Ok, we’re doing Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day thoughts. Hold on tight.
1. Columbus did bad things.
Controversial, I know, but the things Columbus did to indigenous peoples? Bad. Product of his time? Sure, in ways. Shaped the modern world, leading to pretty much all of our lives being what they are? Yes. The things he did to the people in the land where he landed? Bad. Columbus did bad things, past the point where he can be celebrated, especially since you can so easily pivot to exploration in general if the idea is to celebrate exploration, and to other significant Italian-Americans if the idea is to celebrate Italian-Americans.
2. This used to be a big thing for Italian-Americans.
The Washington Post has a good primer on the day’s history. It’s ignored a lot how significant anti-Italian discrimination was. Not trying to play the comparison game, but Italian-Americans were treated poorly for a long time in the United States. The same was true of other largely Catholic bases of immigrants, including Irish-Americans, but Irish-Americans get to keep having St. Patrick’s Day because St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration of Ireland and Columbus Day is, at its most benign and worst, a celebration of a whitewashed version of European expansion across the globe.
You picked the wrong guy, Italian-Americans. And I don’t think anyone’s going to let you change this to Mario Day.
3. There’s probably room for just talking about this all.
I’ve never heard anyone offer a serious explanation of the alternative to Columbus “discovering” America and all the things that followed. It seems like the ideal version would be that humanity would have advanced far enough that things like enslavement and rape and murder wouldn’t have been things people did, and that exploration would have reflected that. This isn’t what happened, though (we have yet to advance that far, even in the United States), and it wasn’t the case, and there’s good that came from the explorations of Columbus and his contemporaries and also a lot of bad, and the prevalent narrative at least I was taught as a kid, in public school in the peripheral suburbs of Chicago, was one that absolutely treated Native Americans as less than human beings, because it mentioned kind of off-handedly all the terrible things that happened to Native Americans after Columbus’s arrival and then we went and colored in the outlines of conquistadors and their adjacents.
In other words, there’s probably room for this to be a day of some mourning, and a day of some celebration, and a day of a lot more education than currently happens and way more good-faith conversation than currently happens. We should probably be able to agree on a “it’s good to explore and economic growth is good but people should be treated well” take. Instead, we get some people trying to deny Columbus’s sins and others pretending that things like enslavement and rape and murder didn’t exist in the Americas pre-European influence, with plenty other emotional reactions between those two extremes, some justified (indigenous people being pissed about Columbus being celebrated is the most reasonable reaction of all reactions to Columbus Day), some not justified (if you use the word “cancel” regarding Columbus you’re not actually doing anything to help solve the problem you’re ostensibly concerned about).
4. You could celebrate both.
No, not Columbus and Indigenous Peoples. But you could celebrate both immigrants and Americans. That’s the thing America’s supposed to be, right? A nation of immigrants? A place people come to make life better? And the problem with that is that in doing that, the first settlers did some terrible things to the people who were already here, chief among them the basic idea that they took all the land for themselves, whatever it took. A broad “Immigrants’ Day” would be more productive than Columbus Day (especially in reminding a lot of Americans of their immigrant roots, since that’s evidently gone out of vogue again in certain circles). A broad “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” is also a great idea, and it’s cool that that’s becoming more of a thing. We grapple with slavery and civil rights. Imperfectly, sure, but we grapple with it. We don’t grapple enough with what we—and I say we to refer to white Americans, the most powerful bloc in the country and one of which I’m a part—did to the people who were here first, and in a lot of ways continue to do. (Travel to a reservation sometime.)
5. Honesty is good, and so is history, and the latter is better with the former.
Just because you were taught one story doesn’t mean it’s true. The importance of studying history is learning from it, and you learn more from studying the truth.
6. Mario Day might already exist, now that I think of it.
It would not be a surprise.
