[Ahead of Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I wanted to dedicate a series to exploring such contested American holidays and what they can help us think about. Leading up to this special post on that most conflicted of all our federal holidays!]
On one way
my thinking has significantly evolved in the last decade, and one thing I’d
still emphasize.
In all but
one of the posts this week I started by asking you to check out a prior piece
of mine, and so it’s only fitting that in this weekend post I do the same. Back
in October 2015 I wrote for my
Talking Points Memo column about how we might reinvent Columbus Day, and I’d
ask you to check out that column if you would and then come on back here for a
couple layers to where my thinking is nine years (!) after I wrote that.
Welcome
back! 2015 was right at the start of the
movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and nine
years later I have to admit I am thoroughly convinced that such a move (which
has officially taken place in a
number of communities) is the right one. As I hope has been clear throughout
the week, and hell throughout this blog’s nearly 14 years, I believe we can and
must remember as much of our history as possible. But commemoration is a very
different thing (as Michael
Kammen knew well), and given the countless impressive and inspiring
Americans on whom a collective holiday might focus, I just can’t justify
dedicating one of them to someone who never set foot on the continent and who
was a
pretty thoroughly despicable dude to boot (getting to talk Columbus Day for
Junior Scholastic magazine remains a career highlight). In the TPM
column I noted the turn of the 20th century reasons
why Columbus Day became a thing (make sure to check out that great Guest
Post on th subject from my friend Nancy Caronia), and those are certainly still
worth remembering as well; but a holiday commemorating Columbus is, to my 2024
mind, a no-go.
Another
part of my proposed solution back in 2015 was to add commemorations of a pair of
other Spanish arrivals to the Americas, Bartolomé
de las Casas y Alvar
Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. While I’m not sure we should try to commemorate them
at the same time as Indigenous Peoples Day—one collective holiday dedicated
entirely to Native American histories seems quite literally the least we could
do—I remain dedicated to adding both of those figures to our collective
memories in any and all ways. While there are various reasons for that
commitment, at the top of the list is that these two figures, in very distinct
but complementary ways, exemplify my concept
of cross-cultural transformation, of perspectives and identities that entirely
and inspiringly shifted when these individuals from a particular cultural
background came into contact with other communities and cultures. Perhaps no
individual holiday could quite capture that complicated process—but perhaps one
could, because as I hope this whole series has illustrated holidays can be (and
have always been) whatever we want them to be. And if we were to commemorate transformative
American stories, we couldn’t do much better than las Casas & de Vaca.
Next
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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