Summary: Every year at Columbus Day, or perhaps, more accurately, Encounter Day, we get our knickers in a knot. Should we embrace a breast-beating white liberal guilt posture of anguished handwringing and so-called political correctness, or should we fall back on the triumphalist Eurocentric narrative so many of us learned in school? The day long ago set aside to commemorate the first coming of Columbus to the New World has become an ongoing controversy. Whose day is it? Do we celebrate the exploring spirit or do we mourn for our First Peoples? Does the celebration of the one preclude sober reflection about the fate of the other? Columbus Day/Encounter Day is, and will always remain, a paradox.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, October 12, 2017- Today is traditional Columbus Day. This day members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an Italian ocean liner (and sister to the ill-fated Andrea Doria) were named. The Spanish remember him as Cristobal Colon, the adelantdo, Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies after whom the Spanish named not one, but two cruisers, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who only built one of them.
Commemoratively named warships notwithstanding, the view of many Americans of this day is colored, so to speak, by an ironic New Yorker Columbus Day cartoon of some notoriety depicting two American Indians standing in the underbrush by the shore of a Caribbean island. From three high-castled ships anchored offshore, boats are rowing toward the beach. In the lead boat, an explorer (presumably Columbus) stands, holding a flag. The caption of the cartoon has one Indian saying to the others something like "now might be a good time to review our immigration policies."
The cartoon strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus' arrival in the New World triggered the greatest völkerwanderung -a vast migration of peoples- in the recorded history of the world. Since then, millions of immigrants from all over the world have made their way to the Americas, and the history of their interaction with those who came before has been checkered at best. Yet, despite all the finger-wagging going on in some quarters, völkerwanderungen themselves are morally neutral phenomena.
For, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even the ethnic group Columbus first identified as “Indians.” If my white ancestors came here as part of the Atlantic migrations, my Indian ancestors arrived here tens, perhaps scores, of thousands of years ago, presumably across the Bering land bridge from Asia, and are still ultimately immigrants. The term "Native American" is thus something of a misnomer, a fact Canada recognizes by designating her Indians and Inuit as "First Peoples."
Still, by the time the first Europeans reached America -whenever that may have been, but certainly well before Columbus- the Indians of the Americas had established a lengthy tenure of occupation. The Americas were not -as generations of schoolchildren were once taught- an empty wilderness, but a landmass populated by a mass of humanity more diverse by far than Europe itself. By 1492, the social development of the Americas ranged from primitive hunter-gathering groups through complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America and the Méxica peoples, to the South American empire whose Inca inhabitants knew it as Tahuantinsuyu, the Four Quarters of the World.
Within two centuries, all of this had gone. The westward migration triggered by Columbus' voyages had grown from trickle to flood. Wave after wave of migration, particularly to the settlement colonies of British North America, coupled with superior weapons technology (coupled with a disturbing European willingness to use it), superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- tipped the balance decisively in favor of the pale invaders from across the water.
Thus the history, and thus the deeply conflicted emotions that swirl around any October 12 observance. Is it Columbus Day? Is it Dia de La Raza/Day of the Race? Is it Indigenous Peoples Day? Whatever one calls it, October 12 can be relied upon to pit the Sons of Italy celebrating one of their own against Native American groups calling attention to what has been called "half-a-millennium of resistance."
Despite the facile characterization of the pale people as eager perpetrators of “genocide,” we should be chary of attaching such a label to what transpired in the Western Hemisphere. Though the statistics of morbidity among indigenous peoples are certainly the statistics of apparent genocide, we need to be aware that genocide, in international law, is a specific intent crime, i.e., the deliberate extermination of a particular prople, in whole or in part. Though we may be appalled at the morbidity statistics, the evidence suggests that the butcher’s bill was inflicted as the result of negligence, inattention, and a lack of knowledge rather than as the result of deliberate policy, and thus does not rise to the level of genocide as that term is understood in international law.
