DISCOVERY DAY — Or, why I keep Columbus Day.
[Howard] Zinn was right about Columbus, but he never once turned the critical lens he applied to the Spanish colonists to the native people of the New World. In Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs sacrificed war captives by the thousands, cutting out their hearts atop the Templo Mayor, and stacked the skulls in a tower of more than 650 heads cemented together, including women and children, while captors ate parts of the bodies in ritual feasts. Around 1450 on Peru’s coast, the Chimú cut open the chests of children, some as young as five. In South Dakota around 1325, attackers at Crow Creek slaughtered villagers, scalped and dismembered the corpses, and carried off the young women. In Colorado around 1150, Ancestral Puebloans at Cowboy Wash butchered and cooked people. And across the continent, slavery was widespread. None of this excuses Columbus. He was a savage. But so were these indigenous people.
Nor did Zinn turn the lens he trained on Columbus Day toward Martin Luther King Day. He was happy to put on his historian’s hat for the uncomfortable truths of Columbus the man, but he did no such thing for King, who plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, serially cheated on his wife, rejected the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection that his Baptist congregants took on faith, and according to an FBI surveillance summary, may have looked on and laughed while a fellow minister raped a woman in a Washington hotel room. None of this approaches the scale of Columbus’s crimes, but it’s the principle that matters. We acknowledge the truth of the words King delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, and we honor the man even though he doesn’t live up to the symbol. But more importantly, we would never assume that someone celebrating MLK Day is celebrating being a scumbag husband, just as we don’t assume that someone celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day means celebrating eating children. Rather, these holidays celebrate the good parts, and we don’t sit around debating whether we can separate the good from the bad either. We just separate them. Readers familiar with my history may be wondering, what about someone like Vladimir Lenin? Do we get to celebrate him too? But with King and Columbus, we celebrate specific achievements worth honoring, and set the sins of the men aside. With Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we celebrate an ethnic identity, which I find less deserving, but not inherently immoral. But with someone like Lenin, the atrocities were not distinct from the achievement. When we celebrate King, we celebrate his antiracism. When we celebrate Columbus, we celebrate his discovery. But when people celebrate Lenin, they celebrate his revolution.
The decisive push for Indigenous Peoples’ Day came on the same anniversary when I was sitting in homeroom, learning about the real Columbus and what he did to the people of my mother’s homeland. In the Bay Area, activists formed a group called Resistance 500 and lobbied the Berkeley City Council, which voted unanimously to make Indigenous Peoples’ Day an official city holiday. In 2014, Seattle and Minneapolis adopted it too. And in 2021, President Biden formally recognized it.
Curiously, the author misspelled then-President Obama in that last sentence.