“Columbus Was A Jerk”

“Columbus Was A Jerk”    Oct. 13,2019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video
Genocide and Slavery: The Evil Twins of Colonialism by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Colonization at its very core is the exploitation of non-white others to advance the economic and political agendas of those who deem themselves superior. Colonialism’s evil twins are genocide and slavery; blacks and Indians paid the highest price in the building of the United States, and we know all too well the legacy of that exploitation is still very much alive today.

Feb 23, 2015   https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/genocide-and-slavery-the-evil-twins-of-colonialism-KerGe7W3iEeUgILWu0ljYg/

You have not really lived until you have had to sit and listen to me and Dan Goodwin tell stories about our Christmas 2016 trip to deliver winter camping gear to the protestors at Standing Rock, North Dakota. The Dakota Access Pipeline being built through Sioux reservation land and over the Missouri River was a threat to both the water supply of millions of people, and a violation of the sovereignty of the Sioux tribe. I had been outraged by the abuses of local law enforcement against the protestors and I was determined to do something to help. 

When I heard that the police had blocked a couple of hundred protestors on a bridge and hosed them down with fire hoses in the sub-zero temperatures and kept them there freezing for hours, we decided to leave immediately, on Christmas morning. Driving into a North Dakota blizzard turns out to be a lot more of a heroic measure than either of us had anticipated. It took three days to make the drive. One day we were on the road for 9 hours and only covered a hundred miles in the zero-visibility weather.  

Tribal elders had ordered the protestors to leave the camp in the severe weather, so, when we arrived, only a couple of hundred stalwart folk remained in the impossible circumstances. 

The blizzard had collapsed several of the teepees and makeshift buildings. I had just broken my arm falling on the ice here at church, so Dan was ordered to shovel snow within the first sixty seconds that we were on the camp and circumstances didn’t much improve during our time there. 

It was an honor to meet Chase Ironeyes and to present him with the financial support we had raised to help in their efforts. But it was not a universally good experience. The single largest problem on the camp for the several months that thousands of people had been there was the rape of female protestors. There was a lot of theft, and though drugs and alcohol were forbidden in the camp, it was there. 

Of course, it was not only native Americans who were there. The protest effort had drawn both celebrities and bleeding-heart liberals, but it had also drawn opportunists and con men and it didn’t take long to start sorting out who was who. I met a young Palestinian woman who had grown up in territorial protests and traveled to America to be there in support of the Sioux. I didn’t meet any other ministers but I’m getting used to that. 

But it wasn’t just the people who were drawn to the camp who had dubious moral qualities. There were serious problems among the Indian population as well. This goes to the complication we have always had in understanding the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. 

Most of what we know about Indians, unless you grew up near a reservation, is based on TV shows and movies and you can count on virtually all of that is false. 

There is no singular Native American culture, spirituality, or ecology. From the Innuit Eskimo population in the polar north, to the Mapuche of Argentina, there were hundreds of tribes, languages and histories. There is no Native American spirituality because there were a thousand of them. While there were written languages among the Indigenous of South America, there does not seem to have been any in what we call North America and when you try to talk about Indian culture, you have to talk about pre-Columbian, or post colonization. 

Many Native Americans don’t want to be called Indians or Indigenous, but prefer to be identified as Sioux, or Cherokee, because their tribes are as different as being English can be from being Croat. There is not a single Europe, Asia, or Africa. And there is not a single Indian culture, character, language, or religion. 

We know of no Indigenous tribes that were entirely hunter-gatherers. All of them practiced agriculture and, in fact, many were much better at it than the first colonizers from Europe.

Columbus had one advantage over the Indians he first encountered in the Caribbean. They had better weapons. Columbus wrote in his journal regarding his first meeting with the islanders, “They neither carry nor know anything of arms, for I showed them swords, and they took them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance." 

Their lack of metal weapons left them vulnerable to the ravages of the Europeans.  The reason why Elizabeth Warren and most of we white folk here have a small percentage of Native American blood in us is because thousands of young women were taken to Europe as sex slaves in the first two centuries of contact with the northern European people who would eventually colonize the Americas. 

There is no way to meaningfully polish this turd. Columbus spoke in his journal about bringing Christianity to the Americas but what he brought was disease, slavery, exploitation, violence, and finally, genocide. 

