This is not Columbus Day
By Betty Lyons
NY Daily News, nydailynews.com
Monday, October 8, 2018
[Caption] Others were already here. (Associated Press)
Happy Indigenous People's Day.
That is what people are saying today in 90 cities and
counties large and small across the country today, ranging
from Los Angeles and Phoenix to Ithaca and Tompkins County
in New York.
Just last week, Cincinnati and Flagstaff, Ariz., joined the
list of cities changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples
Day.
New York City, where human rights shouldn't take a backseat
to local politics, is not on the list. It should be, and as
indigenous peoples, we hope city leaders will begin the
process of catching up with the rest of the nation.
Last year the city engaged in a bracing and divisive debate
over statuary depicting historical figures whose atrocities
were whitewashed in their presentation to the public.
Christopher Columbus was the primary focus of those
debates.
In the final report of the Mayoral Advisory Commission on
City Art, Monuments and Markers, at least some
commissioners called for the outright removal of the
Columbus Circle statue, saying they "cannot envision
keeping the monument without honoring a historic figure
whose actions in relation to Native peoples represent the
beginnings of dispossession, enslavement and genocide."
This is not about pitting one community against another; we
believe everyone has the right to be proud of their
heritage. However, it is not acceptable for anyone to
embrace the dehumanizing, racist and genocidal policies set
off by a view of ethnic superiority that Columbus himself
represented and believed.
Statues of Columbus ignore his enslavement and massacre of
indigenous peoples, promotion of sex slavery of children
and the imposition of the Doctrine of Discovery, a series
of 15th-century papal bulls granting European nations
sovereignty over non-Christian lands "discovered" by their
explorers that continues to provide the legal underpinning
of the denial of land rights to our peoples.
As we now know from studies of Columbus' diary, these were
not ancillary to his activities in setting the stage for
the campaigns of genocide against the tens of millions of
indigenous peoples who had lived here for millennia. It was
core to who he was.
Continues at:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-indigenous-peoples-day-20181004-story.html
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