Columbus Day

As a follow up on my recent article on Columbus Day and my thoughts about it I offer you a statement made by the Indigenous Democratic Network about Columbus Day. I want to emphasize that my viewpoint on America and Columbus is as someone whose family would have been killed in Europe had America not been here to receive us. But Native Americans will not have that viewpoint. Their viewpoint is just as legitimate as ours and should not be forgotten:

It’s Columbus Day – What are we celebrating for?

“We shall take you and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, … and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, … and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault …”

-Christopher Columbus

Each October children in classrooms around the nation will dutifully recite their Columbus Day “facts”: the ships (“the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria…”), the year (“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue...”), and even the fruit that the explorer thought best resembled the Earth (that would be the orange ). Our national leaders take time out of their busy schedules – raising money and covering up scandals – to commemorate the man who “found” America.

I experienced an odd sensation today as I was on the subway today. Today was Columbus Day but I had to go in to work for part of the day anyway. The book I am currently reading is King Leopold's Ghost, a pretty horrifying history of the Congo under colonialism.

Reading about colonial genocide in Africa on Columbus Day. Had a kind of irony to it.

I have been ambivalent, in the litteral meaning of the word, towards Columbus Day for years now. I celebrate America and Columbus' "discovery" of the "New World" because the result of his discovery and the ultimate founding of America is that my family, myself included, is alive and thriving today. Without America, my family would have been exterminated in the genocide of Nazi Germany if not before that in the genocide of the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and later Stalin's genocide in the Soviet Union.

But I am reminded every Columbus day of the genocides on which the founding of America was based. My family had a refuge from genocide because of a previous genocide committed against the natives of America. How's THAT for ambivalence?

King Leopold II set out to turn the entire Congo basin into his own personal colony. It wasn't a colony of Belgium until later. It was a colony held by a single man. According to some estimates, ten million people were killed so that one man could make the modern equivalent of $1 billion. Those people were killed to keep costs down in production first of ivory, then of rubber. Eventually, outrage from Britain, the US, France and Germany led to the transfer of the Congo from Leopold to Belgium...without much change in the genocidal practices.