People have migrated for all of human history. Invasion, conquest, colonization has always been a part of that. In fact, I find this whole DNA testing craze to be quite ironically narcissistic. Folks, we are all from Africa. All humans come from our evolutionary ancestors in Africa and we have adapted to different environments and diets, but we are all pink on the inside.

Race, itself, is a construct of language more than it is of biology. But America was built on a concept of racial, religious, and cultural superiority and that narcissistic assumption was enforced with superior weapons. America has two original sins, the genocide of Native Americans, and the enslavement of Africans. Both were predicated on the assumption of some kind of superiority based on the color of our skin. It is such a horrible sin that it becomes difficult to talk about because you either buy into, as racists do either openly or unconsciously, or you feel so guilty about it that you start to sound like a self-flagellating zealot who is so full of self-loathing that they have lost contact with reality.

Now, I am talking about this because tomorrow is still a banking holiday called Columbus Day and there should not be a holiday, a statue, or any kind of tribute to a man that history clearly records was a jerk more on the level of Hitler than Hitler was. We should change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day and begin to get real about our history and our present day dubious ethical responsibility towards America’s first nations. 

It is important to note that Columbus Day did not become a national holiday until 1937. For the first 160 years of our nation’s existence, Columbus didn’t rate a national holiday but in the early part of the 20^thcentury there were about 4 million Italians who emigrated to the United States and they were facing tremendous xenophobic prejudice. So Columbus, an Italian, had his reputation polished to give Italians a claim to having found the Americas. Ironically, this statue is in Columbus circle in New York City. Columbus never set foot on the North American mainland. He landed among the Caribbean Islands. But the statue is in NYC because that was where Italian immigrants were suffering from calls to “go back to where you came from.”

Italians have other great inventors, artists, and businesspeople to hang their heritage celebrations on. Columbus needs to become a footnote in history.

Similarly, and this is for free today, this monument to “Our Confederate Dead” that has stood on the courthouse lawn in my hometown of Glasgow, KY since 1905, has virtually nothing to do with those who had died 40 years earlier in the Civil War. It was raised by white people as a warning to black people that even though they lost the war, their fundamental racist sentiments were unchanged. As proof of that fact, a couple of years ago when I wrote an editorial for my hometown paper suggesting that they move the bronze statue to a nearby Civil War graveyard, I was inundated with hate mail, many from my former classmates who assured me of some violence if I ever came back to Glasgow . . . and they are safe, I had no desire to do that, but still, what I’m pointing out is that monuments are not always what they present themselves as being on the surface.

But it is important that we all start to let Indigenous people be people. They were not savages and they were not noble environmentalists. They were not always peace loving, egalitarian, generous, or good. They often attacked and robbed and raped among neighboring tribes. Some would drive hundreds of bison off a cliff only to harvest a dozen of them. They burned forests to open farmland or to foster hunting. Some practiced slavery before encountering European colonizers but afterwards, some joined in the southern practice of owning African slaves. 

 The most notable of which was the Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore who had a fifteen-thousand-acre plantation in Mississippi where he kept more than four hundred African slaves. 

I would love to be able to say that the victims of our nation’s two original sins, Native Americans and African slaves, were natural allies who rose up together to fight off the oppression of European colonizers but there appears to be virtually no historical record of it. 

In fact, many tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Apparently, racism can be an infectious disease. Native American historian, Paul Chaat Smith, says, “The Cherokee had a very successful trade in guns and slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as Southern slavery grew, they were not at all reluctant to take part.” (The Sun, August 2019, page 8)

People who live near reservations often think of Indians only in association with casinos and the crime that comes with unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction, and poor education systems. White liberals are equally racists when they portray them as being some kind of new-age forest bunnies. 

But my point is this, the first nations of the Americas do not have to be paragons of environmental virtue and magically connected to nature in order for us to come to a sane and balanced awareness that they have been historically victimized by colonization, that there numbers have been decimated by genocide, diseases, land theft, and discrimination, and while they have issues of their own, it is time for us to take our boot off of their throats and give them both the respect and the opportunity to forge what it means to be a real Indian in the 21^stcentury.

Columbus was one influential character in history. We cannot undo the migration of people from the east into the Americas but we can recognize that while Columbus had some virtues, his sins are such that we should not praise him or publicly honor him. And while Indians are not saints, they are people and it is high time that we started treating them like they were more than movie props and names of sports teams.

 As for me, my next pipeline protest will be in Florida. The moral issues are the same, but I have learned that my old bones prefer palm trees to blizzards. Let the Indigenous Peoples rise up.