Tag Archives: Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Discovery and Exploration, History and Historians, Liberal Arts

Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Revisited

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Peter Feinman does important work promoting the study of New York history. It is important to give him his due. That said, a number of recent posts on his blog touching upon subjects relevant to Native American history struck me as particularly disappointing.

Over the past couple of weeks, Feinman has offered his thoughts on the Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day controversy. As many readers will no doubt recognize, a growing number of states, municipalities, and other organizations have replaced their celebration of Columbus Day with recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Drawing upon the language used in newspaper coverage, Feinman sees this process as insufficiently respectful. Columbus Day has not been replaced by Indigenous Peoples’ Day. No. It has been “dumped” and “ditched.” In the second installment, posted on May 30 and available here, Feinman describes the origins of America’s reverence for Columbus in myth, memory, and history. There is some useful information here. Feinman argues that “the issue of Columbus is very much connected to the culture wars that are currently dividing America.”

You almost get the impression that if Columbus had not sailed the ocean blue in 1492 that Europeans, smallpox, and genocide would never have occurred and that the United States would not even exist as a country, since there would have been no one here to declare independence from England.

There is in Feinman’s post the familiar expression of concerns about matters “politically correct.” For instance, Feinman writes that “just as it is now illegal to dance to the music of Michael Jackson, laugh at a joke by Woody Allen, or watch anything involving a #MeToo person,” so “Columbus is to be cleansed from our midst.” The message these efforts send, Feinman says, is that “it is incumbent on Americans to purify the country of its sins and the stains on the social fabric.” If you read my blog with any regularity, you know I find these arguments unpersuasive. To call something “politically correct,” it seems to me, is the intellectual equivalent of calling someone a Communist in the 1950s. It is an indication that you are not interested in debate and, too often, that you are uninterested in talking about the historical experience of peoples on the margins.

In the third installment, Feinman objects to uncritical use of the word “indigenous,” which he believes has conveyed “the message that there is a global people called Indigenous as if they are a single people.”

When I was growing up I don’t recall hearing the word ‘indigenous’ often. Peoples usually had real names. Sometimes they were their own names, sometimes they were the names other applied to them–Indians, Asians, Egyptians, etc. Now these Eurocentric names are to be banished from polite conversation. People are to be referred to as indigenous no matter where they are in the world. The word “Indigenous” has been weaponized by some white Americans in the culture wars against other white Americans, and imposed on people who had names for themselves and never used the word “Indigenous.” The result is a simpleminded, superficial, bogus term that produces strange results when removed from the American context that created it. Why did the politically correct unleash this weapon?

Uncritical language use is maddening. But I do not believe that this is as big a problem as Feinman says it is. “Indigenous:” the word is commonly used, as Feinman says, but its application is hardly mysterious and hardly mystifying. Its application to native peoples countering “settler colonialism” or good ol’ fashioned imperialism is a salutary development. And look at the language in Feinman’s post. There is talk of weapons unleashed, of prohibition and proscription, of banishment and censorship. I disagree with a lot of this. This is the language of a culture war, indeed. But as a white guy who has taught Native American history for a quarter-century, I have never felt the limitations that seem to run through what Feinman has to say here. I have had debates with many, arguments with others. But that is part of the game. The past is contested, and that includes the language we use to describe it. It is not a war. It is what we do.

I have written about Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the past. As I wrote back in October of 2017, “in Native American history, there are lots of guilty parties, but Christopher Columbus is guiltier than most.” Columbus gets both more credit and more criticism than he deserves as an individual. That said, “there is absolutely nothing edifying in this story of avarice, violence, and religious bigotry, save for the native peoples who at times and places survived the carnage,” and “the continued celebration of Columbus Day does a historical injustice to the native peoples of two continents and the Caribbean.” Nothing Feinman wrote convinced me to change my mind on this matter.

Feinman says much of value about the origins of Columbus Day. He is absolutely correct in pointing out Americans’ uncritical reverence for Columbus, and he provides some interesting examples. Columbus always has been a symbol. He remain a symbol today. The Columbian Encounter, so-called, is the beginning of a horror story for the native peoples of the Americas, North, South, and Central, as well as the indigenous population of the Caribbean, who were quickly destroyed as autonomous peoples by the Spanish newcomers.  Columbus, his supporters might argue, gets too much of the blame.  He did nothing to native peoples in North America because he never set foot on the North American continent.  This much is true, but Columbus has become, and perhaps always has been, a symbol standing in for the “fundamental violence of discovery,” as I class it in the second chapter of Native America. Between the first and second editions of the textbook, one of the many books I read as I worked on revising was Andres Resendez’s excellent The Other Slavery which, among other things, described in detail the centrality of slavery in Columbus’s enterprise.  Columbus carried slaves back to Spain on each of his voyages, and promised the Crown “as many slaves as Their Majesties orders to make.”

