Two years ago, I wrote about the latest controversies swirling around Columbus Day. Caught between Columbus the explorer and Columbus the brutal colonizer, the modern psyche has oft seemed paralyzed on the issue of remembrance and honor for such a complicated historical figure.
Speaking in a class of mine but a few days ago, a similar issue was raised in regard to Confederate monuments that are spattered throughout the American South. How do we deal with the issues of heritage and desolation when the two are so closely intertwined?
In my previous article, I was decidedly deferential towards Columbus and celebration of him with a holiday such as Columbus Day. And while I maintain that stance in part (I hold that we can celebrate the world we have and how he shaped it for the better) I also believe we could see a greater representation of American Indians in the broad culture.
See, many municipalities have begun to replace Columbus Day with an "Indigenous People's Day", honoring the Native Americans that Columbus enslaved and subjugated instead of the conqueror himself.
While I still believe these two celebrations, Columbus Day and Indigenous People's Day, may live side-by-side (though many aforementioned municipalities have in fact replaced Columbus Day altogether), I also believe more could be done to honor the native heritage of the first Americans.
Though the population of the Americas likely numbered somewhere around 50 million persons (if not more) prior to contact with Columbus, no more than five millions Native Americans remain today, and that includes people of a mixed ancestry (a designation obviously impossible at the time of Columbian contact).
The death of so many people, and so many others who did not die in immediacy but were reached eventually by disease and later subjugated as slaves or forced to leave their ancestral homes, is a travesty on the highest level. Some have deigned to call it genocide, and I'm not sure they are too far from the case. Doing the things that the Native Americans had to endure was inexcusable.
And yet, there is nothing to honor this history. This legacy. Now, I'm not saying to throw money blindly at the plight of Native Americans (though rethinking monetary support of Indian reservations might not be a wholly bad idea), but there is absolutely no commemoration of the Native Americans who died.
The closest, and in truth only (I tried Googling it), thing to an American Indian monument in the United States today is the Crazy Horse Memorial...a project that nearly 100 years later, is still not finished.
A similar issue was raised in the previously mentioned class; there are literally hundreds of tons of statues that extol the virtue of the Confederate hero, still standing, but close to none that commemorate the African-American slaves they kept.
In all, it doesn't take hardly any effort to put up a plaque. Say a few words. Honor what was stolen. Doing so would be the least that could be done. And yet, it would do so much. Columbus Day and Indigenous People's Day? Yes. Why not both?
