By Jonah Ruddock
On the ninth of October, President Trump released a proclamation about Columbus Day that retells the idyllic creation myth of the United States, starring Christopher Columbus and the settlers that “tamed the wilderness” and built the foundation of our country. The diverse and sophisticated Indigenous societies that inhabited this “wilderness” were not mentioned once, and neither was the genocide Columbus and later figures waged against them. Indigenous Americans remain one of the most oppressed minorities in the United States. They are still fighting to be recognized in history, to reclaim sacred monuments, and for ways out of the corrosive poverty that the American government has unapologetically held them in for hundreds of years. Collectively, they are the poorest minority group in the country and have lower rates of employment than any other high-poverty demographic. In this proclamation, we see a deliberate erasure of Indigenous history.
The closest the president comes to acknowledging them is when he alludes to the states and cities who have renamed Columbus Day in honor of Indigenous people. He writes, “Sadly, in recent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy. These extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discoveries with atrocities, his achievements with transgression… seek to revise it, deprive it of any splendor, and mark it as inherently sinister.” The glorification of settlers and explorers is far from new, and here we see that deviating from the golden creation myth is not always well-received. The tale of “the legacy of American heroes who blazed the trails, settled a continent, tamed the wilderness, and built the single-greatest nation the world has ever seen” is still present in popular media, and has been upheld by countless presidents, from Benjamin Harrison (who fought in the Northwest Indian War before being elected) to Barack Obama.
It seems to be a matter of conscience. Accepting the atrocities that Indigenous people suffered at the hands of settlers, and later, the American government, means accepting that the United States is a country built on genocide. It was not just disease that dramatically reduced the native population. It was the organized attacks, instigation of inter-tribal warfare, and the poverty forced on them by the United States. This dark truth isn’t something any American should be proud of, but continuing to ignore it and dismissing those who don’t as “radical activists” is no solution.
Although elements of the settler narrative are certainly present in Trump’s proclamation, settlers have almost nothing to do with Columbus. Columbus’s discovery did not make possible the “first settlements on the shores of the modern day United States.” In fact, he never even set foot in the modern-day United States. The popularization of the story that he discovered America was a plot by early patriots trying to create an origin story of their new nation that didn’t include the British. Columbus actually spent his time in the Caribbean. The only thing that Columbus and settlers really have in common are their horrendous mistreatment of native people. Settlers killed Indigenous people for sport, lied to them, stole from them, displaced them, and tried to eliminate them through biological warfare. Columbus enslaved, massacred, and colonized the native people he encountered. Neither of these legacies are the type that you would expect to be glorified, yet here we are.
Trump adds, “…last month I signed an Executive Order to root out the teaching of racially divisive concepts from the Federal workplace, many of which are grounded in the same type of revisionist history that is trying to erase Christopher Columbus from our national heritage.” What he is referring to here is an executive order that demanded an end to diversity training programs exploring race and gender in universities, accusing them of villainizing white males. Some have resisted this order.
The president seems to be angling the proclamation towards Italian Americans, stating, “As a native of Genoa, Columbus inspired early immigrants to carry forth their rich Italian heritage to the New World. Today, the United States benefits from the warmth and generosity of nearly 17 million Italian Americans, whose love of family and country strengthen the fabric of our Nation.” Trump is notorious for acknowledging the truth only when it suits him and leaving out whatever he pleases. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that he managed to include Italian Americans and not Native Americans in his 687 word recap of Columbus’s legacy. Although there is some controversy over where Columbus was born- some say he was Portuguese or Spanish, not Genoese- and although his voyages were sponsored by the Spanish, Columbus Day was enthusiastically supported by the much-discriminatied-against Italian American community in the 40s and 50s. However, in the course of his own life, he undeniably had a greater impact on the Indigenous community as a slaver and brutalizer than on Italians.
Indigenous people have been wronged for centuries by explorers, settlers, and the American government. Trump’s Columbus Day proclamation is just another example of the purposeful erasure of Native American history.
