Today is Indigenous People’s Day. Today is meant to be a national reminder of what America’s tribal nations have endured in the last 500 years, but it is also a day for education, acknowledgments of Indigenous sovereignty, and celebrations of Indigenous survivance. October 10th used to be a holiday to celebrate Christopher Columbus, who for centuries was hailed as the “discoverer” of the Americas: even though he never saw North America, the United States still honored him with a holiday (Dunbar-Ortiz, 4). Columbus brought soldiers to the Caribbean in hopes of making it a part of New Spain. However, Columbus also unintentionally brought brand new diseases that killed thousands of Indigenous people, while survivors faced slavery or were killed by the Spanish (Dunbar-Ortiz, 23). This started centuries of colonization, death, disease, and removal that denied Indigenous people the same rights and sovereignty that white Americans enjoy. Today, Indigenous groups are disproportionately impacted by gendered violence, climate change, and diseases such as COVID-19 but still preserve their cultures and ways of life for the next generations (https://www.nytimes.com/article/indigenous-peoples-day.html).
Columbus not only brought colonialism to the Americas: he founded the myths and stereotypes that justified it. Columbus, an outsider to American Indigenous cultures, coined the term “Indian” or “los Indios” because he assumed that all Indigenous people were part of one homogenous culture (they’re not) and that he was in India (he wasn’t). From his Christian, militant worldview, Columbus considered the people he encountered, such as the Tiano people, to be “heathens” that deserved to be colonized or killed. Subsequent Spanish conquistadors, and later different colonial powers, used the same tropes to justify their colonization of Indigenous lands (Hixon, 26; Dunbar-Ortiz, 23). Hundreds of years later, Benjamin Douglass credited Columbus (as well as Sebastian Cabot) as the “discoverers” of the Americas who only encountered “barbaric hordes” of Native Americans (Douglass, 15). The direct connection between the ways that the earliest colonists like Columbus justified his colonization of the Caribbean and how Douglass justified the colonization of North America speaks to the importance of Indigenous People’s Day and the uplifting of Indigenous histories. Today is a great day to begin thinking about how your local area discusses (or doesn’t discuss) its Indigenous history, and how you can create new narratives that push back on the assumptions of people like Douglass and Columbus.
Below are a few articles about Indigenous People’s Day:
https://www.nytimes.com/article/indigenous-peoples-day.html
Since my last post, I have had some disruptions to my daily schedule with moving back home, but I am happy to say that I’m now settled at home for fall break! I will be home through this week and will return to campus for classes to start again on Monday. I am especially excited to start my seminar on GIS Story Maps with Dr. Holt after the break, which will dovetail nicely with my web content. I was also able to meet with Carissa Speck, a historic preservationist with the Delaware Nation on Friday, and we had a productive discussion about the development of this project and how she could be an ongoing partner in the upcoming months.
Over the break, I plan to continue to work on web content. I started first with the section of my website that delves into the myths of Indigenous history, and my bassline goal is to finish that section over break, if not sooner. Next, I will begin to develop my section on Wayne County’s Indigenous history. I hope that it can serve as an example of the ways that Tribal Nations, academics, and local historians can collaborate to center Indigenous people more in their own histories. This will be a larger section so it will most likely take me multiple weeks to complete.
I have developed a system for writing exhibits that has multiple stages. First, I look at the relevant section of my Junior Independent Study and figure out how much of it I want to keep, what I want to add, and what I want to change. Then, I begin to outline, and then write in a word document. I use brackets to indicate what I want to be headings, where I want to include links or footnotes, and where I want to include images. After that, I also put the text on a new page so I can see what it looks like in the web format. Next, I will get feedback, make edits, put the finishing touches on the page, link the pages together, and eventually publish my work!
I am also excited to visit Jeff Musselman, who is also a researcher of local Indigenous history, to find more primary sources from the local area that was not accessible to me during my junior year. I also hope to get some rest this fall break and spend some much-needed quality time with my family. Pennsylvania at this time of year is full of vibrant fall colors and the temperature is mild, so I’m hoping to also spend some time outside.