photo by Matt Nemeth
Demonstrators protest the celebration of Columbus Day and petition to replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day during a rally for multicultural rights and representation on Liberty Avenue, Monday.
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
By 1494, 125,000 native islanders were dead.
In 2014, we still celebrate Christopher Columbus with his own federal holiday.
This needs to change.
There’s a common narrative that surrounds Christopher Columbus, the one we all learn in elementary school. People thought the world was flat. Columbus thought the world was round, and wanted to sail to India to find a new trade route. He stumbled upon the Americas by accident, becoming the first European to set foot in America. He’s a hero who paved the way for the colonization of the New World, and his bravery in crossing the Atlantic is the reason we’re here today.
That narrative is a lie.
People knew the world was round 500 years earlier, in Ancient Greece. Also 500 years earlier, Leif Ericson founded a village in Newfoundland. Columbus saw that the natives were hospitable, and he enslaved them and stole their wealth.
Columbus treated Native Americans and islanders with absolute brutality. He demanded gold from them. If they didn’t pay, he cut off one of their hands and forced them to wear it around their necks. His men raped native women and sold them into sexual slavery, according to an Oct. 11, 2010 article on the Huffington Post.
“A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand,” he wrote in 1500.
So Columbus was a torturous thief who sold children into sex slavery. (This isn’t even taking into account the diseases he spread to the indigenous population.) And the United States has chosen this man to celebrate each year.
Fortunately, some cities and states are opting out of Columbus Day. According to an Oct. 12, 2014 article on NPR’s website, Seattle and Minneapolis are celebrating “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Sixteen states don’t recognize Columbus Day as a holiday. South Dakota observes Native American Day, and Hawaii observes Discoverers’ Day, which honors Polynesian explorers.
Some people are unhappy with the change, of course. The second Thursday in October has come to mean a celebration of Italian heritage for some people, and they’re upset that this day is being taken away from them.
But they should be more upset that this man ever represented them in the first place. Shifting the day from a celebration of a violent conqueror to an acknowledgement of the people he annihilated isn’t a capitulation to the “PC police.” It’s basic decency.
Whitewashing history and turning monsters into heroes doesn’t benefit anyone. Closing our eyes to the atrocities in our country’s history doesn’t make us a better nation. It makes us a more ignorant one.
I learned the standard Columbus story in elementary school, and I was horrified to find out I’d been so misled. I felt that I had been lied to by people who should have been giving me objective, correct information.
The federal government needs to realize it made a mistake when it decided to honor Columbus. Adding to the mythos of the noble white man is irresponsible, and it’s a lie. The song we all learned in school needs to be replaced by the truth.