Summary: Every year at Columbus 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 is, and will always remain, a paradox.
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By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, October 12, 2016- today is traditional Columbus Day. Two days was Columbus Day as officially observed, curiously coinciding with Double Ten, the anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that overthrew Imperial China’s Qing Dynasty. Today members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an ocean liner (and sister to the ill-fated Andrea Doria) were named. The Spanish remember him as Cristóbal Colón, the adelantado, Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies, after whom two cruisers were named, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who only built one of them.
There is 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 other 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.
Yet, 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 its Inca inhabitants called 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." 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 Naos, 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.
The invasion 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, 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.
Indeed, out of the Columbian encounter and the Columbian exchange that ineluctably followed it has come not merely an exchange -or at least a migration- of populations, but also an exchange of biodiversity as well. In 1492, the cuisine of Europe was innocent of any experience of such things as corn (by which I mean maize, not the grain which the British, who seemed unable to handle the English language, call corn and which the rest of the world calls wheat), tomatoes, potatoes, certain types of chile, vanilla, and those three essentials of decadent sex, chocolate, tobacco, and rubber. By the same token, the kitchens of America lacked citrus fruits, apples, mangoes, rice, onions, wheat, and that great staple of jittery people everywhere, coffee. Today, the Columbian exchange means that all of these foods have a place in the kitchens and on the dining tables of both Europe and the Americas.
But more to the point, the Columbian exchange ultimately produced on this continent “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Abraham Lincoln suggested so movingly at Gettysburg. And indeed, without Columbus, and before him, the Viking explorers, that new nation could never have come into being. And in a sense, that is the historical trade-off we have little choice but to accept. Our forebears did indeed bring forth on this continent a new nation.
And if that new nation did not initially live up to the grandeur of its conception, it still bequeathed to the world heritage of ongoing revolution. The American example has made a tour of the world; every national liberation struggle on the planet for the last 200 years has been a descendent of our American Revolution. Padre Hidalgo in Mexico, the angry, famished, Parisians who stormed the Bastille, Ilyich at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg, Gandhiji in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and a whole host of other revolutionaries bear some measure of debt to the the revolutionary rabble that found its courage and confidence at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill.
Yet a decent regard for the truth compels us to acknowledge that the American nation, conceived though it may have been with grandeur of vision, started life as a deeply flawed society with very real systemic faults. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln was right to refer to this country as “the last, best hope of Earth,” but the emphasis must still be on the word “hope,” as I believe it was for Lincoln himself. For Lincoln, with Jefferson one of the most formidable autodidacts ever to occupy the White House, must surely have been aware of Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker’s observation, repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Across more than 500 years, the long arc of our moral universe has bent toward justice, often imperceptibly and incrementally. The society we called forth on this continent has had to deal forthrightly and was often difficult honesty of self and purpose with its twin original sins of dispossession and slavery. For the arc of our moral universe to bend toward justice, we have had to dare to visualize and to realize a radical vision of a society in which everyone is created equal, including our First Peoples. A society in which everyone has a place at the table and an equal opportunity to participate in the life of the body politic.
We’re not there yet. If we are to keep bending that arc of the moral universe toward justice, we have no choice but to do right by those whom we have wronged. The long story of the post-contact encounter between the white migrants and the first peoples is one written in blood and tears. It is a grim tale of violence, dispossession, and the steady falling back of native peoples before the advance of the pale invaders from across the water. We cannot, as I suggested, reverse the pragmatic sanction of events. Yet we can and must insist that everyone, native and newcomer alike, have a place at our national table. Knowing as we do that the bones of the ancestors of both newcomer and native have become a part of this land, we have a responsibility to those ancestors to refrain from doing hurtful things like running pipelines through those sacred spaces which the bones of our ancestors have hallowed, far above our poor power to add or detract.
If we are to get a handle on Columbus Day, we have to be careful not to err too much on either side. Because in a sense, our approach to Columbus Day cannot be one of either/or. We cannot postulate of Columbus Day that it is a grim, zero-sum equation in which we can either speak of the triumph of the exploring spirit represented by Columbus and his voyage or of the history of “genocide,”a problematic term, because Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term in 1944, defined it as the intentional destruction of a people. Indeed, to the extent that some of the statistics of loss among the native peoples are horrifying, they must still be accounted more as negligence than as intentional conduct. Still, when vast swathes of humanity die as a result of absentmindedness, the result is equally horrifying.
Nevertheless, we should probably see Columbus Day, or as some commentators have suggested we call it, and as I tend to prefer, Encounter Day, as both a time to commemorate the European exploring spirit that enlarged the frontiers of Europe but also immeasurably enlarged the frontiers of the human mind, as well as a time to acknowledge and do penance for the horrors the European explorers so incontinently set in train. This Day of the Encounter should be a time for introspection without recrimination. It should be a time to teach and the time to learn, a time, as the Buddhist sangha might say to us, to meditate and seek enlightenment.
As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus 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 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? It is 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.
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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 “revise and extend” of an earlier post published at this time last year. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
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