Everyone savors three consecutive work-free days, and in northern New England Columbus Day weekend provides the perfect opportunity to spend quality time with friends and family, enjoy the foliage, and, weather permitting, savor the last vestiges of summer.
I’ve just inadvertently revealed my age. Since LD 179 was signed into law on April 26, 2019, the holiday celebrated annually on October’s second Monday is officially “Indigenous Peoples Day” here in Maine. But for those of us who attended elementary school a half-century (or more) ago, the upcoming holiday still involuntarily registers in our brains as Columbus Day. Learning is challenging, but unlearning what was drummed into our youthful brains decades ago is significantly more difficult. What’s been securely stored in a human brain for decades can be awfully tough to dislodge.
Youngsters of my vintage learned that Christopher Columbus braved a wide variety of hardships en route to becoming America’s discoverer. Portrayed by history texts as an intrepid adventurer who surmounted daunting climatic, technological, and fiscal challenges, he and contemporaries like Ferdinand Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci and Vasco da Gama were the astronauts of their day. They were Indiana Jones before George Lucas’s fictional archaeologist ever existed.
But over the last half-century historians have begun taking a more nuanced look at Columbus, and consequently his legacy has become a bit murkier.
Okay, a lot murkier.
Not long after landing on Hispaniola, the Caribbean island which today houses Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Columbus and his men subjugated the locals, beginning several hundred years of often-brutal European colonialism. They also brought diseases like influenza, measles, and smallpox, effectively bringing about what some researchers believe caused 90 percent of the island’s indigenous population to be wiped out within 100 years of Columbus’s arrival. That catastrophic loss of available labor helped bring about one of mankind’s darkest hours, the transatlantic slave trade. The tragic (and seemingly eternal) repercussions of that shameful era arguably still impact our nation today.
It’s understandable why statues of dictators, confederate generals, and slaveowners get taken down. But altering the names of holidays is a whole different business. “Indigenous Peoples Day weekend,” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, possibly because it contains half again as many syllables as “Columbus Day weekend” does.
I get why names need to change from time to time, and particularly in Columbus’s case, since genocide is far less popular today than it was in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. But if annihilators are going to be de-emphasized, shouldn’t slave owners get the same treatment?
Presidents Andrew Jackson, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson all owned human chattel, which most contemporary human beings understandably see as morally repugnant. So how about reconsidering who some of our nation’s state capitals commemorate? Native-celebrating cities like Tallahassee, Florida and Cheyenne, Wyoming are fine, but others clearly need rebranding.
Here’s a thought: let these places keep their current names but add an appropriate prefix to them. How do Mahalia Jackson, Mississippi, Oscar Madison, Wisconsin, and George & Weezy Jefferson City, Missouri sound? Forward-thinking elected officials are needed to get the ball rolling on such changes, but hopefully someone in Congress (located in Denzel Washington, DC) possesses the spine to do just that.
While there’d likely be some initial pushback from traditionalists, eventually Americans would accept having their cities renamed for people who weren’t oppressors. And nowhere would those name changes be more celebrated than in the rechristened cities themselves.
Surely the citizens of Johnny Carson City, Nevada and Stone Cold Steve Austin, Texas would embrace their community’s extended new names.
As, undoubtedly, would the denizens of Indigenous Peoples, Ohio. >
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