Holidays come, and holidays go. Ask any historian. She will tell you that. Commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day does not belittle or demean the western tradition.  What it does do is allow us to pay attention to the experience of those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter. If, after all, any number of people in our nation’s history had had their way, native peoples would be gone: They would have been wiped out by warfare and epidemic and chronic disease; or they would have been “removed” to make way for the “settlers” who championed the rise of Andrew Jackson in the first few decades of the nineteenth century; or confined on tiny reservations until the missionaries and teachers and government farmers wiped away any trace of their identity as native peoples; or assimilated into the American body politic; or “terminated” in the middle decades of the twentieth century, with the reality of their native nations erased by congressional statute.  Indians were supposed to disappear. If any number of people had their way, Native American people would not be here to call for an Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Columbus Day found its origins in discrimination against Italian-American immigrants. We were here from the beginning, Italian-Americans said, and we have as great a claim to this continent as any other group.  The holiday has seldom encouraged any significant and honest discussion of the consequences of the Columbian Encounter, a process which was, as historian Alfred Crosby showed a long time ago, much bigger than Christopher Columbus.  It is time for the bad history and the myth associated with this day to go away, and if recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day helps I am all for it.  Let’s talk about Columbus, to be sure, and the European invasion of America, but let’s do so with our eyes firmly upon those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter.

Current Events

I Read Donald Trump’s Proclamation Commemorating Columbus Day So You Don’t Have To

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When it comes to native peoples, the President has become the Ignoramus-in-Chief, a bigot who issues statement after statement intended to rub salt in the wounds left by a long and traumatic history.  First, there was his reversal of the Obama Administration’s tepid opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline.  Then there is his continuous and mocking derision of Elizabeth Warren, one of his likely opponents in 2020, who he insists on calling “Pocahontas.” And now, his proclamation honoring Columbus Day, without a single reference to the costs paid by the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples in the “Columbian Encounter.”

In 1492, the President claimed, “Columbus and his mighty three-ship fleet…first spotted the Americas.  His historic achievement ushered in the age of discovery that expanded our knowledge of the world.”  The “daring journey” of Columbus, the President continued,

marked the beginning of centuries of transatlantic exploration that transformed the Western Hemisphere. On Columbus Day, we commemorate the achievements of this skilled Italian explorer and recognize his courage, will power, and ambition — all values we cherish as Americans.

Columbus’s spirit of determination and adventure has provided inspiration to generations of Americans. On Columbus Day, we honor his remarkable accomplishments as a navigator, and celebrate his voyage into the unknown expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. His expedition formed the initial bond between Europe and the Americas, and changed the world forever. Today, in that spirit, we continue to seek new horizons for greater opportunity and further discovery on land, in sea, and in space.

Although Spain sponsored his voyage, Columbus was, in fact, a proud citizen of the Italian City of Genoa. As we celebrate the tremendous strides our Nation has made since his arrival, we acknowledge the important contributions of Italian Americans to our country’s culture, business, and civic life. We are also thankful for our relationship with Italy, a great ally that shares our strong, unwavering commitment to peace and prosperity.

That peace and prosperity, historians might point out, came at the expense of a lot of people who were not from Italy, and not from Europe.  Not a single mention of the native peoples, whose loss was the Europeans’ gain.  Not a single mention of disease, die-off, depopulation.  While Trump avoided the open denigration of native peoples that occurred in the racist Columbus Day celebrations written by  Matt Walsh and Rochester radio’s own Bob Lonsberry, his silence is deafening.   This is propaganda of a vile sort, and we historians need to call him on it.

