I don’t understand why Columbus day is celebrated as a national holiday, unless it is to honor the explorers, the discoverers, the Enlightenment.
Otherwise, I am in the growing camp of those who are choosing to use the day to honor the Native Americans, who can mark the decimation of their people and their culture from that fateful day in 1492, when Europeans “discovered” America.
This should be a reminder of America’s original sin — the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Native peoples — the extraordinary disrespect for Native cultures and heritage which is ongoing.
In fact, cities including Albuquerque, Seattle and Minneapolis celebrate “Indigenous Peoples Day” and at least a dozen states don’t celebrate the holiday at all, while that don’t celebrate the holiday at all. South Dakota and Hawaii recognize the day as Native American Day and Discoverers’ Day, respectively. (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/22/memorial-day_n_7314836.html)
Sam Levine writing for the Huffington Post, “Some Places Are Celebrating A Different Holiday On Columbus Day” quotes Seattle Councilmember Kshama] Sawant saying, “I think for most people who know the reality of colonialism, imperialism, the genocide that happened of the indigenous community, for them the idea of celebrating all of that via Columbus Day is quite abhorrent. It was important to have the city of Seattle declare that they’re not going to be celebrating Columbus Day, they’re celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Sawant says, “is also intended to draw attention to the way that indigenous communities continue to be marginalized and lack access to basic services. More than one in three native children live in poverty, and the high school dropout rate is the highest among any ethnic group in the country.”
Columbus Day, the second Monday in October, has been a federal holiday only since 1968, a period of anti-imperialism protest around the world (and likely the counterweight for the establishment of its divine right). civil rights movements by Blacks and women, and heightened activity by the American Indian Movement (AIM). (www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/indigenous-peoples-day_56181a6ce4b0dbb8000e974a)
It seems to me that Columbus Day was established to reinforce the establishment’s notion of American Exceptionalism — that the European colonists had a divine right, a manifest destiny to occupy and control the continent.
At the time of Columbus, there were anywhere from 50 to 100 million Indians living in North America.
By the time Europeans came to set up colonies 100 years later, there were some 20 million-50 million indigenous people (some put the estimate as high as 100 million).
That means that at the time of “contact” with Europeans, the earliest settlers, in St. Augustine, Jamestown, and Plymouth, would have been vastly outnumbered.
How were a few thousand European colonists able to take over a continent?
Because the Indians’ numbers were immediately decimated — whole villages wiped out — because of disease brought by the Europeans for which the natives had no immunity.
Then, in just two generations from when the Pilgrims were literally saved from starvation by the Wampanoag Indians, they went to war with the “savages” who would not convert to Christianity.
Roger Williams, who championed religious freedom (not the kind the Puritans practiced, which was a theocracy for which Williams was banished from Plimoth Colony), was one of the few who dealt fairly with Indians — paying for land, even transcribing his Bible in Indian language and allowing Indians to attend his service.
“Perhaps the dying request of Narragansett sachem Canonicus best shows Williams’ relationship with the Indians.
Canonicus asked that Williams attend his funeral and that he be buried in the cloth Williams gave him.
Williams championed Indian rights, but — unlike his fight for religious freedom — this bore little fruit.
By 1676 the rich Indian cultures of 1620 were reeling from war and disease, and Europeans would take virtually all of their lands.
But Roger Williams led in helping these Europeans understand the first settlers of North America.” (www.nps.gov/rowi/learn/historyculture/toknowapeople.htm)
By 1890, in the United States, only 250,000 native people were left (it is estimated there are 2 million native peoples in the US today and 1 million in Canada).
To put that into perspective, by 1860, the United States population was 31 million; by 1900, it was 76 million.
The Indians the settlers didn’t kill through germs (later on, conducting actual germ warfare with smallpox infected blankets that were distributed to Indians), they pushed out and killed — no different than the ethnic cleansing going on today.
Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and was responsible for the Trail of Tears, that forcibly removed tens of thousands from their homelands, resulting in the death of thousands along the arduous journey.
Jackson justified the Indian Removal Act based on some concept of “divine” right of Christians to take over the land from the pagans, and in keeping with the best of political double talk, “for their own good”:
“It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation,” Jackson said in a message to Congress.
“The consequences of a speedy removal will be important to the United States, to individual States, and to the Indians themselves. . . . It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the General and State governments on account of the Indians. It will place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters.
“By opening the whole territory between Tennessee on the north and Louisiana on the south to the settlement of the whites it will incalculably strengthen the southwestern frontier and render the adjacent States strong enough to repel future invasions without remote aid. It will relieve the whole State of Mississippi and the western part of Alabama of Indian occupancy, and enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth and power. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually . . . to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community. . . .
“Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people . . . .”
Here on Long Island, I wonder how many even stop to think about the fact that there were Indians living here when the first colonists came in the 1600s.
Place names like Massapequa, Setauket, Manhasset and Montauk should (but don’t) stir some recollection.
Indeed, there were once 13 tribes living on Long Island, which was called “Paumanok” (“Land of Tribute”): Canarsie, Rockaway, Matinecock, Merrick, Massapequa, Nissequoge, Secatoag, Seatauket, Patchoag, Corchaug, Shinnecock, Manhasset and Montauk. The Rockaway Indians were the tribe that inhabited the area now known as Richmond Hill.
Even at Steppingstone Park, there is a historic marker which refers to the fact that the Great Neck Peninsula was once “home of the Massapeake and Mattincocke Indians and Sachem Tackapousha, when Dutch and English settlers came in 1644. (Garvies Point in Glen Cove does Indian archaeological study.)
Where did all the Indians go?
Were they forcibly removed after the 1830 Relocation Act?
We still have two reservations on Long Island: the Shinnecock in Southamptom, with a population of (an equal number live off the reservation) and the much less well known Poospatuck reservation in Brookhaven.
This summer, riding the 400-mile Cycle the Erie tour, the Erie Canalway took me to Fort Stanwix, Rome, a Revolutionary War-era fort, where I learned how the Iroquois Confederacy thrived there until European colonists moved in.
By the time of the Revolutionary War, Haudenosaunee Indians were living in towns, in single-family houses in a grid-street pattern, were farmers, their household items looking essentially the same as the European colonists’.
They held commissions in the army and had western names. The British negotiated a treaty (1768) which the new Americans ignored, writing their own treaty that confined the once mighty Oneida to a mere 32 acre-reservation, surrounded by “Europeans.” (In fact, just about all the treaties that Americans signed with Indian nations have been ignored.)
Then, hiking the Grand Canyon in Arizona, I had the chance to see the “then” and “now”: visiingt Walnut Canyon where you can walk a trail to cliff dwellings in this harsh environment, as well as the Wupatki Pueblo – a structure which would have had 100 rooms, inhabited 800 years ago, now National Monuments.
To get to the Grand Canyon from Wupatki Puebo we drove through today’s Navajo Reservation — vast expanse of land almost completely devoid of anything. There is no “town,” no “village,” no “main street,” no amenities whatsoever. Every so often, you see a habitation – the traditional eight-sided hogan, a trailer, a shack amid nothing.
This is the Cameron Chapter of the Navajo people, named for Ralph Cameron, a miner who originally came to exploit the Grand Canyon and found tourism much more lucrative — he laid a claim to what is known as the “Bright Angel Trail,” the most popular trail into the Grand Canyon, charging people $1, and set up a “trading” post — a shop, restaurant, that we visit today that sells Indian crafts and is staffed largely by Indians.
So why the Navajo Reservation at the entrance to the canyon is desolate? How can that be when 5 million to 6 million people visit the Grand Canyon each year?
Every other place at the base of such an attraction is booming. Why doesn’t the prosperity we see in a growing, thriving Flagstaff just 79 miles away not “trickle down?”
