Today happens to be a national holiday for Christopher Columbus, a man who actually existed, even if it appears that for various reasons, including his apparent family background, he cloaked his identity in a web of deception [1]. Among certain left-leaning communities, today is also Indigenous Peoples Day. In a technical manner of speaking, the United States, along with a few other countries like Australia and New Zealand, have no true indigenous peoples. All of the inhabitants of these countries are indisputably descended from immigrants from other places [2], whether they came over a boat across the Atlantic or Pacific, or over a temporary land bridge between what is now Siberia and Alaska. Some of those who consider themselves to be particularly privileged indigenous peoples, like the Aleut or the native Hawaiians, arrived in those lands not long before Europeans began their first recorded efforts at exploration and colonization of North America about a thousand years ago. Given the level of ferocity that people have for Christopher Columbus, and the attention these people want to pay to certain aspects of the historical record, it seems a bit hypocritical that these people would want to have a celebration for a group of people that does not exist—autochthonous inhabitants of the Americas.

How long does it take for an inhabitant to be considered a native, with certain rights and claims on territory? This is not a simple question to answer. After all, the Bantu tribes of South Africa certainly consider themselves natives of South Africa, but they arrived not long before the Dutch Boer colonists whose rule they decry so deeply, and displaced or assimilated the native inhabitants and left them the less desirable desert territories of the Kalahari as a reservation. Similarly, as efforts of European colonization of the Americas go back as long as the Inuit and Aleut colonization of the Arctic regions of North America, where both groups of immigrants happened to meet in Greenland, who gets to count themselves as the native, and who is the interloper? In the Middle East, this question can be particularly contentious, given that the Israelis have a historically documented existence in Israel going back more than 3000 years. Is that claim old enough to make them legitimate inheritors of the land from the more arriviste Arabs whose self-induced misery has attracted so much global sympathy? After all, there are quite a few so-called “indigenous peoples” of the Americas who have not inhabited their land for anywhere close to 3000 years. This is a problem throughout the world, as the “native” inhabitants of much of India invaded those lands about 3500 years ago, where they overthrew the existing city-states of the Indus River Valley. Can people who conquered a land consider themselves natives when faced with later colonists and conquerors? And if they can, is this is a privilege that is only denied to European settler colonists and their descendants?

This raises a double standard that is regrettably common when it comes to historical judgment. Regularly, European Americans are blamed for ecological disaster for the introduction of alien species and for the wanton destruction of native fauna like the bison. Yet when the first immigrants arrived in what is now the United States at the end of the most recent ice age, we are supposed to believe that it was a mere coincidence that all of the native megafauna, animals like the wholly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, simply disappeared by coincidence, without human involvement in their extinction. Somehow the “native” peoples who were supposedly so in touch with the land and lived so harmoniously with the plant and animal life do not suffer the same blame for their role in the destruction of numerous massive and important species of animal life that the descendants of European settlers have for their hunting and settling exploits. This is not even to begin to discuss the same phenomenon that occurred in Australia and Oceania. Is this sort of double standard, where the sins and faults of those who are considered native peoples are swept under the rug lest they delegitimize those claims, but the sins and faults of Europeans and their settler colonists are exaggerated and hyped up, a just historical balance?

So, should we celebrate either Christopher Columbus or any non-existent indigenous peoples? I am of the firm belief that we should look at history or any field with a broad view that does not slight the contributions of any men, women, or children who happen to play a part in a much larger or more complicated picture. Even though Christopher Columbus was not looking for the Americas and did not ever fully comprehend what he had found, his accidental discovery led to the massive historical changes that led to the conquest and colonization of the Americas and parts of several other continents by the descendants of Europeans, and to the integration of these hitherto backwater areas into a global system of trade and governance. Whatever one’s feelings about this process, it is a matter of historical fact and reality must be dealt with irrespective of one’s feelings. The pre-Columbian native peoples did not shrink from brutal combat and massive population shifts and the destruction of cities and civilizations, as the archeological record of the Yucatan, Teotihuacan, Cahokia, and a host of other cities bears witness to, and which occasionally is shown in the historical record. Let us therefore seek to uncover and understand as much of the historical record as we can, by any means possible, and after placing it all in its proper context and presenting the honest truth in all its complexity and honesty, then let us judge who and to what extent we may celebrate anyone from the past, by a standard that is fair and just to all. Until that happens, we are merely playing word games with politically correct days to support a bogus and illegitimate political agenda. Even Christopher Columbus, for all his flaws, was a better man than that.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/christopher-columbus-and-the-social-and-religious-motives-for-exploration/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/we-are-all-migrants-here/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/argumentative-reflection-thoughts-on-the-stranger/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/the-perks-of-being-an-outsider/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/a-musing-on-immigration/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/does-it-matter-who-discovered-america/