Here in Chicago today is celebrated as Columbus Day but it will be a very strange holiday in the context of people protesting, occasionally rioting, to have statues of Columbus taken down. I think they are wrong to do so and in this post I will try to explain why, covering some territory I have in the past.
The first part of my observations is a series of questions. Should we romanticize the past? Is it okay to romanticize some of the past but wrong to romanticize all of the past? In particular is it okay to romanticize what you imagine to be your own past but deny to others the right to romanticize what they imagine as their own? My answers to those questions are that romanticizing the past is inevitable and if you reject romanticizing some of the past but insist on romanticizing other parts it is either sophistry, hypocrisy, or both.
In particular I think it is wrong for people of primarily European descent to reject celebrating the discovery of the Americas by Europeans and I think that even people who are primarily of Native American ancestry should celebrate that discovery. Most of the values that we hold dear including democracy, the very concept of fundamental rights, and women’s rights in particular all spring from the superstructure of white Christian Europe. So do both free markets and socialism. So does environmentalism. Believing anything else is romanticizing the past.
The second part is this. Everybody is from somewhere else. Human beings have been migrating around the planet, probably for 100,000 years or more. Columbus’s experience, sailing thousands of miles from home, landing on another continent, and finding people were already there was not a surprise to him. It is what he expected. Europeans had been traveling around for thousands of years, always finding people in the new lands they encountered, and they would do so for 500 years more.
20,000 years ago or so the distant ancestors of today’s Native Americans crossed over via Beringia, the then traversable but now submerged land connecting Asia with North America and over the thousands of years migrated from there all the way down to the very tip of South America. But that’s not the whole story. Some of these migrations took place during historic times. The Kiowa, Comanche, Navaho, and Apache all migrated from farther north after Columbus arrived in the Americas and, indeed, their migrations would not have been possible at all had the Spaniards not reintroduced the horse to North America. I believe wholeheartedly that every present Indian nation moved into their present lands from somewhere else, bringing their languages, cultures, and technologies, and displacing and interbreeding with the people who were there before them. If anybody has a greater right it was the very first people to have arrived in a place and they’ve been dead for thousands of years.
That’s not just true in the Americas, by the way. The Bantu-speaking people of South Africa moved there in history times, starting their migration south from somewhere around Nigeria, and displacing and interbreeding with the people they found on the way. There’s an argument that the Khoi, San, and Xhosa people there are the original original settlers but they are a very small minority of the people in South Africa. The Bantu-speaking people arrived there within a couple of generations of the Afrikaaners.
Here in Chicago there’s a public holiday for each of the major ethnic groups that make up the city’s population. St. Patrick’s Day for the Irish, Pulaski Day for the Poles, Columbus Day for the Italians, Martin Luther King’s Birthday for blacks. I expect that in due course Cinco de Mayo or some other Mexican holiday will be enshrined as a public holiday here and then, who knows?, maybe some South Asian holiday. They will be just as legitimate as any of the others and just as worth celebrating.
Well said and I agree.
But then do ethnic minority groups who want to tear down statues agree? I don’t think so.
Which brings the question to mind, do they seek equality, or something more?
I don’t believe that most of those wanting to tear down the statues are members of “ethnic minority groups”. Other than, possibly, Mexican-Americans who are romanticizing Mexico’s history ferociously. I think most are idiotic white suburbanites.
Like most Americans I’m a mongrel. If somebody wants me to return to Ireland or Switzerland, the two countries from which the greater number of my ancestors hailed, I suspect they’d both be glad to have me and I wouldn’t have much problem with them.
I can’t help but point out that there are apparently numerous Native American tribes that don’t agree with the notion they came from somewhere else, and this insistence is one of the reasons they oppose participating in genomic studies. When Elizabeth Warren wanted to learn whether she had native american ancestry, her results were compared with tests of Indians in Canada and Mexico because those were the closest available. There is a strange incoherence about that which is specific to the U.S. and not other countries.
There are people who believe the world is flat, that we never landed on the moon, and that the World Trade Center was downed in a government plot.
The languages spoken by the Navajo and Apache are not related to Hopi or Zuni but closely related to the other Athabascan languages spoken in the Pacific Northwest. The preponderance of the evidence tells us they arrived in the Southwest around 1500. There is similar evidence telling us that the Kiowa migrated from what is now British Columbia ultimately to Texas. They can believe whatever they care to.
The human species might have originated in East Africa; it might have originated in Asia; the evidence that it originated in the Americas is nil.
The available evidence suggests that the Clovis culture didn’t transform into the cultures of the present Native American nations but that they supplanted it. In other words there were people all over North America before the ancestors of the present Native American nations arrived.
I have never been that interested in celebrating the past. We usually do something for Memorial Day but I wouldnt call it a celebration. Like having the days off but wouldnt care that much if most holidays weren’t tied to past events.
Steve
‘I don’t believe that most of those wanting to tear down the statues are members of “ethnic minority groupsâ€. Other than, possibly, Mexican-Americans who are romanticizing Mexico’s history ferociously. I think most are idiotic white suburbanites.’
Ferociously virtue-signaling white suburbanite youngsters with doctorates of Social Justice. I call them the C-KKK. They are the ideological descendants of SDS and the Weathermen.
America is of hybrid origin. I look about as white-bread as you can get and have German, English, Welsh, Scotch-Irish, Shawnee, and possibly Cote Ivoire in me (the last via Haiti courtesy of miscegenation and Toussaint L’Ouverture).
‘I believe wholeheartedly that every present Indian nation moved into their present lands from somewhere else,’
The Navajo and Apache originally came from northern Canada, the Absaroka (Crow) were driven out of their Ohio homelands all the way to Montana, the plains Lakota were muscled out of Minnesota by the OJibwe. and the Tuscarora wandered all the way down to the Smokies before being fleeing back to their Iroquois homeland after losing a war to the Carolina settlers. And those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. The Lewis and Clark expedition had little trouble with the Plains Indians because at the time of their exploration the Missouri River valley was a no-man’s land due to an ongoing war. The Indians were far more savage than noble.