The issues are relevant today because it is unfathomable why there is so much poverty among Indians, still — when in fact, under treaty, the tribes are supposed to get royalties from the extraction of minerals from their land.
As it is, the only tribes that are doing well are those that have opted to turn their reservations into casino gaming destinations, like Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun in Connecticut.
Indeed, Native American people — who number about 3 million today (5 million including mixed-families) — are the poorest ethnic group in America.
One-third live in poverty, as Lydia Miller writes in “Native Lives Matter, Too,” documenting the violence against Indians perpetrated by law enforcement (New York Times, Oct. 13, www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/opinion/native-lives-matter-too.html?ref=opinion&_r=0)
White society implemented a federal policy of social and cultural annihilation, under the pretense of “civilizing” Native Americans — it was illegal for Indians to speak their native language, practice their traditions or their religion. Indian children were taken from their families and placed in boarding school or given for adoption into white families. That wasn’t 100 years ago — it was only decades ago. And still, today, lawmakers use Indian “sovereignty” as a tool to exploit and disenfranchise them.
“Until 1978, American Indians on reservations had no religious rights and were specifically barred from practicing traditional ceremonies….The justification for this denial of religious freedom, inexplicably enough, was that Native peoples were sovereign nations by treaty and not granted the freedoms that American ‘citizens’ claimed as fundamental rights. Under ‘sovereignty,’ the U.S. government occupied the reservations, kept control of the populations through military might, imposed arbitrary civil orders and prevented them from exercising freedoms guaranteed Americans under the U.S. Constitution, including the First Amendment freedom of religion that is bedrock to the Bill of Rights. This changed in 1978 with The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and subsequent amendment.” (See: https://www.manataka.org/page1965.html)
American Indians have also been subjected to voter suppression, much as Blacks were with Jim Crow laws, even as they were specifically granted voting rights with the same amendments and Voting Rights Act provisions as African Americans, giving rise to the American Indian Movement, which came to a head in 1973, at Wounded Knee. (See American Indians won the right to vote in 1924, but some officials still haven’t gotten the message, Daily Kos, June 23, 2013, www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/24/1218267/-American-Indians-won-the-right-to-vote-in-1924-but-some-officials-).
This is significant in light of how Native Americans continue to be exploited, assaulted and violated through Congressional action. (Only two Native Americans serve in the House.)
Consider that Republicans held up the Violence Against Women Act over a provision that extended protections to Native American women.
As Louise Erdrich wrote in a New York Times op ed (Oct. 13), “The Justice Department reports that one in three Native women is raped over her lifetime, while other sources report that many Native women are too demoralized to report rape. Perhaps this is because federal prosecutors decline to prosecute 67 percent of sexual abuse cases, according to the Government Accountability Office. Further tearing at the social fabric of communities, a Native woman battered by her non-Native husband has no recourse for justice in tribal courts, even if both live on reservation ground. More than 80 percent of sex crimes on reservations are committed by non-Indian men, who are immune from prosecution by tribal courts.
“The Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center says this gap in the law has attracted non-Indian habitual sexual predators to tribal areas. Alexandra Pierce, author of a 2009 report on sexual violence against Indian women in Minnesota, has found that there rapes on upstate reservations increase during hunting season. A non-Indian can drive up from the cities and be home in five hours. The tribal police can’t arrest him.”
The exploitation didn’t end 100 years ago, but continues today.
“Last year, Republicans in Congress secretly gave away sacred Native American lands to a multinational mining conglomerate,” says Rep. Raul Grijalva. “Oak Flat, a centuries-old sacred site for Native Americans in Arizona, was handed over to an international mining conglomerate by Congressional Republicans earlier this year as part of The National Defense Authorization Act – a bill President Obama could not easily veto – included a shameful provision mandating a land swap long favored by a mining firm called Resolution Copper. Congress, backed by extreme Republicans, gave this mining company, whose owners have ‘dismal human rights and environmental record’ exactly what they wanted at the expense of sacred and religious sites connected to these public lands.” Grijalva has introduced the bipartisan Save Oak Flat Act to repeal the land trade while leaving the rest of the law intact.
