Columbus Day

Interview with Glenn Morris about Columbus Day

GLENN MORRIS: "Columbus Day began -- most people don't know -- as a state holiday in Colorado in 1907. But what's more important for people to understand is the ideology behind Columbus Day and why there is a Columbus Day in the United States or in Colorado. And there's been a lot of discussion lately about Hugo Chavez at the United Nations, when he raised up Noam Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival.

And if we could begin a little bit by just reducing the terms “hegemony” and “ideology” to their simplest forms: if an ideology is a set of ideas that allows a nation or a people to describe reality in terms that are comfortable for them, but more importantly, that describes the world as it should be, and hegemony is driven by a national ideology that is so comprehensive that it becomes almost invisible, like water to fish or air to human beings, and in a sense then, we can understand Columbus Day as a hegemonic tool, the way that Chomsky uses the term, because it makes no historical sense to have a national holiday to Columbus in a country that he never visited, in a state that he never knew existed.

And so, we have to ask the very simple question: why does the holiday even exist? And it exists in part to advance a national ideology of celebrating invasion, conquest and colonialism. And the proponents of the Columbus Day holiday in Colorado and Columbus parades, and so on, make no bones about the fact that they're celebrating the colonization of the Americas and, in fact, have told us on several occasions, “Look, we're going to have this celebration. We're going to have these parades to Columbus. And let's get one thing straight,” they say to us. “This is not your country anymore. This is our country now. And you'd better get with the program.” So, for us, the celebration of Columbus, who was an African slave trader prior to coming to the Americas, then began the colonization of the Americas --

Well, Columbus sailed for the Portuguese on the Gold Coast of Africa, brought back gold and slaves to the Portuguese slave market in Portugal. That's why when he arrived in the Caribbean, it became so easy for him to resort to his old practices and began to enslave Indian people to bring to the slave market in Seville. And so, we believe that Columbus as a national icon is a mistake and sends certainly the wrong message to schoolchildren about what is heroic about the history of this hemisphere. Certainly, the heroism of Columbus does not warrant a national holiday. In fact, he wasn't a hero. He was a slave-trading Indian killer. And so, that's why, in the birthplace of Columbus Day here in Denver, it's such a big issue. Next year will be the centennial of the holiday. And we intend to make that a major focal point nationally." - GLENN MORRIS

Doctrine of Discovery

The point about protesting Columbus Day and the holiday is not so much about Columbus, the man, or about parades -- we all like parades -- or holidays. The point is really about the legacy of Columbus. And from the American Indian Movement of Colorado's perspective, and for many indigenous peoples’ perspectives, what's important is the way in which the United States continues to celebrate this legacy of colonialism and imperialism. And that's embodied in federal Indian law. The Doctrine of Discovery was institutionalized in 1823 in the Supreme Court case of Johnson v. McIntosh, where John Marshall uses -- fabricates the Doctrine of Discovery to justify the diminishment of Indian title to the Americas.

Essentially, what Marshall says in Johnson v. McIntosh is that by virtue of the arrival of Christian civilization, the right of native peoples to their traditional homelands and territories is diminished, because of the blessings that Christian civilization have brought to the western hemisphere. And that opinion is the foundation for federal Indian law in the United States that continues to be enforced day after day after day ’til 2006.

We have a case in Nevada right now with the Western Shoshones, in which the title to their land was considered to be extinguished under this Doctrine of Discovery -- not in 1823, not in 1890 -- in the 1980s, and it continues to the present, to the point where the United Nations, the Committee on the Elimination of the Racial Discrimination and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, have said that through this Doctrine of Discovery, the application of the Doctrine of Discovery, the United States has been involved in gross violations of fundamental human rights.

Now, the United States, of course, continues to ignore those decisions, but in addition to that, this Doctrine of Discovery and the principles of federal Indian law have been exported from the United States to be applied in Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, in other English common law countries, like India and Kenya and South Africa. And so, this is not merely a discussion about a parade or about a holiday to a long-dead historical figure. This is about a legacy that continues to drive imperialism today.

And we see that embodied in the Bush administration. I don't know if you've read Robert Kaplan's book, Imperial Grunts, but Kaplan, who is a favorite of the Bush administration, and reportedly Bush read the book, Imperial Grunts. And in the book, Kaplan admits that today the United States continues to fight the Indian wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Philippines, in Colombia, where they continue to call any territory that is not under the control of the U.S. military “Indian country.” That is, it needs to be subdued, it needs to be civilized. This war, this clash of civilizations, so-called clash of civilizations that's going on in the world today, it's not new. That was a war that was being fought in this area right here where we're sitting for many generations, in order to bring the heathen territories into the civilized Christian fold. So that's really what we're talking about, is beginning to address the ideology that drove the Indian wars, and the line can be traced continuously from October 12, 1492, to the present.

So, what we're saying from the American Indian Movement of Colorado, from the Transform Columbus Day Alliance, is that we can create a different future. And that's what we intend to do in the streets of Denver, is to begin a movement that says: this country needs to re-examine its history; it needs to report that history differently to its children; it needs to impart certain values and moral traditions to succeeding generations, that it's not okay to go to someone else's country and steal it and kill them and engage in genocide.

Tags: columbus day, columbus, genocide, american indian moverment of colorado, transform columbus day alliance, glenn morris, amy goodman, democracy now, GLENN SPAGNUOLO, indian country, bush, chomsky, Imperial Grunts, Kaplan, imperialism, Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. McIntosh