Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Holiday Named for Columbus

10/9/2017

4 Comments

 
Leif Erikson Day (Oct. 9), on the anniversary of the arrival in New York Harbor of the first organized shipload of immigrants from Norway, began in Wisconsin almost ninety years ago to celebrate Nordic heritage. But it’s the Italian-born explorer Christopher Columbus in whose controversial name banks and post offices are closed today. What are we celebrating, exactly?

Columbus Day was never chiefly about conquest and white supremacy. Protestant Americans of English and German ancestry, the dominant culture in the 1800s, paid little attention to Christopher Columbus. Immigrant minority communities – Roman Catholics and particularly Italians – created celebrations named for Columbus to affirm their place in a society that despised them.

Anti-immigrant groups rejected Columbus Day for its association with Catholicism. As Italian immigration peaked in the years around 1900, so did stereotypes of Italians: shifty, criminal, permanently foreign, fit only for manual labor, racially midway between white and Chinese. Violence mounted. Eleven Sicilians were lynched in a single incident in New Orleans in 1891. Ku Klux Klan activity targeted Italian Americans in New Jersey in the 1920s.

Lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, led to the establishment of a national Columbus Day holiday in 1937. Eighty years later, its associations with persecuted immigrants largely forgotten, should we rename it Indigenous Peoples Day? We might do better to let it fade into oblivion alongside Leif Erikson Day. In its place, we could create two holidays on unrelated dates: one named for an American Indian hero or event to honor indigenous peoples, and one to honor all immigrants regardless of faith or national origin.
4 Comments
Lisa
10/9/2017 09:30:07 am

Sarah, did you see today's Non Sequitur comic?

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Sarah link
10/9/2017 11:29:00 am

Ha! I hadn't, but looked it up after seeing your comment. Thanks for the laugh.

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Walter Hassenpflug
10/9/2017 11:26:46 am

Sometimes truth has little value. American students in elementary and secondary schools are presented with a neutral version of Columbus who sailed the ocean blue in 1492. They are not exposed to the naked truth that Columbus opened a door to European colonialism which brought disease, destruction, and catastrophic wars to the people who already lived there. He opened the door to decimation of Amerian
indigenous populations.

Americo Vespucci gets credit for the name America, north and south.

Yet norse (viking) sagas indicate that Leif Erikson (spelled different ways in Old Norse, Icelandic, etc.) was probably the first white European to set foot on North American soil at L'Anse aux Meadows in Nova Scotia. The Ingstadts (husband and wife team) discovered this Viking site in the 1960s. Dating of artifacts establishes the Viking presence on/about A.D. 1000.

Why do "educated" people continue to give credit to Columbus?

He who writes history first, seems to have the advantage of setting a train in motion that is almost impossible to stop.

The sagas indicate that a German named Tyrkir was part of the crew with Leif. What if he was the first to place his foot on the shore of Nova Scotia? Then a German was probably the first white European to "discover" (North) America.

Sometimes truth does not matter.

American Indigenous Peoples Day sounds somewhat better as they were already on the American Continent, north and south. But what tribal group was the first on American soil?

Maybe the "discovery" of America will provide a distraction from the havoc and deaths in Los Vegas.

Just some random thoughts.

Walter

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Sarah link
10/9/2017 11:49:25 am

Yes, it depends who wrote it first. And yes, credit regularly goes to the leader of the team or expedition. And indeed, which tribal group was here first? And for that matter, what does it matter who first reached this hemisphere from somewhere else?

Columbus's expedition differs from Erikson's in having started the series of European arrivals that brought permanent change. "Deserve" and "credit" might be misnomers, though I sometimes wonder whether heaping blame on Columbus implies a belief that without him, all those horrible consequences of contact wouldn't have happened.

If American Indians were selecting a national holiday in their honor, is this the day they'd have chosen? African American history and culture gets attention around Martin Luther King's birthday, not the arrival date of the first ship in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Keeping the date as a holiday, but stripping it of Columbus's name, disregards its origin as an affirmation of a minority group that faced serious discrimination. With Catholics and Italians now part of the dominant culture, it may not be needed any more. Why can't we just let it go?

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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