Cristoval Colon was born to a respectable family in Genoa, Italy in 1451. As the proclaimed father of the New World, he landed in the Americas in 1492. Over half a millennium has passed, but a holiday in his honor is still celebrated, every second Monday in October. The federal holiday is often marked with a parade, as it was in New York City this year. This year, Mayor Bloomberg was embroiled in controversy over this jovial Columbus Day parade because Italian-Americans fumed at Bloomberg for wanting to march with two members of the Sopranos' cast. This story dominated the headlines. Is this all that was wrong with a parade on Columbus Day? In fact, the real question should have been whether there should be a Columbus Day at all.
Christopher Columbus was not a hero, but today we depict him as one in our history books. His supposed bravery and skills of exploration led to the birth of the so-called New World. Rarely do we hear the true story of genocide, and of his imperialist legacy. While we celebrate Columbus Day, there is no holiday for the celebration of the indigenous people of this land, whether they come from the Haida, Navajo, Huron, Apache or any other tribe. There is almost no recognition of the expulsion of these peoples from their lands and homes. Rarely does one mention the religious zeal in Canada and the United States that forced Native Americans into residential schools.
The oppressive nature of Columbus' exploration must be recognized, but this does not preclude a proud nation from rising today. However, we cannot continue to skew murder and slavery into acts of heroism. An accurate understanding of the past is important but our history is written by the victors who conquered, rather than by the victims who were vanquished. Today, Aboriginal peoples live in relative obscurity, and are rarely recognized, but they number over four million according to the latest census, and there are still dozens of tribes which persist to this day. It is a testament to the will of these peoples to maintain their presence after attempts at wholesale annihilation, forced expulsion and oppression of aboriginal cultures.
However, the oppression of the past still resonates today. Native Americans have the highest poverty rate of any ethnic group, at 25.9 percent. A remarkable 27 percent of Native Americans are without health insurance, in comparison to 11.6 percent of whites. Yet, it is history's repression of Aboriginal cultures, traditions and languages that is most blatant when discussing the maltreatment of Native Americans.
In both Canada and America, Native Americans were actively repressed from expressing any element of their culture. Only in 1978 was a resolution passed in the House, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which permitted Native Americans to practice their religion. In Canada, the most prominent Christian churches are settling lawsuits with First Nations peoples who were abused while attending residential schools. Residential schools administered by several Christian churches were part of an attempt by the Canadian government and Canadian society to assimilate Native Americans. Many Aboriginals, considered wards of the state, were forced to attend these schools, and were punished if they spoke their mother tongues while they studied there. This system of apartheid education persisted well into the 1960s, and many Native Americans were not only demeaned by the racist attempt to purge them of their culture, but many were also physically and sexually abused.
Only today are the Canadian government, churches and the society at large coming to grips with the magnitude of the tragedy. This tragedy, however, is not an aberration and is endemic of the treatment at the hands of North American society since the arrival of the famed Columbus.
The ethnic cleansing of Native Americans was apparent even to Presidents as far back as Andrew Jackson, who in 1830 in his first annual address to Congress stated: "Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for awhile their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the states does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity."
While recognizing the ethnic cleansing of the past, President Jackson issued an ultimatum, based on this history, to the Native Americans (primarily the Cherokee people) to cease being Native Americans or be forcefully expelled to a sliver of land in Mississippi. What eventually happened in Georgia to the Cherokees was only symptomatic of the severity with which Native Americans were treated. Perhaps it is true that the Native Americans were not imbued with the words of Socrates, inspired by the arts of the Renaissance or propelled by the technology of European civilization. While to some Christopher Columbus represents those facets of Western civilization, he is in fact representative of an imperialist legacy that left in its wake a Native American society which is only a shadow of what it was before their cultural "liberation" that began with the arrival of the Santa Maria. Taufiq Rahim is a Wilson School major from W. Vancouver, British Columbia. He can be reached at trahim@princeton.edu.
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