy people. They sought gold, silver, land “ownership”, women, slaves. Columbus enslaved in 1493 , but the reason you only hear of African slaves is that of people not being used to Eurasian/African agricualture – diseases thhat jumped from animals – Smallpox jumped from CAMELS, and If you look at the military sweeping of Eurasia and Africa in the centuries and millennia BEOFRE , you can understand that the foreign diseases were new to the Americas. Just as the Port Orford Cedars I was inspecting (for years, but last summer especially) were killed by the introduction of disease from warmer parts of Asia, so the Spanish introduced diseases thhat killed
Columbus and friends gave indigenous newborns to their war dogs as food, 99% of the natives of Hispaniola were dead within 25 years.
He sailed around a bit more, importing more conquistadores young wealthy who saw the moneymaking opportunities through violence. It was, however, the big cannons, and perhaps the war dogs and horses and bang-bang muskets that drove fear into the hearts of those they enslaved, and raped and took over.
TOday, moneymakinng and progress and technology are still worshipped, along with the phoney use of “great spirit” to mistranslate the native intimate understanding of weather, seasons, the similar life of ALL beings. I can more correctly translate some of the original words and meanings twisted by fake godfreaks, if you like. The Oceti Sakowin peoples had 16 or 17 Great Unknowables”, for instance describing things that they understood but euros did not until science helped them toward enough observation of nature and natura processes. Because they had had to move west a couple centuries earlier, part of their name for Wolf came from the Ojibwe/Cree, Algonquian word telling how the wolf moves.
So, yes, Columbus should more be thought of like one of Hitler’s SS than as “discoverer.”
I have not read it, having once explored the sources from which it came, (I cannot read entire books about atrocities that are denied by the v ery same people trying to murder wolves as “in the way” – it has enraged me too much to tolerate ranchers and all those who pretend that their cause is “social justice”, when in fact they are only fighting for the scraps and guns they, too , will use on my Brothers) but for you who wish accurate historical research on Columbus, please get David Stannard’s 1992 American HolocaustConquest of the New World.
Does not matter who wins in politics, the euroamericans, the latin descendants of conquistadores, the moslems who for 1500 years enjoyed converting and enslaving others to their fictions.
The only a nswer is easing the human population back, opening the land up to the forests they eat today, and returning rich and wild.
diversity to the fenced, concreted, hell they have made.
It turns out that the black americans are 1/4 white on average, and the indigenous probably at least as much now genetically. There are, then, only those who know the original wolf, who care, as the Oneida story tells us, enough to listen to our generous hearts knowing that the wolf deserves at least an equal place and respect as we give to ourselves and those who don’t.
I come here only because I can never do enough for my Brother, who people call gray, but whose hairs are red, tan, black, and white. I ave rested my head against him, warming myself, walked in places where humans are not. I have seen the color of his hairs, and it is as i have told you.
You will excuse my typographical errors. Heterozygous, etc. If you do not know what this means, you will have to learn,, in order to understand why MT, WY, ID, WA, CA, OR, AZ and NM all states that seek to Manage or limit wolves, and the republicans everywhere are wrong, and must be removed from positions of decisionmaking.