Columbus Day No More!

Columbus Day has been “set aside” in Minneapolis and the day (the second Monday in October) will now be known as Indigenous People’s Day.
by Charlie Leck

In-dig-e-nous [in-dij-uh-nuh s]
1. Originating in and characteristic of a particular region/country
2. native
3. innate, inherent; natural (usually followed by to)
“people indigenous to North America”

There have been plenty of unfavorable opinions expressed about Columbus Day in the last thirty years or so. When American history has been looked at through less sentimental and more retrospective eyes, it has become clear that someone “discovered” America long before Christopher Columbus. Columbus himself, in his logs, reported about the indigenous people he found here. The holiday was created through the eyes of a white government, white society and from a white/European perspective. October 12 has been shelved for many years in the back of an old and musty national storage closet.

This week, in Minneapolis, anyway, Columbus Day was official discharged from any more duties or responsibilities and the city proclaimed the day henceforth shall be known as Indigenous People’s Day

The vote [I’m going to call it “the historic vote”] took place yesterday (Friday, 26 April 2014) at Minneapolis City Hall. . A large number of indigenous people celebrated rather joyously and the sounds of drums rang out in the corridors of the big, cavernous building.

There is sentiment for such municipal action in other parts of the state as well. Such a vote will be taken in Red Wing next week, where the city will attempt to declare the day First Peoples Day. And there is talk about such action being taken at the state level as well. And, the native people of Minnesota keep hoping that federal recognition will follow.

Columbus Day is officially a federal holiday and has been since 1934.

Some feathers will be ruffled over this. Extreme conservatives can be heard howling already. Yet, it is difficult to look at history and not have great sympathy and supportive feelings for the Native Americans who wanted this holiday recognized for what it is – a sham. The actual story of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas is nothing like the story that I learned in grade school. The history books of the time were written by people of white, European backgrounds who saw themselves as part of the dominant race around which all the wheels of the national experience turned.

The real history of America does not begin with the arrival of Christopher Columbus; nor does it begin with the religious pilgrims at Plymouth. Indeed, it is older and ever so much more glorious than that.

It is difficult for those of us who trace our ancestries back to those European lands, to understand the impact that Columbus Day has on the real natives of America. In 1992 Vernon Bellecourt visited the Science Museum of America. He was secretly carrying a pint of his own blood. He found a replica of the ship, the Niña, on which Columbus sailed to the Americas. The Native American threw his blood on to and against the ship. Yesterday, his brother, Clyde Bellecourt explained the action: “He did that for all the blood that was drained from our community and our nation across the western hemisphere.”

On Thursday of this week (the day before the City Council action), the freshman mayor of Minneapolis, Ms. Betsy Hodges, delivered her first “state of the city” address at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. When the City Council voted yesterday they were unanimous in their decision.

Minneapolis is not the first unit of government to take such action. Several states do not recognize Columbus Day and the city of Berkeley (CA) began recognizing the day as Indigenous People’s Day in 1992.

Several years ago I turned my gaze, for information about American history, to the extraordinary book by Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States*). We didn’t have history books like this when I went to school; that is, history books that told the truth and drew history for us as it was and not as we wanted it to me. Zinn opens his book with an account of the landing of Columbus in the new world. It makes for some of the most interesting, tantalizing and provocative reading one could ever encounter…

“Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

‘They… brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned… They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features… They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

The Arawak lived in village communes. They had agriculture talents and grew yams, cassava and corn. They spun and they weaved. They did not know of iron and they had no work animals.

There in the Bahamas and again on the mainland, Columbus found hospitable welcomes. The natives were generous and sharing. Columbus had come looking for gold and he was disappointed when they found virtually none. He took a few of the Arawak men and sailed on, hoping to find the mainland. He arrived instead in Cuba and then sailed on to what is known today as Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Finding no significant gold, Columbus needed to return to Spain with something, so he took slaves back to Europe. He would return to America on a second expedition of 17 ships and twelve hundred men. His mission was to gather slaves and gold. On one island after another in the Caribbean, Columbus took slaves but found no gold. Word magically began to spread ahead of Columbus, to the other islands of the Caribbean, and Columbus began finding no welcoming natives and, therefore, no slaves. He found out that his men, the ones he had left behind after his first arrival, had all been slaughtered. Word of his deeds had gone before him.

