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Martin P. Felix
October 12, 2020
“Yeah. No school tomorrow [Monday]!” my 10th-grade son exclaims. “They call it Columbus Day. This is like having a public holiday for Ted Bundy. But I’ll take it anyway!”
So-called Columbus Day has been a national holiday since 1934 when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt designated it as such. It is to mark the now infamous day on October 12, 1492, when Christopher Columbus encountered the new world, introducing a cycle of violence, expropriation of native Caribbean lands, and ultimately genocide and slavery. It was the beginning of the colonization of the Americas.
Millions of indigenous peoples in territories throughout the Caribbean archipelago were decimated. On islands such as Grenada and many other islands, Columbus’ occupation ultimately led to complete genocide. The journal Quaternary Science Review estimated in a 2019 that between 1492 and 1600, about 55 million indigenous people throughout the Americas were exterminated. On Hispaniola (today’s Dominican Republic and Haiti), the Taíno people were virtually wiped out in first decades of the Columbus encounter.
In 1934 the then US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt designated Columbus Day (then celebrated October 12). Since 1971, when Columbus Day was designated the second Monday in October, it has been celebrated as a federal holiday. In many locations across the country, Americans hold parades to commemorate the day.
The 2020 commemoration has come at a time of deep re-examination nationally and globally on the past and how the past continues to impact the present in some negative ways. The murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that have spread around the world have forced governments and institutions, both private and public, to take a hard and painful look at many aspects of their societies.
Statues and monuments have been removed around the world, especially that of Columbus’, arguably the most present of colonial monuments (35 Columbus statues has been removed since the BLM protests began). The statue of British slave trader Edward Colston, was dumped in the Bristol harbor (UK), and many confederate monuments in the US likewise took a dive. Global colonial figures were not spared, including Belgian King Leopold II, whose brutality toward the Congolese in the late 19th century still shudders researchers. Some see parallels in the 19th century Congolese and native Caribbean experience that began in the 15th century. Columbus’ gold-maddened drive led to calculated and sadistic dismembering of natives. And Leopold had his soldiers in command cut off heads and limbs of enslaved miners deemed unproductive to be displayed on village palisades.
Symbolically, on US independence Day 2020, protesters marched to the Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore near Little Italy and yanked it, dragged it to the edge of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and toppled it was a splash into the water as fireworks went off around the city. Baltimore’s Columbus statue was one of the latest but not the last monuments in the U.S. to be popularly removed in this year of national reckoning over racism and police violence. Similar actions have also toppled statues of Confederate figures and enslavers around the country.
The original colonizer of the region’s originial peoples, Columbus forced Tainos and other natives into mining gold, Brazilwood, pearls, tobacco and other resources. This practice was modeled by succeeding colonizers over the five centuries of European colonialism.
The day October 12 is suppose to marks Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to America. He is credited for landing on Guanahani island in the Bahamas on this day in 1492. But historians and other scientists of the past are increasingly reckoning with the fact that Columbus was not even the first person, nor even the first European, to explore the Americas, the indigenous people’s habitat for centuries before Columbus’ arrival.
Cities, such as San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, and also entire states, including Minnesota, Alaska, Vermont, and Oregon, have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and the list of cities that are making these changes is growing.
European colonization that began with Columbus continues to haunt us today. Many countries of the Americas remain colonized, after over half a century after Columbus’ adventure. At least 13 colonies remain in the Caribbean region, including Puerto Rico, the oldest and largest, remain colonized.
Today, October 12, 2020, the United Nations has launched the International Day for Reparations related to colonization, which was approved and supported by the Assembly of Social Movements of the World Social Forum in March 2013. It is hoped that this initiative will give more strength and visibility to actions around decolonization and reparations.
Happy Indigenous Day 2020!