Donald Trump’s supporters fished the broken pieces of a destroyed Christopher Columbus statue out of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. They commissioned an artist to repair and reassemble it. And now, “resurrected,” it stands behind the White House barricades, directly in front of the Executive Office Building. It bids defiance, Trump would have us believe, to the “woke mob” who consigned the original to the sea on the Fourth of July in 2020.
Yet Trump’s Columbus is a Zombie, a golem. He is not exactly dead, but he does not look very good at all. Indeed, Trump’s display is a loser’s defiance, a middle finger in the air flashed at the crowds who booed him off the field as he enters the safety of the stadium tunnel. Nothing courageous or principled about it at all. Trump’s Columbus statue can only survive in his compound, after all, protected by electronic surveillance, steel gates, and the high-powered weaponry of the Secret Service. Thanks to the efforts of generations of Indigenous activists and their allies, a revisionist effort took root late in the 1980s. As a result, nobody with more than half a brain will ever discuss Columbus’s voyages without considering the brutality, avarice, and enslavement that rested at the heart of his “New World” enterprise.
I READ ABOUT TRUMP’S LATEST COLUMBUS FETISH after boarding the Island Packers boat that would carry me back to Ventura from the north shore of Santa Cruz Island, in the Channel Islands National Park. I had spent the day hiking at this beautiful, beautiful place and, resting on the boat, realized I had a signal on my phone for the first time in several blissful hours.
When I was born, it’s important to remember, the Indian policy of the United States was still known as “termination.” During my lifetime, the United States looked forward to the destruction and dissolution of Indigenous nations, and the assimilation of individual Indigenous peoples into the American body politic. Teachers in Ventura, where I grew up, told us that the Chumash, who inhabited the mainland and the Channel Islands, were extinct. They knew no better. It was likely what they were taught as well. Nobody could tell us where the Chumash had gone, and in grade school I can remember constructing a model of Mission San Buenaventura as part of our social studies curriculum. At the Catholic School I attended, the notion that these two things were connected—disappearance and the missions—was never discussed. Father Junipero Serra, who established the Ventura mission in 1782, was to be revered. It was easy. We never learned anything that would cause us to question the purity of his heart, the fierceness of his commitments, and the piety of his Christianity.
But the Chumash did not disappear. While home this past week my dad and I drove up into the hills above Santa Barbara, onto what now constitutes the Chumash reservation. We visited the gorgeous Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center. Signage at Santa Cruz Island, meanwhile, and the presentation by the National Park Service ranger, both featured prominently the island’s original Indigenous inhabitants and the Island’s Chumash name, limuw. Two years ago, once again making my way out to limuw, I shared the boat with a large number of Chumash people traveling to the island to hold ceremonies. And whatever you think of Indigenous casinos, Chumash gaming operations are very profitable. The Chumash are alive and well.
That is an incredible achievement. If the Spanish, the Mexicans, or murderous Californians had their way, no Chumash would have survived. They defied their colonizers. They refused to disappear. And in all sorts of ways, they are teaching non-Indigenous southern Californians how they did so. The museum does a fantastic job of this.
DONALD TRUMP IS A LOSER, and all that he represents is a loser’s cause. He and his supporters will never admit their obvious commitment to white supremacy as they try to bring back the past. The best these racists and their sycophants can do is reanimate a broken zombie Columbus and keep it behind the barricades where nobody will ever see it. They are afraid of a frank debate. Several years ago, Venturans debated what to do about the large Father Serra statue that stood outside City Hall. Some people wanted the statue removed. Others wanted to preserve it. The debate took place during the pandemic on Zoom. It lasted several hours. Many people spoke. I am proud of how my hometown handled this. In the end a compromise was reached: the statue of Father Serra was moved from City Hall to the Mission, just a short distance away. If you want to see it, you know where to go. But Trump, unlike the people in my town, won’t even engage. He really is a chicken-shit, whiny-ass, little bitch. It continues to amaze me that roughly sixty percent of white people voted for him in each of the last three elections.
If in the 1960s, federal authorities still looked forward to the assimilation and disappearance of Native Ameircans, now we see Indigenous peoples laying claim to their stolen homelands. In places, the “Land Back” movement has had small but significant success. Offensive Indigenous mascots have been eliminated; Indigenous place names have been restored. Even Donald Trump, briefly, responded to pressure from Indigenous activists when he became the first American president to address directly the problem of “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.” He appointed a commission (“Operation Lady Justice”), and proclaimed the 5th of May “National Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.” He has abandoned this in his second term and he has tried to undo President Obama’s decision to restore Mt. McKinley’s Indigenous name, Denali, but, again, Trump is a loser, fighting against the forces of time.
When I was out on limuw I hiked from Scorpion Landing to Smuggler’s Cove and back. It was listed by the National Park Service as a “strenuous” eight-mile hike. I felt it during the return trip, as the heat increased and there remained a number of mile-long climbs . I looked forward several times and appreciated how much farther I had to go. I also looked behind me, to see how far I had already ascended. We should do something similar when we counter Trump and the old world his followers wish to restore. He wants to pull us back, to drag us down. He has nothing constructive to offer. Most of us are so far ahead of him. He really is a fat old man, bloated and out of shape, who has been left behind not because of any unfairness but solely because we have judged him by the content of his character. He will stir up the hatred of the racists and the fears of the homophobes and transphobes. He will drag some people down, destroy some careers, and do great damage to the institutions and values we cherish. He will attempt to hurt those of us who climb past him, and push them off the trail. He will scream and yell and pout and posture, as he works to bring back a world in which people like him—white, rich, male and mediocre—were assumed to be the only parties able to hold real power. That belief, perfectly represented by his Columbus golem, can no longer survive in the wild. Talk to young people. Talk to people whose eyes, hearts and minds are open. Trump and Zombie Columbus are so far in their rear-view mirror. These terrible, retrograde, old racists, at the end of the day, are worthy of nothing, least of all your respect. The war is not over. There are many battles ahead. But from the shores of limiw, to the palisades that surround his creepy, caged Columbus, you must know that we are going to win. There is no reason to yield to them an inch.