Thus, as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in that no-man's-land to which moderates and truth-seekers -and indeed, most of us- are exiled. Do we celebrate the human achievement of the explorers and the immigrants, or do we weep for our Indian ancestors? Do we call attention to the evils the explorers so often brought in their wake, or do we celebrate the achievements of our First Forebears?
The answer is: all of the above. We cannot reverse the pragmatic sanction of history; the völkerwanderung that brought my European forebears to the Americans is as irreversible as that which brought my Indian ancestors to this place. The peoples have mixed too much to separate them; the rate of intermarriage among the Cherokee, for example, is close to 100 percent. Now is no longer an opportune time for the Indians in the underbrush of the New Yorker cartoon to discuss immigration policy. The invaders cannot be marched back onto their Nãos, caravels and Mayflowers, their Susan Constants, their Godspeeds, and their Discoverys and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have also become part of this land.
Nor can we forget the other ramifications which have preceded from a biological phenomenon which has become known as the Columbian Exchange. Without the Columbian Exchange, the cuisines of Europe would be innocent of such now-integral foods and stimulants as the potato, the tomato, corn (which the British, who cannot seem to handle their own language, use to describe the grain properly known as “wheat.”) chocolate, vanilla, and tobacco. Similarly, without the Columbian Exchange, the tables of the New World would entirely lack such staples as citrus fruits, apples, bananas, mangoes, onions, wheat, rice, and that staple of insomniacs everywhere, coffee. Indeed, until the arrival of Hernán Cortés, the horse, which had originated in what is now North America but had become extinct there, had been unknown to the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.
Moreover, while the pale invaders from across the water must take responsibility for such diseases as the measles, the emergence of syphilis, which for almost four centuries cut a horrifying swath across Europe, can be laid at the door of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. In short, the Columbian Exchange, like so many other phenomena throughout history, in the end must be accounted morally neutral. We should be foolish indeed to judge either Christopher Columbus or the Columbian Exchange by the purportedly modern standards of the 21st century. As Winston Churchill observed in 1938, in our own time, “we have seen archbishops pistolled in the nape of the neck in the warm, bluntly lighted corridors of modern prison.” We have seen women and children machine gunned and hacked to death in their scores, hundreds, and thousands. We possess the capacity to extinguish all life on this planet. We thus have little claim to vaunt some kind of superior civilization to that in which Christopher Columbus lived.
The invasion of the pale people from across the water has been a success. Generations of interpenetration have produced a people that like mythic Coyote -the culture hero of many tribes- is one of shape-shifters. Millions of Americans carry the blood of both sides in their veins; millions of us are at once both the invading European and the resistant Indian. In a time of shape-shifting and mixing, Columbus Day, or Encounter Day, like Coyote, must be a shape-shifter. It must be an occasion for celebrating the nobility of the exploring spirit, but also for reflection on the duties we all owe to one another as common human inhabitants of the place we all call home.
As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus/Encounter Day and every day to what our communities are telling us. We are a coalition -a movement- composed of communities and tribes and lineages of every sort and condition. We march with labor, but also support the right of Indians to be accounted as first class citizens of the commonwealth. We confess many faiths, and none at all. We acknowledge the right of many Americans of faith to oppose marriage equality within the context of their own churches, but we also insist that America's queerfolk be treated as first class citizens, too. We embrace inclusiveness, knowing that ours is the harder choice and the nobler path, one from which the fearful of change turn away.
Columbus/Encounter Day has become a paradox, laden with so many layers to deconstruct the debate will continue long after those currently engaged in it have passed out of this world. It is part of our larger American paradox, in which, as Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski once observed, "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, [and] the future frightens us...." Whose day is Columbus Day? Whose day is Encounter Day? It is all of our day, on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday, we need to reflect on who we are, where we've been, and where we're going.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is a pale, European-looking, attorney. He lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council. Thanks to an Act of Congress only a lawyer could love, and the fact that he lives on Indian leased land, his government considers him an Indian living on a Res. Go figure. The views herein are his own, not those of any jurisdiction, agency, entity, club, or other organization, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
This post is a revision of an earlier post published at this time last year. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
