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Cleansing Columbus' stains
By Zoë Williams
williamz@mscd.edu

This year another Columbus Day parade will march through the streets of Denver, and the Transform Columbus Day movement will protest it. It will also mark the seventh year I have participated in the protests.

From the time I was 13, making t-shirts that read “No More Killumbus Day,” to the present, I have heard many arguments against protesting the celebration of Columbus. People have told me there is no point in demonizing Columbus and that Columbus Day means very little. I beg to differ and feel the need to reassert the reason the protests continue.

When Columbus landed in the Americas, he thought little of the indigenous peoples inhabiting the land. “These people are very unskilled in arms … They could all be subjected and made to do what one wished,” he said, and did just that. As governor of the new colonies, Columbus began the massacres of the Taino tribe, which left a mere 100,000 alive by the year 1500. By 1542, the Taino were considered extinct.

Columbus was a genocidal megalomaniac funded by Spanish gold, and he left a legacy that lives on in this nation. After Columbus landed in the Americas, indigenous people were raped, tortured, torn apart by attack dogs and burned alive. Later, indigenous children were forced into boarding schools while women were sterilized against their will.

Now the Native American nations living as domestic dependent nations within the United States experience the highest infant mortality rates, levels of poverty and deaths related to exposure, malnutrition or plague diseases in the United States. Reservations have become ghettos, and any indigenous person desiring to live with their tribe is left to find leftovers from the U.S. government.

However, Columbus’ legacy is seen in many other forms. Columbus set a precedent for racism, neocolonialism, war crimes and occupation. From the nation’s founding, the United States has relied on slavery for its industries. The practice has evolved from Africans forced into the United States to sweatshops and prison labor in the developing world. Anyone wishing to break free of this system, such as South and Central American refugees, is punished with racism and military force.

The expansion of this nation has been fed with the blood of other nations. From Vietnam to Iraq, our massive military has bulldozed the structures of nations that do not cooperate with our global hegemony. In fact, every president of the United States has led a preemptive war, whether through the CIA or the full military, since World War I. Civilians have been murdered, tortured, starved and denied other essential human rights.

This is Columbus’ mark on this nation. It marches on, just like the parade, and I, like many others, have had enough of it. Every year that Columbus Day is recognized by this nation is another year in which we recognize brutality and xenophobia as acceptable practices. The genocide of indigenous people that has taken place both physically and culturally is ignored. Human rights are seen as an option to be granted when they do not infringe on the gain of a dominant nation.

If we have dreams of a peaceful, just and free nation, we must not only confront current events, but also this nation’s past. The government will not do so; if it would, such actions would have been taken by now. This leaves individual citizens responsible to take the call to action of ending the legacy of domination, oppression and murder. One outlet for us is the annual Transform Columbus Day actions.

I hope to see you there.