Goodbye, Columbus Day

IT'S TIME to get rid of Columbus Day. Celebrating this holiday is like rooting for the cowboys in those old John Ford Westerns--something we all used to do but ought to be ashamed of now that we know some of the real history of the period.

We would never dream of celebrating the "discovery" of South Africa or Rhodesia by white European settlers. That's because we know very well that those colonists didn't "discover" any place that black Africans hadn't known about (and lived in) for a good long time. We also have little desire to glorify European colonialism in Africa, especially considering the quality of the resultant white minority-dominated societies in southern Africa today.

Why, then, are we so willing to celebrate European colonialism in America? Needless to say, Columbus Day is not designed to commemorate Chris Columbus's personal success in bumbling into a "new" continent. It's meant to pay tribute to the European "discovery" of America, the first step in the creation of the European colonies here. In that way, it is a tribute to American colonialism.

But American colonialism was hardly much nicer than the African variety. Our continent's indigenous people, the American Indians, were simply routed from their land and murdered. Instead of exploiting the labor of our "natives," as the Europeans did in Africa, we just got rid of them.

The real story of American colonization and expansion has begun to make its way into school curricula. But somehow we never managed to dump Columbus Day. Maybe Columbus Day has become more an ethnic holiday than anything else, the Italian-Americans' St. Patrick's Day; but a more appropriate date for "Italian-American Day" can (and should) be found, one that commemorates one of the many truly constructive Italian-American contribuitons to the United States. Many people feel that the massacre of the Native Americans is just an ugly blot in our past, and that the current state of "the greatest country in the world" makes up for, even if it doesn't justify, our evil colonial history. And, of course, most people probably don't think of Columbus Day as anything but an excuse for a day off.

All of this may be true, but it is no excuse for celebrating "Beginning of Our Colonialism Day," as we implicitly, though casually, do on Columbus Day. Certainly, under no circumstances would we want our school children to take a holiday on "First Day of Slavery Day," no matter what it was called.

Americans should express the evils of all colonialism, and fight both modern neocolonialism and the vestiges of its past incarnations. There is ample opportunity to fight both, for example, in Africa today. That is the whole idea of the anti-apartheid movement.

AND CLOSER to home, we can do a better job of dealing with our own colonial heritage than by celebrating its inception. Despite our best efforts, Native Americans have survived. Like other minorities (including blacks, who suffered the consequences of slavery, another American "mistake"), they continue to face special problems. American Indians have a significantly lower life expectancy and a higher infant mortality rate than the U.S. population at large. They suffer the economic exploitation of the giant energy companies, who seek the vast quantities of coal and uranium buried underneath the remaining Indian land. Indian workers, for example, have been sent to work in the uranium mines for years without adequate warning of, or protection from, the deadly radioactive gas radon and its breakdown products present in those mines. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, those workers face an increased chance of getting lung cancer.

In addition, the U.S. government Bureau of Indian Affairs reports that unemployment among able-to-work Native Americans living on or near reservations is about 40% nationwide, and that incomes of one third of all Indian families are below the official poverty line.

The Geneva Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations of the Americas, sponsored by the Non-Governmental Sub-Committee on Racism, Decolonization, and Apartheid, of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council (a consultative body to the United Nations), has declared October 12 International Solidarity Day with the American Indians. Isn't this more appropriate than Columbus Day?