Another second Monday in October has come and gone. It is a federally recognized holiday, Columbus Day, but depending on the municipality you live in it might be acknowledged as Indigenous Peoples Day instead. Currently, there is a bill to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day in the Statehouse.
Each October, the controversy between the two holidays occupies my mind and prevents me from giving Indigenous Peoples Day as much attention as I should.
The two holidays don’t share the same date, but contest it, and the legacy of Christopher Columbus is the source of an enduring argument between those who see him as a symbol of Italian American identity and those who consider him a repugnant slaver.
I consider Native American history a central part of this country’s story and support Indigenous Peoples Day as one small way to bring that history, which has often been buried and overlooked, to the surface.
Columbus should not be venerated with a holiday. He enslaved thousands of Taino, an indigenous population in Hispaniola, overseeing their torture and subjugation. Proponents and opponents of Columbus Day often argue about which sources can show us what the man was really like, but the fact that he enslaved Taino is not seriously challenged.
Among the most important sources are the journals of Columbus himself, and the writings of his friends like Michele da Cuneo, who described raping a Native American woman Columbus “gave” to him. Some historians have argued that we cannot project our contemporary morality onto Columbus, but I believe we have to hold those we honor with holidays to the highest standards.
But even if Columbus had treated Native American populations with respect and courtesy, he would be an odd candidate for a holiday celebrating Italian Americans.
Columbus died centuries before either the founding of the United States or the unification of the Italian peninsula. Italians who immigrated to the U.S., particularly from Southern Italy, did so to escape cyclical poverty, a neglectful and unreliable state, and the suffocating presence of organized crime. In America, they were discriminated against, profiled as criminals, and subjected to brutal violence at the hands of nativists and terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.
None of it stopped Italian Americans from demanding their rights through organized labor and political activism, and excelling in science, law, film, medicine, sports, literature, music, and every other field they entered. A group of people once maligned as alien to American culture have influenced and given so much to it that it would be unrecognizable in their absence.
The life of Christopher Columbus is not particularly relevant to this identity, and I believe a better symbol of Italian Americans would be — an Italian American.
It is not apparent from my name, but I have partial Italian ancestry. It was the only part of my background that was really visible in my house growing up. My Italian ancestors came to the United States more recently than those from the other branches of my family tree, the oldest relatives I was lucky enough to have known as a kid were my Italian American great-grandparents, and the funny memory of my childhood friend staring with confusion at my mom’s ravioli is still vivid. Things like this led me to think of Italy as “the country my family came from” growing up, and culturally I feel closer to it than the other homes of my ancestors.
When the second Monday in October rolls around, I am unable to recognize the experiences, struggles, and victories of Italian Americans, or the Italian American friends and family I have, in the story of Christopher Columbus. Instead, I see a first edition of some of the worst atrocities that accompanied the colonization of this hemisphere.
I have heard arguments that there is no more need for an Italian American holiday, as the community is no longer subject to the discrimination and violence it once faced every day. I cannot agree with this.
We are moving further and further away from events like the 1891 New Orleans lynching, when 11 Italians were murdered by a mob after being charged with involvement in the murder of the city’s police chief, or the biased trial and executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for two murders in Braintree. With that distance, there is a need to understand that prejudice and hostility that those of us who are younger have not felt, but which has been redirected toward other groups.
A day recognizing Italian Americans should highlight the community’s achievements, but recall the systems of oppression that Italian immigrants and their descendants suffered under, fought, and overcame. I am certainly proud of what my ancestors achieved, but I am also humbled by what they survived.
Stuart Foster is The Item’s copy editor.
