Columbus Day, 2009

By John Ballard

This may be the year of collapse for the Great Columbus Day Mythology. Cracks have been forming for years but revisionist history this year is like the bursting of a dam. 

Five years ago I came across this at Thanksgiving and commented at the time that it would have implications for Columbus Day as well.

Dad: What was the name of the Indian who met the Europeans?

Grace: Uh ... Samoset?

Dad: Very good. Where did he come from?

Grace: Maine!

Dad: Uh huh. Who were his people?

Grace: That's easy. Us! The Abenakis.

Dad: Uh huh. You are related to Samoset. What were the Europeans doing?

Grace: Uh ... Waiting for Samoset?

Dad: Nope. Grave robbing. They were hungry. They were opening Pautuxet graves and eating the spirit food, the maize.

Grace: Ick. So where was Squanto?

Dad: He was living with the Wampanoags. Samoset reported the Europeans to the Pautuxet and Wampanoag sachems, then he returned to the Kennebec settlements.

Grace: How did Samoset know what to do?

Dad: The Abenakis had starved out the English at a place they call Popham.

Grace: Oh. I remember they all waggled their butts at Verrazano.

Dad: He he. So, at school this year, have they tried to make you do anything stupid this year?

Grace: No.

I just checked and found that Grace is now a teen and Dad has decided to wait a few more years before telling her some of the deeper secrets of their tragic heritage.

Germans celebrate their liberation from the National Socialist Regime, and from nationalism. European, and Euro-American civilization was liberated from cannibalism as theology forty years after the onset of the Conquest, the works of Christobol Colombo, Catalan navigator and slaver. Rather than defending Columbus, and ignoring the enormous step forward their culture accomplished abandoning human cannibalism as a theology and creating the basis for International Law and the protection of the rights, not of other European Princes momentarily defeated in dynastic wars, but of the most abject humans on the face of the earth, they would better appreciate the value of their culture by looking, not at a Catalan, but at two Bulls and what they meant, and continue to mean.

It remains important to the present day. At the core of the Marshall Trilogy, the "dependent" construct, was the removal of Indians, not from any place in particular, but from access to courts other than those of the state claiming to exercise the right of discovery, a claim made in Inter Caetera of 4 May 1493, and at its perverse bottom, Rehnquist's "Oliphant" of 1978 argues that because Indians are outside the faith of Jesus Christ, they ought not have jurisdiction over Christians, and their courts overthrown and brought to the faith itself.

Michael Wade, whose fertile sense of inquiry is forever asking pertinent questions aimed at provoking other people to think, picked up a WSJ piece and wanted to know What Happened to Columbus Day?  That august publication looked around the country through its business-focused pinz-nez, side-swiping Aboriginal angst with a why-can't-they-pull-up-their-socks attitude, treating bruised Italian-American egos with as much attention as the vanishing Native American remnants whose roots were growing in the New World even as Rome was being sacked by Vandals.

Columbus's defenders aren't prepared to watch their hero's holiday sail off the edge of the earth. They say he should be celebrated for risking his life to explore the world and for forging modern ties between Europe and the Americas.

His supporters acknowledge Columbus took slaves back to Spain and opened the door to conquistadors who killed Native Americans. But much of the criticism is built on "judging a 16th century man by 21st century standards," says Dona De Sanctis of the Order Sons of Italy in America, a group of half a million Italian-Americans that tries to defend Columbus' legacy.

At Brown University, the rename-the-holiday activists "stressed this was against Columbus, but not Italian-Americans," says Reiko Koyama, a junior who led the effort to persuade the school to change the name to "Fall Weekend." Brown happens to be in Rhode Island, a state with the largest proportion of Italian-Americans in the U.S.

So what's a few slaves gonna matter?
Why can't these people just Get. Over. It.???

Anybody notice last week's piece about the First Lady's roots? Seems like there is a lot of interest in the history of slavery, who did it, when and why.  And who might be today's beneficiaries? Did someone say "reparations"? No. Not me.

And by the way, it's still going on. 

This morning's post at Truthout Blog is worth a serious look. In The Myth of "America" Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola have composed a litany of Columbus Day factoids and stories, unfortunately without links. But for the concerned reader there is enough content to poke the intellect and inspire some serious Googling. Descendants of immigrants from other parts of the world might want to do some homework between this year and next. That means everyone without indiginous roots.  I predict that by next year this zit will start to bust.

In "A People's History of the United States," celebrated historian Howard Zinn describes how Arawak men and women emerged from their villages to greet their guests with food, water and gifts when Columbus landed at the Bahamas. But Columbus wanted something else. "Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise," he wrote to the king and queen of Spain in 1503.

Rather than gold, however, Columbus only found slaves when he arrived on his second visit with seventeen ships and over 1,200 men. Ravaging various Caribbean islands, Columbus took natives as captives as he sailed. Of these he picked 500 of the best specimens and shipped them back to Spain. Two hundred of these died en route, while the survivors were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town where they landed.

The reader might want to check out the You Tube collection.
This one caught my attention.

?When you do a You Tube search, look for the tab "Uploaded: This week"   There is a drop-down menu which sorts the thumbnails by day, week, month or anytime. When I last checked there were over five hundred uploads for Columbus Day this week. Look carefully at the thumbnails and find out when they were uploaded and how many times they have been viewed.?