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E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Gimme More Columbus
It's pretty much universally agreed upon that Columbus didn't discover America. He was late on that by about 500 years, beat to our rugged shores by Leif Erikson, an Irish monk, and possibly a Chinese muslim named Zheng He. What Columbus did do, a point on which most people can agree, is open North America to European exploration, colonization, and the eventual arrival of pilgrims, strip malls, Britney Mania, and all the rest.
Regardless of who was here first (that is, not counting the people who already lived here), some of us have a hard time accepting today as a legitimate holiday. The American Indians, for one, have kicked up a fuss about Columbus Day for years, and rightly so. His arrival marked the start of one of the grimmest chapters in American history, which saw aboriginal people cheated, poisoned, and slaughtered en masse in the name of God, or some crusty old monarch across the ocean.
Yesterday, 83 protesters, many of whom are Native American, were arrested in Denver, after spilling fake blood and body parts across the Columbus Day parade route, and otherwise disrupting that city's festivities.
Half a century after those three Spanish ships dropped anchor at what they thought was the Orient (in fact, Columbus died still believing this), we give the kids the day off school, but still aren't really having an honest discussion about the muddy legacy today commemorates. It's easy to think simplistically of both Native Americans pre-colonization, and the heroic Columbus, but neither of these versions is strictly true. The American natives warred, pillaged, and traded slaves just like the rest of us, and Columbus, in turn, was responsible for his share of carnage. The arrest of protesters is a pretty good indication that we still aren't taking full responsibility for Columbus' actions, and the lasting impact they've had. We don't celebrate that many national holidays in America, let's at least be sure about why we're celebrating the ones we have.