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. Perhaps we should call the commemoration by the more neutral, more fitting, title of Encounter Day.
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Cathedral City, October 12, 2020- Today was traditional Columbus Day. It is theoretically supposed to commemorate the achievement of Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator (and possible Sephardic Jew) who, by sailing across the Atlantic in the late summer and early fall of the Year of Grace 1492, proved what had long been believed and generally accepted in European thought: the sphericity of the earth. Italy and Spain both named warships for the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and there have been a raft of ocean liners named for him as well.
Commemoratively named warships and ocean liners 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 other something like "now might be a good time to review our immigration policies."
Yet, after 500 years, it is too late for the native people in the underbrush to review immigration policies. Now in the last generation, there is been a great deal of white liberal guilt, pearl clutching, handwringing, and revisionist history that has arisen around October 12, the Day of the Race, Columbus Day, or, as politically correct legislative bodies around the country now wish to call it, Indigenous People’s day.
Permit me to suggest that if we must rename the commemoration of the arrival of Columbus’ Flota (or maybe with just three ships, it merits being described as a flotilla) at San Salvador in the Bahamas, we should perhaps try to commemorate the encounter itself, and refer to October 12 not by some Eurocentric, triumphalist description as Columbus Day, or by some politically correct moniker such as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but by the more neutral and more historically just appellation of “Encounter Day,” even as we remember the New Yorker cartoon with its Indians along the shoreline discussing the importance of reviewing their immigration policies.
The cartoon in question strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus' arrival in/encounter with 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 Americans are all 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. Of course, we should remember that the tenure of European occupation in the Western Hemisphere did not begin with the Colombian Encounter on October 12, 1492. In fact, we cannot know when the Europeans first encountered the Western Hemisphere. Some suggest that there may have been Egyptian, Carthaginian, or Roman expeditions to what is now the New World. Irish tradition has it that St. Brendan sailed to the New World with 15 monastic companions in an Irish curragh sometime in the early part of the sixth century.
More reliable, archaeologically-backed research indicates that the first European encounter with the Americas which we have a strong empirical basis to believe actually happened was that of Bjarni Herjólfsson in the year 986. Originally chronicled in the Norse Groenlandinga Saga, Herjólfsson’s voyage has been lent credence by the archaeological evidence of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the island of Newfoundland. Established around the year 1000, L’Anse aus Meadows, together with the Norse settlements in Greenland, establishes a European tenure of occupation in the Americas stretching back more than a thousand years.
No matter whose tradition one accepts, the history of the European-American encounter is more complex and more nuanced than our politically correct historical revisionists might like to believe. The Americas were not -as generations of American 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 of the Colombian Encounter, all of this had gone. The westward migration, the völkerwanderung 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: Norwegian scholar Helge Ingstad once declared that Columbus had succeeded largely because he and his fellows had firearms.), Superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- together with firearms and edged weapons of Toledo steel, 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, or Encounter Day, as I prefer to call it, 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 from Europe 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 as defined by Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the concept of genocide, is itself a specific intent crime, i.e., the deliberate, non-negligent, non-accidental, extermination of a particular people, 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, or even aboard the White Star liner Oceanic, which brought my Limerick-born Irish grandmother across the Atlantic in 1913, and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have, as much as the bones of the First Nations, 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 (a word 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, brilliantly 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, or his contemporaries the Méxica tlatoani Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, or the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac, 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 Burkean conservatives and Gladstonian liberals, and as Democrats, 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. . And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between....." Whose day is Columbus Day? Whose day is Indigenous Peoples' Day? Whose day is Encounter Day? It belongs to all of us, a day on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday or commemoration, 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 in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council, And practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. 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 in the year 2016 and modified and republished every October 12th since then. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
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