“Frankly, I’m tired of people trying to co-opt the discovery of what we would now call “America.” This is also particularly painful when individuals from other communities of color adopt this colonial mindset. While I understand that there is a historical precedent for exploring community pride, particularly if being proud of yourself has been historically and violently denied to you, this ends up both alienating and erasing the indigenous population here.
I think it’s important to really examine the notions of “discovery” and engage with this desire to co-opt the discovery of the Americas. This attitude bothers me for a couple of reasons, the foremost and most obvious being that it completely ignores the fact that we indigenous people were here with our own histories, ceremonies, and civilizations far before anybody knew that we existed. It doesn’t matter how we got here, no matter what your beliefs are, but the indisputable fact is that we as native people were living here thousands of years before anybody “discovered” America.
Secondly, this co-opt of discovery is truly just coded language for playing the racial superiority game. It is deeply rooted in the idea that whomever discovers first gets to claim, and whoever can claim more is obviously superior. This is a heavily colonized attitude wherein people attempt to elevate themselves and their communities at the cost of our humanity and at the expense of our history, all so that they can gain legitimacy in this white world that we live in. It perpetrates this violent idea that the only way to prove your worth is by proving how much you have and by how much you have dominated.
Finally, no matter who “discovered America” for the “first” time, the end result is always the same: murder, rape, disease, enslavement, genocide. With an end result like that, I’m not so sure it’s something to be proud of. As native people we know that Columbus Day marks not a day of discovery, but the beginning of hundreds of years of horrific genocide, not just for our community but also for other communities of color with whom our history is profoundly entwined.”
– Last Real Indians, Don’t Honor Columbus or the Colonial Notion of “Discovery” By Sloane Cornelius.
Check out this video Reconsider Columbus Day 2010 and this cartoon by the Oatmeal, Columbus Day.
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Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #11 – Unlearn.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