Other explorers would follow. Zinn writes of them….

“What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortés did to to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.”

The historical sources used by Zinn are Columbus’ own log books and the early history of a Catholic missionary priest named Las Casas. The priest left behind gruesome accounts of the Spaniards’ treatment of the native Indians.

And this behavior by the explorers was not the exception, but it was definitely the rule. It did not take long before the natives of the Americas began understanding the cruel ways of the invaders who came out of the waters to the east.

*Zinn, Howard: A People’s History of the United States [Harper Perennial, 1979]

_________________________

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IMPERIALISTIC AMERICA

I never learned these things in my history classes!
by Charlie Leck

High School history classes, or college ones for that matter, never taught me the real history of the United States. Those histories were really propaganda sessions teaching me a lot of pabulum to make me feel warm and fuzzy about my country. I came away from those institutions of education with the wrong ideas. In other words, I was cheated.

If you want to read some accurate, authentic and good histories of the United States, I recommend two books:

1. Overthrow (America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq) by Stephen Kinzer(see it on Google Books)
2. A People’s History of the United States (1492 to the Present) by Howard Zinn (see it on Google Books)

It was as if someone, like that crazed character Jack Nicholson played, was afraid I couldn’t handle the truth: “Truth? You don’t want the truth! You can’t handle the truth!”

Gee whiz, Jack, the truth, in this case would have been a lot more fun and I would have understood my country a lot better. I wouldn’t have come away with this false concept that my country was so much morally better than all other countries.

To learn that we are really an imperialistic country is not so bad. I really can handle the truth. This fact, for instance, helps me understand a lot of things. I understand the Vietnam War much more clearly. Trying to understand that war from the basis of my youthful education in history was virtually impossible. The same is true with the Korean War before it. And it is certainly true now of our War in Iraq.

As a simple example, I attended a number of graduation celebration parties this early summer – college and high school. As a little tease, I liked to ask some of the assembled scholar-students how many military bases the United States has around the world. Seldom did these new graduates have any idea whatsoever; however, I was surprised by one sniveling kid at the last gathering I attended. He was a very sharp young man.

“Well,” he began with a pedantic tone, “we really don’t know, do we? That’s highly classified information. We know of several hundred; perhaps as many as 5 or 6 hundred, but there are likely very many more.”

“You learned that in school,” I asked in a somewhat surprised tone, “really?”

“No, no,” he promptly corrected me, “I read that on the Internet somewhere when I was going through a period when I thought I might enlist. I wanted to know to what possible places I might be sent. Our bases are in some exotic locations, you know.”

Well, this young man is a rarity. Most people in our nation have no idea that we have more than 750 military bases around the world. In this regard, we were weak in the great Middle East, but the massive base we’ll leave behind in Iraq when we leave will take care of that. Camp Anaconda, a 25 square kilometer base north of Baghdad, is headquarters to the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. We have also built a permanent embassy compound in Baghdad that is capable of housing several thousand people and is very heavily fortified. There are huge gymnasiums and swimming pools and facilities capable of keeping a small army trained and ready.

Chalmers Johnson wrote a very revelatory article on the HISTORY NEWS NETWORK in 2004 (The Arithmetic of America’s Military Bases Abroad: What Does It All Add Up To?). He opens that article with this interesting comment:

“As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.

"Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage -- Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.”

I hope this comment by Johnson will make you want to read the entire article.

Once you finish that piece, I hope you’ll go on to Kinzer’s book (OVERTHROW) and learn about the history of our imperialistic actions from Hawaii to Grenada and beyond. If all that stirs your innards and makes you curious about our nation’s real, unadulterated history, go on to read Zinn’s incredible book (A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES).

If you think any of what you read in these sources is fiction, think again. They are all well documented and have been proven by many researchers to be extremely accurate.

So Little Time

As my grandchildren grow and mature, I hope they’ll read the real histories of America – the people’s histories – and understand that global peace is possible if we’re humble enough to work for it.
by Charlie Leck

Yesterday, I sat for a few moments with a woman a bit more elderly than even I. I had delivered to her some lamb from our farm. We chatted. The subject turned sharply and became volatile.

She’s a wealthy woman. She lives on a big piece of land that was settled in 1857 by my wife’s great-great-grandfather. There’s a pretty pasture south of the house and some handsome horses grazing in it. You’d think she’d be a soft, conservative lady who would acquiesce to her husband’s politics.