Look, I have posted on this blog in the past my feelings about Indigenous Peoples Day, which you can read here and here. And if you have studied Native American history you know that the President’s proclamation is pure and unadulterated bullshit.  His intent, I suspect, is to be deliberately provocative, to stir up angry and aggrieved whites by “owning the Libs” and pounding on peoples of color.  The forces of Political Correctness, he believes, want to rename the holiday “Indigenous Peoples’ Day They will destroy your heroes, pull down your monuments, make you feel like you are less than a person of color.”  But I am on your side, our Bronze Creon says. It is all part of Trump’s playbook, and we have seen it a hundred times before. There is an ugliness here, reflective of the abiding cruelty that stands as the foundation of today’s Republican Party, a foundation built on white victimhood.  Trump, a product of these politics rather than their creator, plays this dangerous game well.  Trump’s proclamation, an ignorant and unfortunate revision of history that ignores the sufferings the Columbian Encounter initiated, is meant to stir us up and meant to cause pain.  Millions of people died.  Millions more survived as they confronted what a historian long ago called the “Three Horsemen of the Indians’ Apocalypse”: Disease, violence, and dispossession.  Trump understands this very well. He simply does not care.

Discovery and Exploration, History and Historians

Some More Thoughts on Why We Need Indigenous Peoples’ Day

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to apologize for the damage done by residential schools for First Nations children in Newfoundland and Labrador.  He will do so on November 24.  Like many apologies, I suppose, it is not enough to erase the trauma suffered by so many First Nations families. In the end, however, there are limits as to what can be done to address the crimes and the mistakes of the past. Acknowledging, apologizing, and a pledge to learn and never let it happen again: it is incomplete, but much, much better than nothing.

I am inclined to be charitable towards Trudeau, and those Canadians committed to pursuing truth and reconciliation.  My own country, after all, has shown a disturbing and consistent unwillingness to examine much of its history critically, and this tendency has been even more pronounced than usual in the response to the important dialogues surrounding police violence against people of color and the efforts to remove racist Confederate monuments.

Earlier this week I appeared on a local public radio call-in show called “Connections,” hosted by Evan Dawson, on WXXI Rochester. (The audio is here). I was on the show to talk about Native America but also to discuss the growing movement on college campuses and in municipalities across the country to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day every year on the second Monday in October. Peter Jemison, from the Ganondagan State Historic Site, joined me on the program.

This movement, as I pointed out in an earlier post, is viewed as an affront by many Italian-Americans whose ancestors suffered discrimination when they immigrated to this country.  There may be grounds for compromise here, as Father James Martin pointed out earlier this week. “If we abolish #ColumbusDay in favor of #IndigenousPeoplesDay,” he tweeted, “we still need a day to honor Italian-Americans, who were once marginalized. I’d suggest a new name for #ColumbusDay and a new day for #IndigenousPeoplesDay.”  Maybe there is something to be said for this, a compromise.

But the political right has not couched their opposition to Indigenous Peoples’ Day in these terms,and they have shown little interest in compromise or discussion.  Bob Lonsberry, for instance, a long-time conservative radio personality in Rochester, tweeted out last Monday that “other than the birth, death, & resurrection of Jesus, the discovery of the Americas by Columbus was the most important event in human history.” There are a lot of obvious problems with this argument, but this sort of sentiment has been widely embraced on the political right.  Matt Walsh, a columnist for The Blaze who tweets @MattWalshBlog, told his many followers to not “let anyone tell you it’s wrong to celebrate the great men who built our civilization.”  Kurt Schlichter, another pundit aggressively active on Twitter, said that “the European conquest of the Americas was history’s greatest achievement.”  The Daily Wire posted an incredibly racist and offensive video, since removed from their site with apologies from the editor, depicting the Americas in 1491 as a land of savagery, cannibalism, and superstition that was refined and civilized by Christopher Columbus.

And the President, our Bronze Creon, proclaimed that

“the permanent arrival of Europeans to the Americas was a transformative event that undeniably and fundamentally changed the course of human history and set the stage for the development of our great Nation. Therefore, on Columbus Day, we honor the skilled navigator and man of faith, whose courageous feat brought together continents and has inspired countless others to pursue their dreams and convictions — even in the face of extreme doubt and tremendous adversity.”

Not one mention of native peoples.  We are witnessing a reaction against the very notion that native peoples have a place in this story that is worth remembering and retelling.

Indeed, assertions such as these, like all assertions based upon shoddy historical reasoning, I find deeply troubling for a number of reasons.  First, they completely deny the enormous human consequences of European imperialism and colonialism in the Americas. Millions of people died as a direct result of colonization.  The avarice, bigotry, and violence of these explorers is so apparent in the documentary record that to ignore it or deny it requires a positive act of will. The most conservative critics of Indigenous Peoples’ Day show a deep lack of sensitivity to the sufferings of native peoples, to say the least, and a willingness to consign the historical experience of millions of people like them to the dustbin of history.

