Indigenous People's Day
Obviously I can’t go too deep about the essence of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and what it represents to the original settlers of our lands. I’m only an ally to their worlds. They own all rights and exercises in philosophic exposition. As with the Black Lives Matter movement, I can merely provide tangential discussion of its effects on whiteboy culture, and how it’s related to our marking of Columbus Day.
Columbus Day is an honorarium for an Italian explorer who supposedly ‘discovered’ a new world, one which already had human beings living there. In fact, he never step foot on the North American continent, he only made it as far as the Caribbean. Norse Vikings were in the vicinity long before Columbus, and well before that, Pan-Asian migrants likely crossed a Bering Sea land bridge in Alaska, then spread south and colonized the Americas, eventually becoming human tribes we now title as Native, Central, and South Americans. How did Columbus get so much undeserved credit, you might wonder? Because he was a figurehead for European expansion.
Though the Chinese are thought to have first brought gunpowder, explosives, and cannon ordnance to pre-industrial world order through Mongol invasions of early Europe, it was Turkish and Mediterranean Anglo-Saxon tribes who took those ideas and developed advancements eventually enabling them to perpetuate westward imperialism in conquering Indigenous cultures.
Harvard scholars claim the voyages of Columbus are still deserving of study, as he initiated what they call the Columbian Exchange, a turning point in world history, where the planet got a lot smaller as a mass exodus from Europe took place, spreading populations, cultures, religions, and diseases outward. They are, however, quick to point out he ought not to be celebrated or commemorated, as he’s the man who launched the first salvos at Native Americans, including genocide, enslavement, and forced conversion to Catholicism.
Many Italian Americans get pissy about ending the celebration of Columbus Day. They think it marginalizes Italian immigrant contributions to American history. They’re not focused on the brutalities perpetuated on peoples of color by their ancestors. They’d prefer recognizing the illusory glories of discovery. Well, sure. Who wouldn’t? As an Italian American myself, I must confess I have zero attachment to the sentiment of Columbus being a pioneer of imperialism or his mythic status. His place in history has no value to me despite me growing up in a staunchly Italian home. My family was more likely to laud Italian entities like the papacy, Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, a handful of Renaissance artists, and my grandfather’s northern Italian heritage in Florence, than touting the significance of imperial Italian explorers.
Italy had no shortage of men who, like most all other tribal whiteboys, were often looking to rank high in expansionism efforts and didn’t mind doing the dirty deeds to get there. Julius Caesar, Marco Polo, Benito Mussolini, and yes, Christopher Columbus, were all murdering, Italian bastards.
Giving up Columbus Day and replacing it with Indigenous People’s Day is another necessary rewrite in the archives of true world history.
17 states in the United States have officially recognized Indigenous People’s Day in some manner, including Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii (they call it Discoverer’s Day on the islands), Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin. Washington D.C. and about 130 different American cities also mark Indigenous People’s Day. Here in my home state, on October 9th, 2023, Governor Newsom finally proclaimed October 9th as Indigenous People’s Day in California.
I imagine not many of us whiteboys know Native Americans created democracy long before Europeans did. It’s true. Some tribes were practicing democratic principle nearly a thousand years before the Italian slaver accidentally stumbled upon the Caribbean islands. Our founding white fathers invited the council chiefs of what was then known as the Iroquois (Haudensaumee) Confederacy to the Continental Congress meeting in 1776, more famously known as the birth event for the Declaration of Independence. They invited them because the Iroquois were practitioners of what was the oldest democracy on the planet.
The Iroquois emblem, the Tree of Peace, signifies the tribe’s longstanding form of inter-tribal cooperation, where their warriors ‘buried their hatchets’ (yes, that’s where the phrase comes from) under a great white pine tree and an eagle was set on top to watch over their agreed upon communal governance. As a matter of fact, our official Seal of the United States represents their founding contributions to our fledgling little imperial conquest of North America. You know the one, it’s on many of our coins, the bald eagle holding the e pluribus unum banner in its beak (the Latin meaning? Of many becomes one.), its claws holding an olive branch and a bundle of arrows respectively. That comes straight from the Haudensaunee tribes, where they believed one arrow was weak, but many arrows united were strong. We ripped off whatever we could from Indigenous peoples. When we couldn’t peacefully mesh with differing cultures (a near one hundred percent fractional), we took them over by force and appropriated whatever we wanted for ourselves.
Letting go of our commemorations born in blood is part of the process of acknowledging the fallacies of all the institutions and social structures created from ruling class supremacy. Tradition does not outclass truth. Whiteboys will ultimately have to change nearly everything about their cursory understandings of history to forge a sustainable future for true coexistence with other peoples. In the long epochs of the corporeal universe, tradition won’t win out against history. History can wait us out.
Humans don’t particularly like being reminded they’re small potatoes in the galactic scheme of things. That’s why so many think The Big Guy created us in his own image. We like to think we’re more important than we actually may be in the big picture. Humans have a fascinating obsession with grandeur. I may be prone to exploring that exaggeration than many, I admit. Who wants to think we’re just an anthill with a colony of irrelevant ants swarming all over each other? I don’t think we’re irrelevant, far from it. All sentient life has a place in this reality and the realities that lie beyond.
We might be toward the back of the line, admittedly.
Indigenous peoples deserve much, much more than a Monday off the work week. We all like three-day weekends. Columbus Day ain’t worth the price.
That’s all this whiteboy is gonna say about that.
Talk with your local Indigenous tribe’s spokespeople for more information
*Compiled from October 17, 2020