Opinion: Columbus Day?

Today the banks are closed, the mail is not being delivered, and some people will watch a news story about a statue of some Genoan who sailed for Spain looking for China a long time ago.  Some other people, generally more uppity about these sorts of things, will cite that today we celebrate half a millennium of genocide, cultural and physical enslavement, and all the other bad things that have happened since 1492.  These people regret that Europeans ever made contact with the West Indies that year.

I am not one of them.

What happened in 1492 did not destroy the New World.  The will and actions of individuals did that.  Did the discovery of a pair of continents with exploitable resources and peoples open up the gateways to domination by these people?  Yes, absolutely.  All the same though, Europeans, as with ALL humans, were pretty good at these things even before they made contact with the New World.  Let's be honest here, on that note: Native Americans are hardly innocent noble savages, no matter how much we would want them to be as a part of our common imagination.  Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Haudenausonee, Crow, Commanches, etc... they were pretty rough cultures to be a part of, or worse, to be a neighbour to.  No one is entirely innocent.

Did some truly terrible things happen?  Yes, they certainly did.  I dare anyone to visit Washita in Oklahoma and not feel some sort of compassion, dread, or sorrow.  While away from the battlefield and in the comforts of one's armchair, Washita and other such slaughters of North America's first born can be rationalized away in the greater context of history and circumstance, witnessing the places where elders and children were mercilessly killed and horses shot simply for being beloved animals of the Cheyenne... I have problems even just typing this... well let's just say that the heart is moved.

All the same, I noted that such people were the first born of this continent.  Regardless of the actions of others, we must not fall into logical fallacy and blame entire peoples for atrocities.  The fact of the matter is that North America is now home to so many peoples.  This continent is a very diverse place; it was even before European contact.  There is no such thing as an "Indian", namely because there are so many different cultures and language groups present among the first born here.  Now that new generations have come, should we ask them all to go back to the rest of the world simply because they wanted to live in harmony and peace in a land where origins contribute to destiny, rather than dominate it?

I am a North American, even if my roots are European.  I think I first really came to know this when I returned home from living in London back in 2003 and looked down onto the shores of Labrador from my plane.  I saw the waves of the cold northwestern Atlantic beating down on the ancient granite of the Canadian Shield, and I knew then that I was home.  When I spent six weeks in Mexico refreshing my Spanish language skills back in 2008, I still felt at home among the pine-covered mountains of Morelos.  When I have traveled out into the truly divine wonders of the West, I have still felt at home.  Should we condemn the second child for the sake of the first?  I am sorry that the first born was screwed out of an inheritance.  That was wrong.  But I am just as much in love with my homeland, from the jungles to the tundra, as my brothers and sisters of a different mother are.

Today is a day for reflection, for all the good and ill that has come of life here in this New World since that year (even if Basques, Celts, Norse, and East Asians probably had been here before then).  Think about discovery, think about atrocity, think about a new chapter in the history of humanity.  Think about so many of the peoples of the earth making a destiny for themselves set apart from their accident of birth and instead built around what they can make of themselves.  Such are the hopes and dreams of Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans, no matter what their last name might be.  Columbus Day is a good thing.  

Oh, and by the way, today is also Canadian Thanksgiving.  Yes, we have one too, and yes, it is largely about the same reason: thankfulness for the bounty of the land.  While we don't have an iconography dominated by puritans and scantily clad native stereotypes, we do have turkey and stuffing.  If this blog makes it to next year, count on an extended history of it then.