“The line on treating Indian Country with disrespect must be drawn. It’s time for Congress to do the right thing and uphold its commitment to Native Americans and protect their sacred lands,” Grijalva wrote.
In Crawford, Nebraska, native people and ranchers are fighting the re-permitting of the Crow Butte Resources, or CBR, uranium mine, comprised of thousands of wells at the base of Crow Butte, a sacred site located within Lakota treaty territories. For the past couple decades CBR has mined uranium using the in situ leach process, which injects water under high pressure into aquifers, extracts uranium ore, and then processes it into yellow cake. Each year 700,000 pounds of uranium produced here is shipped to Canada, where it is sold on the open market.
Or consider that the Justice Department just announced a $20.8 billion settlement with BP over the oil spill that unleashed 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. While this was the largest pollution settlement in U.S. history, the United Houma Nation, who were hit by the worst of the spill, won’t see one cent and can’t even sue BP because they are not federally recognized. (www.truth-out.org/news/item/33196-lakota-women-and-ranchers-lead-charge-to-break-silence-against-uranium-mine)
And in the latest example of exploitation painted to look like a favor for Indians, the House is trying to pass the Orwellian named “Native American Energy Act” (sponsored by Young of Alaska and one other).
The Office of Management & Budget, issuing its Statement of Administration Policy, Oct. 7, 2015, said, “While the Administration supports the need to facilitate energy development in Indian Country, it does not support H.R. 538, the ‘Native American Energy Act.’
The bill would undermine public participation and transparency of review of projects on Indian lands under the National Environmental Policy Act, set unrealistic deadlines and remove oversight for appraisals of Indian lands or trust assets, and prohibit awards under the Equal Access to Justice Act or payment of fees or expenses to a plaintiff from the Judgment Fund in energy-related actions.
By foreclosing the Judgment Fund, this provision could negatively impact the Indian Affairs budget that is intended to serve all tribes. In addition, the bill’s changes to mineral leasing laws applicable to Navajo Nation lands may adversely affect energy development on those lands.
“The bill also stipulates that Indian lands are exempt from the Department of the Interior’s hydraulic fracturing rule. That rule already contains a provision allowing for variances from the rule’s requirements when Tribal laws meet or exceed the rule’s standards. The rule’s approach both protects environmental and trust resources, while also protecting the decision-making role of the Tribes. Overall, H.R. 538 would not ensure diligent development of resources on Indian lands.
“The Administration appreciates the Committee’s efforts to address energy needs in Indian Country. Income from energy development is one of the larger sources of revenue generated from trust lands, and delays in development translate to delays in profits to Indian mineral rights owners. The Administration has been taking meaningful action to update the leasing process for lands held in trust for Indian tribes, and is actively working to expedite appraisals, leasing, and permitting on Indian lands, and to provide resources to ensure safe and responsible development. The Administration looks forward to working with the Congress to develop the reforms necessary to support such development.” (www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/114/saphr538r_20151007.pdf)
How we continue to treat Native Americans was brought to mind with President Obama’s visit to Alaska, and the uproar (from Ohioans) over his decision to show respect for Native Americans and restore the native name, Denali, to the mountain named for President McKinley by a prospector (McKinley, an Ohioan, already dead, had never visited Alaska or had any connection to Alaska).
The Ohio delegation went ballistic (what else is new).
President Obama’s focus on climate change mitigation, which he highlighted during his historic visit as a sitting President to Alaska, also directly benefits native peoples, whose communities are most dramatically upended by climate change — another thing that the “civilized,” over-industrialized and materialistic world has foisted on native peoples all around the globe.