Like a guy named Bruce, who was the first caller on Evan Dawson’s show.  Native peoples, Bruce suggested, were savage and violent, their lives poor, nasty, brutish, and short.  Although Europeans did some “bad things” here and there, it was all in the name of progress.  Indians should stop bitching and moaning, Bruce implied.  After all, he could lose his property at any time should the government exercise its power of eminent domain, he said, so in that sense he was just like the Indians.  Join the club, he said.  No, Bruce.  No.  White dudes who have the luxury of listening to NPR in the middle of the day, I am willing to wager, generally do not suffer dispossession at the hands of the government.  And certainly not in the systematic and continent-wide scale experienced by America’s native peoples.

Second, these assertions celebrate what many scholars and activists now call settler colonialism, the legacies of which are still felt in very real ways by native peoples. Settler colonialism encourages the erasure, the dismissal, of native peoples and their concerns from the realm of rational discourse.  The country was not being used, these conservatives argue, and only Europeans with their refinement, religion, and culture made it better.  It is racist in its dismissal of both the inherent beauty of so many indigenous cultures and the blood-drenched history of Europe for centuries before Columbus sailed out into the ocean blue. Life in fifteenth century Europe was no walk in the park.

Commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day–and this is a point that so many of these right-wing pundits do not see–does not belittle or demean the western tradition.  What it does do is allow us to pay attention to the experience of those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter. If, after all, any number of people in our nation’s history had had their way, native peoples would be gone: They would have been wiped out by warfare and epidemic and chronic disease; or they would have been “removed” to make way for the “settlers” who championed the rise of Andrew Jackson in the first few decades of the nineteenth century; or confined on tiny reservations until the missionaries and teachers and government farmers wiped away any trace of their identity as native peoples; or assimilated into the American body politic; or “terminated” in the middle decades of the twentieth century, with the reality of their native nations erased by congressional statute.  Indians were supposed to disappear. If any number of people had their way, Native American people would not be here to call for an Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Finally, the reaction to Indigenous Peoples’ Day coming from the political right reflects the increasingly oft-expressed anger of white males at nearly any expression of grievance by people of color.  Protestors who assert that “Black Lives Matter, and who complain about the alacrity with which militarized police deploy violence against African Americans is dismissed as violence; the protests of principled men like Colin Kaepernick and other African-American NFL players is regarded as an assault on the flag, and a demonstration of a lack of patriotism, with no discussion whatsoever of the issues that generated those protests. Suggestions that racist Confederate monuments be removed or revised is treated as an assault on white identity and southern heritage; and native peoples, meanwhile, are told to get over it.  The crimes you “allegedly” suffered took place long ago, and therefore the problems occurring in your communities are entirely your fault.  We had nothing to do with that.

I have been teaching and writing about Native American history for a long time, more than thirty years. Every day when I talk with my very good students, I realize that I still have so much to learn.  Every time I read new scholarship, I realize that there are so many more stories out there that we should tell.  I will be a student of this subject forever.

But one thing is so very clear to me, and the tweets I mentioned above are the evidence: Racism towards Native Americans is a real thing.  The inequalities experienced by native communities are significant. If you have followed the posts on this blog at all, or the stories I share on my Twitter account, you will see this plain as day.  The statistics do not lie.  New York, where I have lived for all but five of the last twenty-seven years, became the Empire State, as Laurence Hauptman has so ably shown, through a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession. You could not have one without the other.

The transactions through which New York acquired Iroquois land happened a long time ago, but these were transactions that violated federal laws the United States lacked the power and perhaps the willingness to enforce.  The Supreme Court has held that these transactions occurred so long ago that nothing can be done to right these wrongs, but that does not mean that the rights retained by native peoples should be ignored, or their history dismissed.

New York’s native peoples have seen, through a long history, their homelands invaded.  They experienced waves of epidemic disease.  They faced dispossession, and then the effort to “remove” them to new homes in Arkansas, or Wisconsin, or the Indian Territory, and then to re-educate their children, and disable their governments.  Disease, warfare, dispossession, diaspora: the injuries occurred a long time ago, but their legacies remain.  And when native peoples and their allies suggest that we commemorate that history on a special day, one associated with the author of a genocidal process against native peoples, their arguments are dismissed.

