I will, carefully, briefly, touch upon the marking of Indigenous People’s Day, because I noted its passage back in October of 2020 during the scribbling of this diatribe, and it happened to fit within the broad parameters of whiteboyism.
I can’t go too deep about its essence and what it represents to the original settlers of our land. 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 ‘discovered’ a new world which already had humans living there. That on top of the fact Norse Vikings step foot on North American shores long before Columbus did. And well before that, Pan-Asian migrants crossed an icy 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. Insofar as our penned record is concerned, he who carries the biggest stick writes the history books.
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 white tribes who took those ideas and ran with them, developing advancements eventually enabling them to set watermarks for 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 and cultures (and diseases) outward. They are, however, quick to point out he ought not to be celebrated or commemorated, as he’s the dude 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 whiteboy imperialism or his whitewashed 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 dudes who, like any other tribal whites, 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.
Only 14 states in the U.S. have either added Indigenous People’s Day to their calendars or transitioned and renamed Columbus Day entirely to Indigenous People’s Day: Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii (they call it Discoverer’s Day on the islands), Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin. Washington D.C. and about 130 different American cities also mark Indigenous People’s Day.
On October 9th, 2023, just a few months ago, Governor Newsom finally got off his ass and proclaimed October 9th as Indigenous People’s Day in California. Long overdue.
I imagine not many of us whiteboys know Native Americans created democracy long before Euro trash did. It’s true. Some tribes were practicing democratic principle nearly a thousand years before the Italian bozo 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. See? We ripped off whatever we could from Indigenous peoples. They had their shit together long before we did. When we couldn’t peacefully mesh with differing cultures, we simply 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, I daresay, the realities that lie beyond, but we might be toward the back of the line, admittedly.
Indigenous peoples deserve a shit load more than a Monday off the work week. Christopher Columbus didn’t step foot on this continent. The closest he got to North America was the Bahamas. He set out to find a route to East Asia for silk and spices and settled for Indigenous slaves.
We all like three-day weekends. Columbus Day ain’t worth the price.
That’s all this whiteboy can say about that.
Talk with your local Indigenous tribe’s spokespeople for more information.
*Compiled from October 17, 2020