Because there isn't one.
That may be the best reason for an Indigenous People's Day, whether or not the new name erases what has been Columbus Day. People know so little about this nation's first nations that creating a holiday to commemorate them is altogether fitting. Me?--I prefer what South Dakota did: eschew both Columbus and the odd word indigenous, and just call yesterday "Native American Day."
Not all that long ago, a Washington Post article made humiliatingly clear how poorly American schools teach its students about slavery. Not that teaching about slavery isn't done; it simply isn't done well. One of the reasons is obvious: slavery isn't a nice story. Teaching about it, Joe Heim wrote in that story, "means acknowledging and exploring slavery’s depravity. It means telling the personal stories of enslaved people, the physical and psychological cruelty they endured, the sexual violence inflicted upon them, the separation of husbands and wives, parents and children."
And that's not something fun to do, especially right before the pep rally. Who on earth wants to teach "ugly stuff"? Bring on World War II, and and how we finally dispatched Hitler and Hirohito, or the Great War, when we came to Europe's rescue. The Civil War, despite hundreds of thousands of dead, isn't bad either, given the fact that, hallelujah! it freed the slaves.
For kids who are white or red, there's no easy way to teach Native American history either. A Navajo once told me he dropped out of college after taking an interim course in Native American history. He quit school altogether because he was so angry that what he'd learned in that single, short class was a saga he had never, ever heard in school before even though he'd grown up on a reservation.
There's good reason to drop Columbus Day from the calendar and Columbus himself from the pantheon of American heroes, starting with the word discovery. "Before it became the New World," says Charles Mann in a 2002 essay in the Atlantic, "the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought." There were thousands, millions, for whom the word discovery is not only silly but a slam. Columbus didn't need to find them or to verify their existence, and he certainly didn't need to treat them as despicably as he did.
Columbus Day, Yoni Applebaum argues just last week in the Atlantic, is, oddly enough, a victim of its own success. Applebaum traces the history of the holiday back to a time in American culture when "swarthy" Catholic Italians were swarming into WASP-held America, upsetting the powerful, who felt the immigrants to be a grade or two less than human. Columbus Day originated as a means to celebrate a people who were also despised, save for their strong backs and their cheap labor at jobs in which white folks had no interest.
I'm all for "Native American Day," but it's also good to remember that its predecessor on the calendar of national holidays actually had origins in seeking to recognize yet another forgotten people.
Is there a pattern here? Probably. Should we try to understand it? Yes.
Not all that long ago, a Washington Post article made humiliatingly clear how poorly American schools teach its students about slavery. Not that teaching about slavery isn't done; it simply isn't done well. One of the reasons is obvious: slavery isn't a nice story. Teaching about it, Joe Heim wrote in that story, "means acknowledging and exploring slavery’s depravity. It means telling the personal stories of enslaved people, the physical and psychological cruelty they endured, the sexual violence inflicted upon them, the separation of husbands and wives, parents and children."
And that's not something fun to do, especially right before the pep rally. Who on earth wants to teach "ugly stuff"? Bring on World War II, and and how we finally dispatched Hitler and Hirohito, or the Great War, when we came to Europe's rescue. The Civil War, despite hundreds of thousands of dead, isn't bad either, given the fact that, hallelujah! it freed the slaves.
For kids who are white or red, there's no easy way to teach Native American history either. A Navajo once told me he dropped out of college after taking an interim course in Native American history. He quit school altogether because he was so angry that what he'd learned in that single, short class was a saga he had never, ever heard in school before even though he'd grown up on a reservation.
There's good reason to drop Columbus Day from the calendar and Columbus himself from the pantheon of American heroes, starting with the word discovery. "Before it became the New World," says Charles Mann in a 2002 essay in the Atlantic, "the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought." There were thousands, millions, for whom the word discovery is not only silly but a slam. Columbus didn't need to find them or to verify their existence, and he certainly didn't need to treat them as despicably as he did.
Columbus Day, Yoni Applebaum argues just last week in the Atlantic, is, oddly enough, a victim of its own success. Applebaum traces the history of the holiday back to a time in American culture when "swarthy" Catholic Italians were swarming into WASP-held America, upsetting the powerful, who felt the immigrants to be a grade or two less than human. Columbus Day originated as a means to celebrate a people who were also despised, save for their strong backs and their cheap labor at jobs in which white folks had no interest.
I'm all for "Native American Day," but it's also good to remember that its predecessor on the calendar of national holidays actually had origins in seeking to recognize yet another forgotten people.
Is there a pattern here? Probably. Should we try to understand it? Yes.
But try teaching that to the guy in the MAGA cap.
2 comments:
A recent column in the nytimes was helpful in seeing how Italians made the transition from black to white https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html?searchResultPosition=1
The psychiatrist Thomas"s Szasz said the rule among animals is "eat or be eaten" but the rule among humans is "define or be defined.
I do not accept "Columbas day" as defining any narrative about reality, so I am also looking for a new definition. Part of the reality of 1492 is ship load of gold traders and slave traders arriving in the Netherlands after being exiled from Spain.
thanks,
Jerry
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