Correcting for Columbus

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Hundreds of years later, children, schools and states celebrate the violence, genocide and imperialism that followed his arrival in the Americas. Returning to campus, many students likely passed through their four-day fall break without a second thought for the Columbus Day holiday that falls in the middle of it every year. Established in 1937, Columbus Day has been a federally endorsed symbol of American erasure of indigenous peoples in this country’s history for nearly 80 years. That is abhorrent. Instead of celebrating the life of a murderous conqueror, we should instead turn our attention to indigenous peoples in America, reflecting on what we as Americans have done and failed to do with respect to native populations.

Columbus Day as it is taught and celebrated not only glosses over mass genocide and oppression but also contributes to the continued invisibility of native communities and issues in today’s world. In the years after the arrival of Columbus and Europeans, hundreds of ethnic groups, cultures and languages were annihilated. By 1900, the population of indigenous peoples in the Americas had declined by a full 80 percent and in some areas, had been totally wiped out. As if that were not enough, Native Americans were subjected to centuries of enslavement, subjugation, marginalization and exploitation. Columbus Day cloaks all of that in its name and meaningless celebration while totally failing to recognize one of the darkest aspects of American history.

People have begun to stand up. Brown University has celebrated a replacement Indigenous Peoples’ Day since 2009; Tufts University had its first observation of the alternative holiday this year with widespread support from students and faculty. Berkeley, Cambridge, Seattle and Minneapolis have all made similar moves through their municipal governments. While there are valid concerns that maintaining the holiday’s date risks celebrating native cultures on the day that previously commemorated the beginning of their destruction, the creation of an Indigenous People's’ Day at least recognizes native peoples for their unimaginable suffering as well as their essential role in American history.

The institution of an Indigenous People’s day is laudable, but only marks the beginning of work to be done. Reservations and even those native populations which have assimilated into non-reservation communities are in notoriously poor states with unthinkably high rates of alcoholism, suicide and depression. The erasure of their struggles from everyday life and remembrance is shameful.

Even a universal victory in changing the holidays we celebrate does nothing for our failures at the university and in the media. A lack of education and representation of native populations is at the root of this erasure. A cursory glance at the composition of our faculty and student body makes this evident. There are zero Native American faculty members at Duke, only 11 Native American graduate students and just a mere handful of undergraduates. While we recognize the good work that those individuals, the Native American Student Alliance and their allies on campus have done to increase support and awareness for Native issues, there is more to be done, and there are no excuses for our university and students to fail to lend their voices wherever possible.