The recent commemoration of Columbus Day, rightly rebranded to Indigenous Peoples Day by nine prominent cities in the country, provides an excellent point of reflection as to who Americans are and what exactly America is.
At the forefront of any discussion of our American identity is the notion of a "nation of immigrants," which is widely represented by American school teachers as a "melting pot" or a "tossed salad."
However, these descriptors do a great disservice to our understanding of this region’s history by emboldening us to think before 1492, when the Western Hemisphere was some unpopulated wasteland, and its only salvation came in the form of Western European settler colonialism.
Our "melting pot" narrative has wholly distracted us from the historical truth that the Americas — a term which itself reeks of European arrogance and triumphalism — were, before its sabotage by colonists, highly populated and marked by incredible degrees of technology and social organization, as so brilliantly documented by Charles Mann in "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus."
The very commemoration of Columbus Day, officially deemed a U.S. federal holiday in 1937, attests to the mentality of the U.S. government and the wholesale acceptance of the societal institutionalization of racism and genocide as a means of "nation building."
But it’s important to acknowledge that while Columbus merits vilification, he was only one of many. The system that birthed him is still present, only now on a more global and more destructive scale.
Columbus was the pinnacle of arrogant hypermasculinity and hubris, ultimately convinced securing a passage to India and boosting the riches of Western Europe were intrinsically righteous ventures. The mindset itself is identical to the one still used to justify the inherent goodness of the so-called "free market" and its global network of neoliberal control over world economies.
It’s shortsighted to simply rename Columbus Day without first reconsidering our narrative and realizing the extent to which the wrongs from 1492 are seen in our present structure.
Rather than continuing to perpetuate such a deceptive account of our history, we would be better served in our quest to figure out who we as "Americans" are by discarding our happy, ultra-capitalist American Dream myth and replacing it with a destructionist dialogue of dispossession.
Our history is thus shaped by colonists, immigrants and the dispossessed. The indigenous peoples of the Americas murdered and purged from their ancestral homelands are still relegated to second-class citizenship.
A great proportion of Native Americans live in a perpetual state of crush, which is attributed to having been forced out of their ancestral homelands. This was identified as a form of structural violence in which, through illusory "sovereignty," the U.S. government can treat Native Americans living within the borders of their land as if they were living in a foreign country.
As a result, our indigenous populations receive little governmental support. Some Americans rebut by pointing out Native Americans' casinos — as if a few millionaires can let us disregard the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people who live in much higher rates of depression, poverty, addiction and suicide than their counterparts. After all, Native Americans were not even granted universal U.S. citizenship until 1924.
Hence, as we reflect on Columbus and our forefathers who valiantly came to America for one reason or another, tapping into the grand myth we call the American Dream, let us not forget for the indigenous peoples of "our" country, that dream was nothing short of a nightmare.
Jordan MacKenzie is a second-year UF linguistics master’s student. His column appears on Wednesdays.
