Here we are again at October 12 and the annual commemoration of Columbus Day, 520 years later. School teachers will dutifully teach lessons from district-sanctioned textbooks that promote one or another sanitized version of how Columbus the great explorer discovered a new world that would forever change the course of history. That history was changed is true; but pretty much the rest of the Columbus story is a myth that perpetuates a version of reality that simply isn't true. The truth is that Columbus essentially started the transatlantic slave trade and was responsible for what may be the first recorded genocide of an indigenous people in modern history. But somehow those details usually get left out of the storytelling, unsavory as they are for children's history books.
It's a mythology that won't die easily, and some Americans still hold on to it for dear life. Italian-Americans will go head-to-head with Native Americans as they protest Denver's annual Columbus Day parade. Columbus is, after all, Italian-Americans' claim to fame, but what most of them don't know is that his ethnicity as an Italian has never been fully substantiated in the historical record, and it is in fact shrouded in doubt.
Indigenous peoples worldwide have been working hard for the past few decades to expose the truth about Christopher Columbus. For Native people, celebrating Christopher Columbus is like Jews celebrating Hitler. Why celebrate someone who led to such misery for your ancestors? In Berkeley, Columbus Day was changed to Indigenous People's Day in 1991. In South Dakota, Columbus Day was changed to Native American Day in 1990. Other states are slow to follow suit, but student groups on college campuses such as my alma mater (the University of New Mexico) stage Indigenous People's Day events in answer to what they see as an absurd holiday. When I was a student there organizing Indigenous People's day events, we introduced a new ritual called the "Burning of the Bulls," in which we burned a copy of the Roman Catholic Papal Bull Inter Caetera, an idea we borrowed from our Native Hawaiian brothers and sisters in the islands. The Bull Inter Caetera is possibly the single most harmful document to the worlds' indigenous peoples ever produced.
Read about the uncensored truth of Columbus's history (and the accompanying Papal Bulls) here. And then think again about the wisdom of celebrating it.