Look at the ground underneath your feet.  If you live in western New York where I live, in towns called Irondequoit, or Nunda, or Geneseo, or Tonawanda, think about the processes of dispossession that made New York state what it is.  If you believe that laws matter, that the Constitution matters, that the pledges in a treaty that guarantees to the Six Nations the right to “the free use and employment of their lands” matters, then drop the whining about Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It is not a good look.  It makes you  sound like a racist buffoon.

 

 

 

 

Discovery and Exploration, History and Historians, Liberal Arts, Native Americans

A Plea for Justice on Indigenous Peoples’ Day

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In Native American history, there are lots of guilty parties, but Christopher Columbus is guiltier than most. There is absolutely nothing edifying in this story of avarice, violence, and religious bigotry, save for the native peoples who at times and places survived the carnage. The continued celebration of Columbus Day does a historical injustice to the native peoples of two continents and the Caribbean.

The Columbus Day holiday found its origins in the Italian-American community. Columbus, quite likely from Genoa, sailed in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, the authors of the Spanish Reconquista, and in 1492 he “discovered” America. He was, his advocates claim, an Italian and an American hero. The holiday in his honor asserted that Italians were Americans, too.

But the Columbus Day holiday has been under siege for some time. He discovered nothing, of course, for the “New World” he stumbled across in search of the riches of Cathay was already occupied by millions of people. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages in 1992 reawakened interest in the explorer and his actions in the New World, and that attention did not cast Columbus in a good light.  Recently, a growing number of colleges and municipalities across the country have recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day, to be held on the federal Columbus Day holiday.  An Italian-American friend of mine asked me the other night why any one of the other 364 days of the year could not be chosen for Indigenous Peoples Day.  In his view, the movement to obtain recognition for Indigenous Peoples’ Day generated conflict where none was needed, and caused offense to Italian-Americans.  While I understand his argument, the commemoration of Indigenous Peoples Day is something I support.  As I point out in Native America, the Columbus Day holiday “many native peoples view as a day for mourning the victims of an American holocaust and 500 years of genocide.”

The Columbian Encounter, so-called, is the beginning of a horror story for the native peoples of the Americas, North, South, and Central, as well as the indigenous population of the Caribbean, who were quickly destroyed as autonomous peoples by the Spanish newcomers.  Columbus, his supporters might argue, gets too much of the blame.  He did nothing to native peoples in North America because he never set foot on the North American continent.  This much is true, but Columbus has become, and perhaps always has been, a symbol standing in for the “fundamental violence of discovery,” as I class it in the second chapter of Native America.

Long ago I taught at a one-day NEH gathering on the Blackfeet Reservation way up in northwestern Montana.  The subject was children’s literature that treated in different ways the history of America’s native peoples.  One of the books was Michael Dorris’s Morning Girl (1992).  The story followed Morning Girl and her brother Star Boy, indigenous children playing and exploring in the “Pre-Columbian” Caribbean.  It is a story that is wise and gentle. But at its close, it takes a darker turn.  Morning Girl swims out to see a strange sight approaching the beach.

Dorris ends the story with a lengthy excerpt from Columbus’s journal:

In order that they would be friendly to us — because I recognized that they were people who would be better freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force — to some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads which they put on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. Later they came swimming to the ships’ launches where we were and brought us parrots and cotton thread in balls and javelins and many other things, and they traded them to us for other things which we gave them, such as small glass beads and bells. In sum, they took everything and gave of what they had very willingly. But it seemed to me that they were a people very poor in everything. All of them go around as naked as their mothers bore them; and the women also, although I did not see more than one quite young girl. And all those that I saw were young people, for none did I see of more than 30 years of age. They are very well formed, with handsome bodies and good faces. Their hair coarse — almost like the tail of a horse-and short. They wear their hair down over their eyebrows except for a little in the back which they wear long and never cut. Some of them paint themselves with black, and they are of the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white; and some of them paint themselves with white, and some of them with red, and some of them with whatever they find. And some of them paint their faces, and some of them the whole body, and some of them only the eyes, and some of them only the nose. They do not carry arms nor are they acquainted with them, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and through ignorance cut themselves. They have no iron.

Their javelins are shafts without iron and some of them have at the end a fish tooth…. All of them alike are of good-sized stature and carry themselves well. I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies and I made signs to them asking what they were; and they showed me how people from other islands nearby came there and tried to take them, and how they defended themselves; and I believed and believe that — they come here from tierrafirme to take them captive. They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion. Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses in order that they may learn to speak…

Morning Girl, then, is the story of that child who Columbus  saw as his men approached landfall in October of 1492, and whose gentleness and innocence led the wayward Admiral to conclude that her people would make good servants.

