Why "Columbus Day" needs to go

Bob McElvaine celebrated Indigenous People's Day with this column, What Celebrating Columbus Says About US Medium 10/11/2021.

He provides a 1963 example of how a leading liberal historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, showed a surprisingly callous disregard for the cruelty and brutality of Columbus' initial spree of conquest in the Carribbean. And he adroitly links it to the white supremacist worldview behind the current Republican complaints against the bogeyman of "critical race theory" (CRT). McElvaine describes the anti-CRT hype this way: "a movement is underway again to impose on school curricula the sort of 'guilt-free' mythology that prevailed when Morison wrote and call it 'history.'"

One of the aspects of the liberal historical view of that period that I’ve found the hardest to process is the view of the European conquest of the Americas as a tragedy. The native population faced European armies who had superior military forces and a more “advanced” civilization in economic terms and social organization. And so their subjugation was inevitable.

There’s enough truth in it that it’s hard to dismiss completely. There was no shortage of real tragedy involved. But the tragic approach as a master narrative inevitably obscures the cruelty and ambition of the Europeans and the agency of the native peoples in their centuries of interaction with the colonizers. The tragedy frame also reflects how hard it is to imagine a “happy ending” for the indigenous people in that confrontation.

That’s part of why the work from the early 1500s by Bartolomé de las Casas– who owned native slaves himself for a few years – is so important. Like the guy who wrote “Amazing Grace”, he was someone who converted from his previous ways and brought some convert’s zeal to his criticism of Spanish colonial practices. Of course, he wasn’t working from a 21st century postcolonialist perspective. But his work created a record that there were at least some Spaniards who were criticizing Spain’s conduct in real time applying some version of the standards of their era. Those famous “European values” today’s xenophobes like to claim are so superior to Muslim ones.

Similar American examples were a minority but at least there were some. Fur traders often worked and lived closely with American Indians. There were “Indian lovers” in the cities and among Christian missionaries, though their actual respect for native life wasn’t exactly pure. The opponents of Andrew Jackson’s (rightly) much-criticized Indian Removal Act argued against it on the grounds that it would be easier to convert all the Indians to Christianity if they were not expelled, and also that the fact some of them owned African slaves was a good advertisement for slavery.

Herman Melville actually lived with a native tribe in the South Seas for a while and drew some downright anti-imperialist conclusions from his experience. Francis Parkman did serious research on native tribes and Indian languages and had a reality-based understanding of their lives. (Although Melville criticized Parkman for having too hostile a view. And Parkman’s views on women’s suffrage in the later 19th century were pretty rancid.) So there were contemporary criticisms in the US that call into question the “tragic” view that the colonists didn’t know any better.

This piece from the Spanish news organization Público (César Calero, Visión de los vencidos 11.10.2021) discusses how Indigenous People's Day is straightforwardly celebrated (with varying names for the occasion) in Argentina (Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity), Bolivia (Decolonization Day), Costa Rica (Day of the Cultures), Ecuador (Day of Interculturalism and Plural Nationality) , Nicaragua (Indigenous Resistance Day), Peru (Day of the Original Peoples and of Intercultural Dialogue), and Venezuela (Indigenous Resistance Day).

Calero also notes that Spanish conservatives including former Spanish President José María Aznar are promoting a type of "Hispanidad", which involves a triumphalist celebration of the Spanish conquests in the New World. See also: (Miguel Munoz, La derecha española refuerza su discurso racista contra los pueblos indígenas latinoamericanos a las puertas del 12-O Público 12.10.2021)