Blog: Off the Reservation
Taking Columbus Day Off (the Calendar)
By Troy Doney, 10-13-08
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The Post Office won’t be delivering any mail. Federal Agencies across America are closed for the day. Banks are emptied of personnel. Most of the nation is still at work, some parades are snaking their way through cities and Italian Americans are supposedly celebrating a famous figure. Most notably, a 14.92 percent discount is in effect at clever stores.
It’s Columbus Day, everyone.
It’s hard to imagine that this is a holiday. Even before it became politically correct to view the European colonization of the Americas as ‘flawed in some respects’, there shouldn’t have been much to celebrate. There aren’t a lot of holidays that celebrate screwing up finding India, but making the best of it by ushering in generations of genocide and exploitation. And yet, postal workers nationwide get to chill out today.
What is there to celebrate? What positives outshine the countless negatives about this particular holiday? Nobody celebrates the assassination of Franz Fernidad, the opening of Auschwitz, the completion of the Manhattan Project or the inauguration of Slobodan Milošević. So why is it that people are in the streets rejoicing an event that led to a similar slaughter of a people from sea to shining sea?
Not everyone is celebrating it, mind you. Berkeley, California, is celebrating Indigenous People’s Day. South Dakota has “Native American Day” in lieu of celebrating the wayward Genoese. The Virgin Islands have the “Puerto Rico-Virgin Islands Friendship Day.” In 2002, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez changed the name of Dia de la Raza (Day of the Race) to Dia de la Resistencia Indigena (Day of Indigenous Resistance).
Every one of those holidays is far more worth celebrating then a lost man who discovered a place that was already populated for ages in the name of “God, Gold and Glory.”
To me, Columbus Day isn’t a holiday. Yet it persists. I’m going to go out today and discover the nearby McDonald’s. I’ll take some fries that I also discovered, maybe a recently discovered Big Mac, too.
How much longer until Leif Erikson Day?
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Comments
I was HOPING there wouldn't be any Columbus Day angst but I guess not. I lived in Pueblo for a while, so I know where the very first Columbus Day edifice sits, and was at one of the protests...not to enjoy it, but just to observe.
I'm sorry, but I'm glad Columbus took the trip, inept as he was, and despite all the crimes and injustices perpetrated not only upon Indians but others along the way.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be here, in the United States of America, and I wouldn't be an American. Because I am, I am grateful.
It is your right NOT to be grateful, Troy, I guess, but I have to ask, would you rather the Chinese explorer Wang Dang P'tang had colonized America? Or would you rather be uncolonized, in your teepee for the approaching winter minus the medical care that has kept you intact up to this point?
And the fact remains that tribes kept slaves themselves at the time of "discovery." Never mind wonderful human rights realities such as sun god sacrifices and whatnot. Who is to say that wouldn't have been your unfortunate fate?
And who is to say that Indians, had they beat the Chinese and the Yerrupeons to gunpowder and steel, would not have been interested in what vast riches lay across the sea? And sought to, under the guidance of Father Sky of course, fulfill the Indian equivalent of "manifest destiny?"
And come to think of it, regarding celebration of the completion of the Manhattan Project: I'm dang sure a lot of American soldiers facing the invasion of Japan celebrated -- Norwegians, Nisei, and Navajo -- Americans all.