This Day

Until moving to San Francisco in 1971, I wasn’t particularly aware of Columbus Day. Growing up in Michigan, mainly it meant a day off from school. But in San Francisco, with its large and politically powerful Italian population, it was a Big Deal.

As it had been since 1868, when the first of America’s Columbus Day parades started there.

Alas, Christopher Columbus was in fact a hapless, incompetent hustler. A believer in the notion that the world was flat, he sailed three commissioned ships to locate a new route to the Far East, only to run ashore in the Bahamas.

With this dubious accomplishment, he somehow got presented to us when I was young as the first European to “discover” America.

Not true. But he does have an actual legacy and that was to oppress the native populations of the Americas, as the great journalist Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the New Yorker years ago, in her classic piece “The Lost Mariner.”

“His gravest misjudgments,” the magazine reminds us, concerned the treatment of native peoples, whose ‘subjugation’ he advocated within days of making landfall. Modern defenders insist that Columbus should be judged by the standards of his day, but Kolbert points out that at least one early settler was alert to the moral outrages under way. Bartolomé de las Casas, a former slaveholder, spent ten years on Hispaniola, she observes, before dramatically reorienting his views. ‘He devoted the next fifty years,’ she writes, ‘to trying, in vain, to defend the New World’s indigenous peoples.’”

Thanks to Kolbert and others, we now have a clearer understanding of the actual history of those times. As a result, today is no longer known as Columbus Day in San Francisco. It is now called Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

According to Pew Research Center,16 states and American Samoa territory still observe the second Monday in October as Columbus Day. Meanwhile, Indigenous Peoples' Day has officially been proclaimed by televen states — Arizona, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin, plus Washington, D.C.

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