I know her husband real well. I’ve played plenty of golf with him. We went out to Pebble Beach together and down to Palm Springs for golf outings.

America, she thinks, ought to stop being so hypocritical in its criticism of other nations of the world. She’s angry about the way we treated those detainees we held for the last eight years.

“We’ve got no right to complain about the way other nations treat people,” she went on. “Just look at the way we fire bombed Dresden and Tokyo during the war – even before that ghastly atomic bombing. I’m tired of this country being so self-righteous about everything. Look what we did in that prison in Iraq. Look what we did to them in Guantanamo.”

She pointed me toward the books of Howard Zinn.

“He wrote what’s called ‘a people’s history of the United States.’ None of this balderdash they teach in school. Zinn tells the truth. You didn’t go hear him on Monday night?”

I meekly shook my head.

“I told you about it!” She looked both displeased and disappointed. I looked out the window at the grazing horses. That pasture is land that old grandpappy Bradford Wakefield would have cleared.

She handed me a book by Stephen Kinzer.

“Be sure to read this. You’ll find out who really runs this nation. It certainly isn’t the people!”

Oh how I wished there had been time to sit with her and chat. She was frantic, however. I could see it in her face. She had warned me she was busy and had other plans for the morning. She had fire in her eyes and I wanted to hear everything she had to say.

There was so much truth that needed to be gotten out, and so little time!

Instead, I took the book and made my way to the car. Jasper and I pulled over into the parking lot of one of the town’s fancy country clubs and we took a moment to look at the book. I started by reading down the back cover. There is high praise from the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. The publisher’s blurb was interesting.

“Regime change did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer tells us the stories of the audacious American politicians, spies, military commanders, and businessmen who took it upon themselves to depose foreign regimes, starting with the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. He details the three eras of America’s regime-change century: the imperial era, when Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras were brought into the U.S. orbit; the Cold War era, when the CIA deposed governments in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam and Chile; and the invasion era, when American troops overthrew governments in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.“Kinzer explains why the U.S. government carried out these operations and why so many of them have had disastrous long-term consequences. Overthrow is a cautionary tale that serves as an urgent warning as the United States seeks to define its role in the modern world.”

I looked over at Jasper and said, “So much to read and so little time!”

He sighed and seemed to understand.

“Let’s go home and find out about Howard Zinn, big fella. Oops, now, don’t get upset. We’ll go to the dog park first.”

So it wasn’t until this morning that I googled (oh, how I love that verb) Howard Zinn. In a tenth of a second I had 1,340,000 hits. (See why I like that verb!)

I started off at the Howard Zinn website and read the latest Howard Zinn news and some biographical information about him.

The following came from the Harper Collins website.

“Howard Zinn is a historian, playwright, and social activist. He was a shipyard worker and Air Force bombardier before he went to college under the GI Bill and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has taught at Spelman College and Boston University, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris and the University of Bologna. He has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in Auburndale, Massachusetts.”

Well, the credentials ain’t bad, are they?

Wikipedia tells me that Zinn is best known “for A People’s History of the United States, which presents American history through the eyes of those he feels are outside of the political and economic establishment.”

Zinn flew bombing missions in World War II. He stands in total opposition to war these days. He was active in the American civil rights movement in the 60s and served as an advisor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was a mentor to a young student of some reknown – Alice Walker.

Howard Zinn has authored more than twenty books. And, I’ve never read a one of them.

“So little time.”

Well, I’ll begin with Kinzer’s book, Overthrown, while I wait for A People’s History of the United States to arrive.

Zinn was here in town on Monday. He spoke over at my wife’s alma mater, the College of Saint Catherine. Why the hell weren’t we there? Because I’m not supposed to drive at night and my poor wife has been going so fast and furiously that I just couldn’t ask her to spend another night out. And, I hadn’t yet sat with this kindly, tiger of a woman and heard her lash out at the emptiness of the histories we give to our children to read.

“I’m not saying, you know; I just saying!”

Now, you’ve got to add a couple more books to your reading list. So little time!

"...And if we do act, in however small a way,
we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future.
The future is an infinite succession of presents,
and to live 'now' as we think human beings should live,
in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself
a marvelous victory." [Howard Zinn, 1996]