OCTOBER 12, 2020 – Federally, today is officially Columbus Day, named after the mariner who “sailed the ocean blue in 1492.” A number of blue states and cities, however, have decided this is all wrong. They’ve re-dubbed it, “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
I’m in favor of calling it simply, “October 12.”
First, Columbus did not “discover” the New World. The “discoverers” were hunters who crossed from Asia via the land-bridge after the last Ice Age (i.e. as a matter of anthropological evidence, there were no “indigenous people” here to greet them). By the time Leiv Eirikssen’s team—the first Europeans—arrived, circa 1000 C. E., the “New World” was very “old hat” to descendants of the first discoverers. It was another 500 years before Columbus’s first voyage to what is now Hispaniola.
Second, Columbus Day itself has a sketchy history. In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison made a one-time proclamation of “Columbus Day,” not so much to honor Chris as to tamp down furor among Italian-Americans in the wake of lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans. Not until 1968 did Columbus Day become a national holiday.
Third, in their push to make Columbus Day a federal holiday, Italian-Americans conveniently ignored the fact that their man was sailing under a Spanish flag (after having been turned down by the Portuguese). Columbus was in it for the money and he needed a royal sponsor in order to put up major at-risk capital. Ferdinand and Isabella—not Italy (which wouldn’t come into national existence for yet another 400 years)—were the venture capitalists behind the whole adventure.
We now know that Columbus’s contact with the western hemisphere “went viral”; that he was no Sunday school teacher in his treatment of the people he “discovered.” None of his bad behavior from today’s “woke” perspective alters the two basic facts of his adventures: 1. He was a master at dead-reckoning navigation—sailing from a known position to another point on the open ocean, using only estimates of speed and course over a given time—but so were the Vikings and the Polynesians such experts; and 2. An awful lot of conquest—strike that; a lot of awful conquest followed in his footsteps . . . er, wake . . . and yet—we white Americans sit atop the beneficial culmination of all the fruits of that conquest.
So, what to do about the name day of that Genoese mariner who sailed for Spain, ignorant of a world that had been “discovered” long before his discovery? Erase the man along with his day? Take it a step further and rename Columbus Circle, “Indigenous Peoples’ Circle” and call Columbia University, “Indigenous Peoples’ University”? Those “radical” changes might establish white “wokeness,” but unless woke whites are prepared to abandon ship altogether, such substitutions would be empty gestures.
We cannot “turn back the clock,” undo smallpox, roll-back forced conversions, or erase crimes against humanity.
What we can do is read, understand, and acknowledge what came before us so as to understand better our current predicaments and navigate better into the future.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