We spent quite a bit of time that morning discussing Dorris’s book.  The teachers from Blackfeet felt very differently about the book than did some of the non-native teachers.  The Blackfeet teachers all agreed that if they were to use Morning Girl in class, they would cut out that last piece.  They would have physically removed the last page from the book.  Too painful, and too traumatic for the children who might read it, they thought.  In Fourteen-Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…and contemplated how indigenous children might make good slaves.

I do not agree with altering books in this manner, nor in insulating children from the more horrifying parts of our shared history, but I understood their concerns.  I spend some time on Columbus in Native America. I have to. Between the first and second editions, one of the many books I read as I worked on revising the text was Andres Resendez’s excellent The Other Slavery which, among other things, described in detail the centrality of slavery in Columbus’s enterprise.  Columbus carried slaves back to Spain on each of his voyages, and promised the Crown “as many slaves as Their Majesties orders to make.”

If you read excerpts from Bartolome De Las Casas’s Devastation of the Indies–and if you are a student in a Native American history course treating this period you likely will–you can read about the sheer brutality of the Spanish conquistadors who followed Columbus.  Las Casas provides a first-hand account of the first modern genocide: Spanish ships able to sail homeward without need of navigational instruments because all they needed to do was follow the trail of floating corpses, enslaved Indians who died on the Atlantic crossing. Las Casas described how Spanish colonists could buy human flesh for their dogs, and how Spanish war dogs tore native peoples literally limb from limb.  Las Casas described the competition between conquistadors to see who could run through the most Indians with one thrust of the pike, and how Spaniards burned native peoples in groups of thirteen in honor of Jesus and the apostles, and bashed their children’s heads in by swinging them against the rocks, as in the Flemish (and Protestant) engraving to the left.  And all this brutality, all the subjugation that occurred under the aegis of the Spanish encomienda system, exacerbated the consequences of epidemic diseases, which in places killed off 80% of the population. Brutality made native peoples less able to resist the onslaught of disease. Millions died.

But here’s the thing, and I hope you will see it if you read Native America.  We can focus on victimization and cruelty.  God knows, Columbus and his successors were violent and brutal and victimized many.  But to focus on victimization alone does a deep disservice to the history of native peoples.

In Native America, I tell the story of the first European explorers who came to North America from the Indians’ perspective: What native peoples saw when they looked at these newcomers, their strategic calculations, how they fit the Europeans into their conceptual universe.  If you look at the story of the French explorer Jacques Cartier, who sailed into the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s, or his Spanish contemporary Coronado who wandered throughout the American southwest, or Soto’s violent exercise in futility in the Southeast, or the Juan Pardo expedition, or Cabrillo’s ineffectual reconnaissance of the California coast, or even the Roanoke voyages of 1584-1590, you cannot help but see one consistent theme. It is so obvious in the surviving documents. What is clear in every account is the utter dependence of the newcomers upon the native peoples who cautiously welcomed them into their communities, cultivated them as military allies and trading partners, enlisted them in their struggles with their neighbors, and contemplated transforming them into kin.  When the newcomers wore out their welcomes in North America, their enterprises were doomed, their situation worse than desperate.  These European explorers discovered what they believe they discovered only because native peoples allowed them to do so.  And the effects of the visits by these European sojourners were remarkably short-lived, the consequences fleeting.  Even with De Soto, who many scholars long had blamed for spreading epidemic disease into the continent’s interior (a mistake I made in the first edition), we now know from the work of historians like Paul Kelton and anthropologists like Robbie Etheridge that his disastrous expedition had little long-term effect.  The wasting plagues came in the seventeenth century, a product of an Anglo-American trade in Native American slaves, the scope of which was vast and mind-boggling.

Columbus Day found its origins in discrimination against Italian-American immigrants. We were here from the beginning, Italian-Americans said, and we have as great a claim to this continent as any other group.  The holiday has seldom encouraged any significant and honest discussion of the consequences of the Columbian Encounter, a process which was, as historian Alfred Crosby showed a long time ago, much bigger than Christopher Columbus.  It is time for the bad history and the myth associated with this day to go away, and if recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day helps I am all for it.  Let’s talk about Columbus, to be sure, and the European invasion of America, but let’s do so with our eyes firmly upon those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter.