Those Fools are Bringing Back that Fucking Columbus statue: The Century of the Jew Celebrating that Jew

Both Israel and North America share similar rhetoric that justifies their origins. Infused with biblical references to “salvation, redemption, and destiny,” settlers in both countries believed ...

. . . that they had reached the Promised Land.

When Native American and other activists challenge the celebration of Columbus, they are drawing attention to the Indigenous place in both history and the present. They say that to celebrate a killer of Indigenous people is to dishonor humans. They say Native Americans, not Columbus, were first to this hemisphere. They say Native Americans deserve more of a place than Columbus as founders. They say that they are not to be erased. They have had some success so far, and Indigenous Peoples Day is being celebrated on an increasing scale. — Gregory Dowd

From Turtle Island to Palestine: Indigenous People’s Day and Palestine Solidarity

It is also a good time to highlight Indigenous solidarity within the Americas as well as with other Indigenous people, including the Palestinians. Indeed, both people share a similar story of resistance to colonization, while the colonizers—the United States and Israel—share similar origin stories and tactics used to sever the Native people from their land.

In “Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World: Encountering Palestine in American Indian Studies,” Steven Salaita traces some of the ways that colonial rhetoric in North America and Palestine sprang from the same “narratives of settlement,” while also examining how Palestinian and Native people have resisted those discourses of occupation.

On Indigenous People’s Day, its useful to point out the significance of the term “Indigenous.” According to Salaita, it means that Palestinian dispossession is rightly placed within the framework of colonial history rather than in a-historical terms. Moreover, it locates Palestinians within a broader struggle for liberation and decolonial status.

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Will it run in our local county rag? I rushed this morning to write “something.”

A Country Named after . . . Italian Map Maker?

By Paul Haeder

Monday is becoming increasingly known as Indigenous Peoples' Day, a commemoration of Native American history and culture.

The second Monday in October has historically been celebrated as Columbus Day, and shifting this day as a commemorative day for our first nations brothers and sisters have become fighting words for Italian-Americans especially in places like Boston or New York.

A federal holiday with that Italian mariner’s last name (also, as the public school poster board theme), for many has motivated them to scrap a ‘Christopher Columbus’ holiday to acknowledging the atrocities Columbus committed against people living in the Americas long before his arrival.

Amerigo Vespucci was the first to suggest that the land discovered by Christopher Columbus was a whole different continent. In 1507, Martin Waldseemuller, a German cartographer, was the first person to name this continent America, which is a Latinized version of Amerigo.

It is bizarre, to say the least, for the Portuguese-backed Vespucci to have his first name chiseled for all time in the geographic history of the world.

And it is fitting that the slaughter of indigenous people on this continent, let alone within the contiguous USA, is matched with centuries of broken treaties which have defined the relationship between many Native American nations and the U.S.

More than 370 ratified treaties have helped the U.S. expand its territory and led to many broken promises made to American Indians.

One of the first compacts between the U.S. and Native American nations – the Treaty of Canandaigua. History – revised-resurfaced-brought to new light – is important. This Canandaigua deal, also known as Pickering treaty, was signed in 1794 between the federal government and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, or the so-called Six Nations.

It was a deal securing an ally for the U.S. government after the Revolutionary War and returning more than a million acres to the Haudenosaunee. That territory has all but been permanently cut up and stolen over the years. More than two centuries later, the U.S. has kept one promise.

"Article 6 says that they will provide goods in the amount of $4,500, 'which shall be expended yearly forever, " explained Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian museum director Kevin Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma.

Eight years ago, the Museum of the American Indian curated an exhibit on treaties which was headed up by Suzan Shown Harjo.

She pointed out to the press the light-blue pages of “Treaty K” which were signed without ratifying seals or ribbons. It is just one of 17 other unratified treaties signed by representatives of the U.S. government and Native American nations in California during the Gold Rush.

The U.S. Senate was pressured by California lawmakers not to ratify the treaties, which promised reservation land to the Native American nations. There was one reason the lawmakers didn't want the treaties, according to the exhibit's curator Harjo of the Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee Indian nations.

"The answer is always gold," Harjo said. "And if it's not gold, it's silver. And if it's not silver, it's copper. And if it's not, go right through the metal chart."

We know the suffering of American Indians here in Lincoln County with the Siletz tribes.

In 1855, President Franklin Pierce established a 1.1 million-acre reservation for the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. The reservation was reduced to 4,000 acred through a series of actions, including:

• 1864: The government stole 300 square miles of the Coast Reservation.

• 1875: The Siletz Reservation was reduced to 225,000 acres.

• 1887: The General Allotment Act forced the Siletz people to sell 192,000 acres.

• 1910: Congress authorized the sale of five timber reserve tracts, including the School Farm reserve.

Harjo explained what California did is just the repeated formula of the federal government’s theft of native lands. "They were not only scattered from their lands, and lots of people murdered during the Gold Rush, but they were erased from history."

The history of indigenous people’s is on fraught with tragedy after tragedy.  Harjo told reporters she hopes museum visitors will take away the full span of this diplomatic history.

"People always think of broken treaties and the bad paper and the bad acts, and that is our reality. But it didn't begin there. It began on an honorable footing," she said.

Old and young Americans who want a strong grounding in American history should understand the history of these treaties.

"The people who are citizens of the U.S., these are your treaties. They aren't just the Indians' treaties. No one gave us anything. No one was dragging any land behind them when they came here. This was our land."

Here we are now, a country of broken treaties, the Monroe Doctrine,our Manifest Destiny and this commitment to a settler colonial project called Israel at all costs, even framed within a potential World War Three with nuclear weapons.

More history and truths hidden, held back or mashed up into pro-war propaganda, but the truth has been written by both Jewish and non-Jewish scholars.

Since the early 20th century, the Zionist movement has longed for the creation of a Greater Israel, but it has been savvy enough to hide and conceal its intentions, especially in the international arena.

As Benny Morris put it in his famous book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,

“[Zionist leader David] Ben-Gurion, a pragmatist, from 1937 on, was willing (at least outwardly) to accept partition and the establishment of a Jewish state in only part of the country. In effect, he remained committed to a vision of Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine as the ultimate goal of Zionism, to be attained by stages.”

“Stages,” just like America’s Indian Pacification and Eradication and Broken Treaties “long game.” Lessons to be learned on Indigenous People’s day, and applied elsewhere, where settler violence and criminal colonialism have made their deadly marks.

“Israel cannot tolerate the idea of Palestinian sovereignty, let alone its implementation because the erasure of Palestinian sovereignty is part and parcel of the underlying logic of the settler colony. As a result, regardless of how much land Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ally, Defence Minister Benny Gantz actually annex this year, this episode will be neither the first nor will it be the last.

The settler colony, secured in its power after the founding violence, often plays a long game. But despite the scantest of hopes of ever gaining their freedom and sovereignty, the Palestinians will continue to stand, more or less, alone in their long and historic resistance.” -- Muhannad Ayyash is the author of “A Hermeneutics of Violence” (UTP, 2019), and a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. He is currently writing a book on settler colonial sovereignty.

by Nick Estes

The genocidal assault on Palestinian life is also ideological, with firm roots in Turtle Island. The United States supplies more than bombs. It also supplies the media narrative justifying the slaughter of Palestinians and the colonization of their lands. The Atlantic Magazine has become the veritable mouthpiece for what can be called anti-anti-Zionism. This pro-genocide position, standard across corporate media outlets, has only hardened since the intensification of the Zionist-led genocide against Palestinians one year ago. 

Last December, I reluctantly took a phone interview from The Atlantic writer Michael Powell, who claimed, in an email, to be writing a “piece looking at the concept of Turtle Island within the context of struggles around native [sic] and Palestinian rights.” I made clear that his magazine was profoundly anti-Palestinian and, therefore, anti-Indigenous. The magazine’s longtime editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was a prison guard at the notorious Ketziot Prison during the First Intifada (1987-1993). Human rights organizations have called for the prison’s closing because of widespread human rights abuses against Palestinians. A colonial prison guard runs an outlet that prides itself on its abolitionist history.

Powell countered by citing his own expertise as an author of a book on young Diné basketball players (who he called “Navajo”). The interview was more of him debating the fact that the occupation of Palestine is a European settler colonial project in a similar vein as Canada and the United States. He said something that has haunted me since — claiming that in Gazan schools, Palestinian children were instructed in antisemitism. (I could only find sources for this assertion from the Israel lobby group, UN Watch.)

Israeli President Isaac Herzog appeared to back up this claim when he revealed during a BBC interview in November 2023 the occupation’s discovery of an Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a child’s room in Gaza. Spaces for children were now legitimate targets, and the Palestinian education system was a significant counterpoint to charges of genocide and colonialism. Today, there are no schools left in Gaza. The occupation has destroyed all of them, including universities, and killed thousands of children, students, and teachers. Gazan schoolchildren pose no threat when they are dead, have no schools, and are displaced.

Dehumanization is the first step in genocidal incitement. However, counter-annihilation is also a key feature of settler colonialism. It is the belief and practice that colonial society must annihilate Native people; otherwise, the colonizers, in turn, will be annihilated in a zero-sum calculus. It is a pre-emptive “self-defense” against any real or imagined anti-colonial attack. It makes invasion look like “self-defense.” It is why the chorus of Western media outlets repeat the mantra: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” But the colonized are never granted the authority of self-defense or the right not to be annihilated.

After one year of genocide, we have plenty of gruesome evidence of what settler “self-defense” looks like. Leaked video surveillance shows that occupation prisons are also sites of extreme sexual violence and rape. “Everything is legitimate,” responded the Zionist ruling party to condemnations of prison guards raping Palestinians. Such brutality is not solely a nineteenth-century phenomenon. This is modern, twenty-first-century settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism wages total war on Native societies by attempting to eliminate and destroy familial and kinship relations through a combination of physical destruction, incarceration, and family separation. Such violence is easily seen in the macabre spectacle of the military massacre of civilians, which has been live-streamed to billions of witnesses without serious challenge — and, in many cases, with explicit support — by the “democratic” West. The trauma of enduring and surviving such violence carries on for generations. The trauma inflicted upon Native peoples by the United States is a case in point. Only in the last several years has the United States acknowledged its centuries-long, genocidal war on Indigenous children. 

U.S. Colonel Henry Pratt was a notorious Indian killer who turned his pursuits from the battlefield to the targeting of Indigenous children and the destruction of Native families. His Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which pioneered removing Native children from their families by sending them to far-off schools, not only attempted to destroy kinship relations to weaken Indigenous resistance but also killed Native children and used them as hostages to force concessions from their parents, making them little more than “prisoners of war.” Luther Standing Bear estimated half the children of Carlisle’s first class died there.

While the off-reservation federal Indian boarding school system has formally ended its child removal policies, Native children today are still disproportionately removed from their families and placed into foster care. According to a 2019 report, Minnesota has the highest rates of Native child displacement in state foster care, with Native people making up 1.7 percent of the state’s population and 25.8 percent of children in foster care. The goal is to destroy the very social fabric of Native life — to take the land. Even after Native peoples pose no military threat to settler society, the war still wages against the young. The theft of the young is a theft of the future, and the theft of life is naturalized. (In my homelands, Native people have a median life expectancy of 58 years old.)

What Palestinians have taught us — and the people of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen who have joined them — is that things need not always be this way. A year ago, we watched the walls of the largest open-air prison camp come tumbling down. Gazans walked to the villages where they were from. They were surprised their prison guards were so easily overwhelmed. The retribution against their acts of liberation is exacting its toll. The settler “counter-annihilation” in “self-defense” doctrine has spread to Lebanon. The United States has clamped down on its own educational system, banning books teaching its true settler colonial history, while brutalizing college students and cracking down on educators opposing its genocide against Palestinians. And yet there is still hope for justice.

The Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta imagines what that future may look like. “In the future, when we have a museum for this genocide [in Gaza],” he recently told Al-Jazeera, “we will have a special place where we put the pictures of the journalists who allowed it to happen.”

Nick Estes is an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and the co-host of The Red Nation Podcast.

“We are all illegal aliens.”

It’s a bumper sticker many of us on the frontlines of the fight against the United States’ government’s assault on Central Americans plastered on our car bumpers down El Paso way.

That was in the 1980s.

You know, when Reagan was running amuck ordering his captains Ollie North, McFarland, Casper Weinberger, the whole lot of them, to send bombs, CIA-torture manuals and US agents in order to aid terrorist contras and other despotic sorts in killing hundreds of thousands of innocents in civil wars in Salvador and Guatemala and El Salvador.

We worked with women and children who had witnessed fathers, uncles and husbands eviscerated by US-backed military monsters. Victims of torture, in Texas illegally. You know, what those brave Smith and Wesson-brandishing, chaise lounge Minutemen of today would call aliens.

We worked with people in faith-based communities, mainstream churches, and non-profits throughout El Paso, Juarez and the general area known as La Frontera. Everyone I met working with in this refugee assistance stint had humanitarian blood coursing through their veins. We were proud of our law-breaking work -- we gave refuge to terrorized and sometimes half-dead civilians.

We were called lawbreakers by the Reaganites and the Minutemen of that time. Communists. Pinko-fags. Those were the good old days of low-tech surveillance and simple FBI lists.

But what we did was human and humane, in the tradition of that very universal (with roots in Quakerism) belief in bearing witness and acting upon that which has been judged as unjust and inhumane.

Of course, we were up against the laws of this land and coarse politically driven judges who denied victim after victim permanent or temporary status while seeking asylum in the US.

We have so many stories of people sent back who were at best imprisoned, and in the worse cases, mutilated, disappeared, and murdered.

Guatemalan and Salvadorans, that is. Your readers don’t want to hear the narratives and visualize the descriptions of photos of those victims of torture. Ghastly things happened to teachers, nuns, medical workers and farmers, more heinous than what we’ve heard happened in the cells of Abu Ghraib.

We were there to assist, but more importantly to bear witness to our country’s terror campaign. Some of us got so riled up that later in our lives -- me included -- we hoofed it to Central America. Kicked around. Wrote articles for the few newspapers in this country that even cared about poor, misbegotten, displaced people of Latin America.

But no matter how hard-nosed we became, or how much we could withstand the photographs of women’s sliced backs and beheaded fetuses, we couldn’t shake the images of the children of torture at this two-story refugee house, Annunciation House. It was full of scruffy looking East Coast volunteers who had hooked up with Ruben Garcia, the House’s director, through Catholic services organizations. It was their stint with public service, their spiritual duty calling. Part of their degree plans. But most were converted and slammed hard by the violence their charges had suffered under.

Those PTSD-induced cartoons those children drew sucked the air out of even the hard-ass border patrol guys who used to “dump” the Central Americans at Ruben’s door at all hours of the night. Who can believe it now, that once upon a time official INS and border patrol officers knowingly let their perps go -- knew that Ruben and his volunteers could salve emotional and physical wounds  of these tortured crossers.

Their chance at freedom. Except for the piss-ant judges. And the memories of pregnant aunties being raped, their fetuses cut out alive, speared, and the laughing Reagan-loved military punks in the highlands and jungle.

Annunciation House was bulging at 100 people -- disheveled lives jammed in. Beans always cooking. Songs. Mattresses and piles of donated clothes. Guitars strumming. Gueros, the white ones, and the Chicanos would help with in-takes -- asylum transcripts, translation, dotting all the i's and t’s. Help with getting jobs. Odd jobs in the community. Help with making sure the refugees didn’t get caught again.

But it was always those by-the-letter-of-the-law jurists helping confound the torture. More than 70 percent of our brothers and sisters seeking asylum in the US were denied entry by some fat cat, cocaine-sniffing immigration judge who usually had a friend in the back pocket of some Bush or buddy of Bush somewhere.

Then it was trying to get the denied victims off to Canada without being caught. You remember, the Canada back then which used to open its borders to refugees.

The judges and politicians and Minutemen all professed, “Send them back. Those aliens broke our immigration laws.”

But “we are all illegal aliens” as a rejoinder went much further than USA’s mayhem in Mesoamerica. We worked in solidarity with the housekeepers, bricklayers, agricultural workers and so many other worthy Mexicans who worked their butts off in the US for little pay and much less respect.

These were workers who crossed the Rio Grande to find low-paying jobs with American families and businesses -- working for mayors, bigwigs, even on government contracts. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, elsewhere. With a wink and a smile by the American exploiters.

Mojado -- wetback. Squatter. Beaner. Illegal alien. These were the more tame epithets.

But let’s not kid ourselves about the genesis of this new round of empowered Latinos fighting against racist laws put forward by the dispassionate conservatives running the ship of fools in DC.

This is not a country of legal immigrants. It’s a country based on colonialists, undocumented white people who helped displace native tribes through broken laws and genocide.

It’s a country based on illegal occupation of native lands and on Mexico’s lands, pure and simple. Colonialists protected by Federal laws that deemed free white people as the only ones who had the right to be fully-fledged citizens.

Manifest destiny was a violent racist act to seize lands illegally. Everything this country’s current anti-Mexican and pro-Apartheid border war proponents stand upon -- all that doctrine and those so-called laws -- is based on illegally seizing lands of Native tribes.

And worse -- laws that “removed” natives. Laws that starved natives. Laws that approved of eradicating native families, entire tribes.

The current massive turnout of students and workers alike in this country’s major cities is a testament to these Americans’ backbone to fight this new exclusionary law -- HR4377 -- a Washington, DC-inspired racist act that has its roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Many Americans do express a certain humanity and dignity for the people many deem aliens, but it’s not awe-inspiring that some citizens of Denmark or Limerick, Ireland, obey the so-called immigration laws of this country during their initial years as landed immigrants.

Let’s make no bones about the motives of Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of this racist House bill: He sees those brown-skinned south-of-the-border lettuce pickers, linen washers, house framers, and their US-borne children as, what? “Alien gang members terrorizing communities.”

Anyone spouting that we are a nation of immigrants and laws has a disease, what George Orwell called the illness of doublethink.

And until those many white Americans stop spewing that this is their land, a land of their laws, and a land made for Christians, the racist Minutemen will ramp up their gun brandishing on the southern and northern borders. And racist politicians will continue to play on the fears of uniformed constituents and try and pass the 21st Century’s racist exclusionary laws.

I wonder what these modern-day Nazis would say about those children’s cartoons -- images of bodies floating in rivers. Blood-soaked church walls. Military men with their M-16s trained on men while others were in their rape hunch. Beautiful jungle birds flying in the sky next to US-paid-for helicopter gun ships spraying the corn fields below. Dead mommies cradling dead babies.

Yeah, I’m an illegal alien. We all are illegal aliens, under the laws of these creeps in high office. Humanity and caring and simple benedictions for suffering so much, those are alien traits only held by a minority in this country of exclusion. Yeah, those creeps on hate-radio and in the newspaper columns and on Capitol Hill, sure, they recognize all of us who see the lies and fight the injustice as aliens.

And the children whose post-traumatic cartoons brought tears to men and women who had been in Vietnam. Simple Crayola colorings brought tears to a county sheriff who had survived drug runners shooting up his town and unearthed bodies.

Yeah, we are all illegal aliens. Except them.

Paul Haeder worked in Central America and Mexico writing for newspapers during the 1980s and early 1990s. He’s currently in Spokane, Washington, as an instructor of writing at Spokane Falls Community College and writes sustainability-energy-environmental pieces for the towns weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander.  

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Columbus statue that was defaced, tossed into lake in Virginia finds new home in NYC suburbs: ‘Everything that we’re proud of’

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By Dani Anthony

This year marks the 500-year anniversary of the pricking of one man's conscience. Bartolomé de las Casas, sickened by the exploitation and physical degradation of the indigenous peoples in the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean, gave up his extensive land holdings and slaves and traveled to his homeland in Spain in 1515 to petition the Spanish Crown to stop the abuses that European colonists were inflicting upon the natives of the New World.

Las Casas arrived in Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1502, and soon became a land and slave owner, joining military expeditions against the native peoples and becoming a priest in 1510. However, after Las Casas' participation in the violent and destructive Spanish invasion of Cuba in 1513, he began to view European interference in native affairs as illegal and amoral.

Though his petitions began in May of 1515, they would continue until his death in 1566 as he cajoled, shamed, and begged the Spanish crown to end its practices of violent invasion and enslavement. The Spanish government in return treated Las Casas' pleas with ambivalence, in part because indigenous enslavement was so profitable.

The government was not the only ambivalent actor. Las Casas himself changed his rhetoric over time as he and his argument matured. For instance, he originally advocated the use of African slaves instead of indigenous Americans because Spaniards considered them to be hardier than natives.

In making this argument, Las Casas may have inadvertently provided the Spanish government endorsement of the new idea of slavery based on race, rather than the medieval concept of slavery as the result of war and conquest. Las Casas later advocated that all slavery be abolished, but the burgeoning European empires paid little attention to this moral idea when so much wealth and power was at stake.

Bartolomé de Las Casas was a contemporary of Christopher Columbus.

He witnessed Columbus present himself as a devout Christian while he kidnapped, maimed, and killed the indigenous people of Hispaniola in pursuit of gold.

Film Clip Description

Bartolomé de Las Casas’ account “Devastation of the Indies” is read here by John Sayles on October 22, 2004, at The New York Society for Ethical Culture, New York, NY. The excerpt is from Voices of a People’s History of the United States edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove.

Fucking Cristobal was a Jew: Christopher Columbus 'was Jewish and born in Western Europe'

Christopher Columbus was Jewish and from Western Europe, a study has found following the discovery of his remains 500 years after his death.

The origins as well as the final resting place of the 15th-century explorer who led Spanish-funded expeditions from the 1490s onward, opening the way for the European conquest of the Americas, have long been argued over among experts.

Many historians have questioned the traditional theory that Columbus came from Genoa, Italy. Other theories range from him being a Spanish Jew or a Greek, to Basque, Portuguese or British.

To solve the mystery researchers conducted a 22-year investigation, led by forensic expert Miguel Lorente, by testing tiny samples of remains buried in Seville Cathedral, long marked by authorities there as the last resting place of Columbus, though there had been rival claims that he was buried in the Dominican Republic.

They compared them with those of known relatives and descendants and their findings were announced in a documentary titled 'Columbus DNA: The true origin' on Spain's national broadcaster TVE on Saturday.

'We have DNA from Christopher Columbus, very partial, but sufficient. We have DNA from Hernando Colón, his son,' Lorente said in the programme

'And both in the Y chromosome (male) and in the mitochondrial DNA (transmitted by the mother) of Hernando there are traits compatible with Jewish origin.'

Around 300,000 Jews lived in Spain before the 'Reyes Catolicos', Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, ordered Jews and Muslims to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country. 

Many settled around the world. The word Sephardic comes from Sefarad, or Spain in Hebrew.

After analysing 25 possible places, Lorente said it was only possible to say Columbus was born in Western Europe.

On Thursday, Lorente said they had confirmed previous theories that the remains in Seville Cathedral belonged to Columbus.

Research on Columbus' nationality was complicated by a number of factors including the large amount of data. But 'the outcome is almost absolutely reliable,' Lorente said.

Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506, but wished to be buried on the island of Hispaniola that is today shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. 

His remains were taken there in 1542, then moved to Cuba in 1795 and then, it had been long thought in Spain, to Seville in 1898.

Lorente said last Thursday: 'Today it has been possible to verify it with new technologies, so that the previous partial theory that the remains of Seville belong to Christopher Columbus has been definitively confirmed.'

Many experts have believed that the tomb inside the cathedral has long held Columbus' body, but it was not until 2003 when Lorente and historian Marcial Castro were granted permission to open it, finding the previously unknown bones were inside.

More reasons to burn down all Columbus fucking statues. Genocideir.

Dowd — The Knights of Columbus, the Roman Catholic-American fraternal organization, was founded in 1882. We can use that date as a convenient indicator of when some Catholics became keenly interested in Columbus as their symbol for belonging in America. This was a time when Indigenous populations in the United States were reaching their catastrophic nadir, and when U.S. forces had largely completed the military conquest of Native Peoples in the lower 48 states. It was at the beginning of intense immigration from foreign-seeming Catholic populations in Southern and Eastern Europe as well as flows from the Philippines, joining considerable Irish, Latinx, German and French Catholics already here and still coming. The movement for Columbus Day was not strictly or even mainly Italian American, contrary to stereotypes. There was a lot of broader Catholic-American support. Their goal was achieved in 1937, under the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whom Catholics tended to vote.

Why drop Columbus Day?

We can absolutely honor the determination of immigrants to be counted as “Americans.” At the same time, the truth is that those who supported a holiday for Columbus in the late 19th and early 20th century sailed with currents of white supremacism that were cresting in the United States. The advocates of Columbus, like most American citizens, did not reflect on the lives, contributions and experiences of Native Americans. These were not taken seriously, if taken at all. In celebrating Columbus’ so-called discovery, they were overlooking (or worse, supporting) his violent efforts at conquest. These were knowable. Even in his own time, Columbus came under criticism for cruelties toward Indigenous peoples from Bartholome de Las Casas, a Dominican priest, and even the very Queen Isabella for whom Columbus sailed.

Over the years, Columbus and those who followed him brought hundreds into slavery in Spain and thousands on the islands. Sexual violence is clear in the record. Colonial efforts to coerce Indian labor, the colony’s introduction of diseases new to Indigenous peoples, its warfare, and its release of new animals and plants into the delicate environment resulted in catastrophic depopulation: A once Indigenous world was for the most part eventually replaced by the brutal regime of sugar and slaves. It is not a story worth celebrating.

The first Indigenous People's Day was proclaimed on October 12, 1992, the quincentennial of the infamous voyage of Christopher Columbus to this hemisphere. At the 1990 Continental Gathering of Indigenous Peoples in Quito, Ecuador participants from 120 different nations collaborated to write:

“The Indians of America have never abandoned our constant struggle against the conditions of oppression, discrimination and exploitation which were imposed upon us as a result of the European invasion of our ancestral territories.”

The Italian explorer, Columbus, sailing under the flag of Spain, is credited with the “discovery of a New World,” although his expedition had sought a passage to Asia, a very old part of the world. As the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano points out in this powerful essay from the The Progressive in October 2007, our hemisphere is still dealing with the curse of Columbus.:

“Were colonial invasions encounters, whether those of yesterday or those of today? Shouldn’t they be called rapes or violations instead?”

The Curse of Columbus

Did Christopher Columbus discover America in 1492? Or was it the Vikings before him? And before the Vikings, what about the people who lived there? Didn’t they exist?

Official history relates that Vasco Núñez of Balboa was the first man who saw both oceans, standing on a peak in Panama. Were the inhabitants of that area blind?

Who gave maize and potatoes and tomatoes and chocolate and the rivers and mountains of America their names? Hernán Cortés? Francisco Pizarro? Were the people who were already living there mute?

We have been told, and still are, that it was the pilgrims of the Mayflower that populated America. Had it been empty before?

Because Columbus didn’t understand what the Indians were saying, he concluded that they didn’t know how to speak. Because they wore no clothes, were gentle, and gave away everything they had, he concluded they lacked the capacity for reason. And because he was certain of having discovered the Orient by the back door, he believed they were Indians from India.

Afterwards, during the second voyage, the admiral promulgated an act establishing that Cuba was part of Asia. The document of June 14, 1494, stated as evidence that the crew of the three ships recognized it as such. Whoever said otherwise was given thirty lashes, fined 10,000 maravedíes, and had his tongue cut out.

The notary, Hernán Pérez de Luna, attested, and the sailors who could write signed at the bottom.

The conquistadors demanded that America be something it wasn’t. And they treated the Americans as if they were what they imagined the pagans of the Orient to be.

Christopher Columbus said he saw on the shores of Cuba sirens with men’s faces and chicken feathers, and supposed that not far from there men and women had tails.

In Guyana, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, there were people with eyes in their shoulders and mouths in their chests.

In Venezuela, according to Pedro Simon, there were Indians with ears so long they dragged on the ground.

In the Amazon, according to Christopher of Acuña, the natives’ feet were shaped backwards, heels forward and toes behind, and according to Pedro Martín de Anglería, women mutilated one breast to be able to fire their arrows better.

Anglería, who wrote the first history of America, though he never set foot there, also affirmed that in the New World there were people with tails, and these tails were so long the natives could sit only in chairs with holes.

The Black Code prohibited the torture of slaves in the French colonies. But it wasn’t to torture them but to educate them that slaves’ masters whipped their backs and cut their tendons when they fled.

The Laws of the Indians, which protected those in the Spanish colonies, were quite moving. But the gallows and pillory set up in the center of every Main Square were even more affecting.

The reading of the Request for Obedience was very convincing. This occurred on the eve of the assault on each village. It explained to the Indians that God had come to the world and left St. Peter in his place, and that the successor of St. Peter was the Holy Father, and that the Holy Father has shown favor on the Queen of Castilla, who rules all this land. For this reason, they should go from here or pay tribute in gold, and if they don’t or if they stay, war would be declared on them, and they would be made slaves along with their wives and children. But the Request was read in the middle of the night from the mountain in Spanish and without an interpreter, in the presence of the notary but no Indians, as they were asleep, miles away, and hadn’t the faintest idea what was awaiting them.

Until not long ago, October 12 was Race Day.

But does such a thing even exist? What is race but a useful lie to exploit and exterminate one’s neighbor?

When the U.S. entered the Second World War, the American Red Cross decided that the blood of black people would not be accepted in its blood banks. Has anyone seen, by chance, black blood?

Afterward, Race Day became the Day of Encounter.

Were colonial invasions encounters, whether those of yesterday or those of today? Shouldn’t they be called rapes or violations instead?

Perhaps the most revealing episode in the history of the Americas occurred in 1563 in Chile. Indians besieged the fortress of Arauco, depriving the Spanish of food and water, yet Captain Bernal refused to surrender.

From the stockade he screamed out,

“There will be more and more of us!”

“With what women will you make them?” the Indian chief asked.

“With yours. We will make them bear children who will be your masters.”

The invaders called the original Americans idolaters because they believed that nature is sacred and that we are the brothers and sisters of all those with feet, paws, wings, or roots.

And they called them savages. But they were not wrong about this. The Indians were such savages that they ignored the fact that they had to obtain a visa, a certificate of good behavior, and a work permit from Columbus, Cabral, Cortés, Alvarado, Pizarro, and the pilgrims of the Mayflower.

Eduardo Galeano, was an Uruguayan writer and journalist. His books include The Open Veins of Latin America and Memory of Fire.