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Columbus Day In America

Yesterday was Columbus Day in the U.S. of A. There were parades, parties, and protests. Depending on whether one was a beneficiary or a victim of Chris's hapless blunder, it was a day of joy or a day of mourning. Mostly, you could tell the victims by the color of their skin, their features, and the level of their income.

I remember, in 1966, sitting on the balcony of an apartment in San Francisco, watching the Columbus Day parade wend its way through North Beach. Pat Brown, then governor of California, was there, riding in some large chromed convertible with fins, and there was a fine turnout of the neighborhood's mostly Genoese Italian residents. It was a more naive time, undisturbed by the as-yet-unorganized American Indian Movement. We didn't have to think about whether the native Americans we vanquished had any human rights. The reservations to which they had been banished could just as well have been the Japanese-American relocation centers of an earlier era, for all that we knew about them at the time.

The occupation of Wounded Knee changed all that. By the 500th anniversary of Columbus' folly, AIM, and the International Indian Treaty Council (which has UN status as an observer nation) had organized a gigantic demonstration in the Civic Center of San Francisco; and throughout the world people came together to witness the shameful history of repression and dehumanization of native peoples under the European conquerors.

Now, four years later, little has changed for indigenous people. Tribes still fight to prevent toxic and nuclear wastes from being dumped on their lands, claims for restitution of reservation land still languish in the courts, life span is still far short of the average, illiteracy is still alarmingly high, crime and drug and alcohol addiction are still rampant. Funds for education, medical care, food and shelter are being cut by a government out to balance the budget at any (poor person's) cost.

This year, a new wrinkle was added to the "other Columbus day", which our neighbors to the south call Dia de la Raza (Day of Our Race). People of Hispanic (mostly, Mexican) descent took their own concerns to Washington D.C., where, some forty thousand strong, they marched and rallied in defense of their rights as newly arrived Americans. They demanded that they be included in the social services network. They denounced the humiliation of being hassled by immigration police demanding that they prove their right to be there, in the border areas in which many of them live. They objected to being characterized as foreign, uneducated, and addicted, by a society that provides only menial jobs while it withholds affordable medical care and bilingual education, documents, applications and ballots.

In this, the mostly mixed-blood euro-american Hispanic immigrants that rallied in Washington are similar to many of their indigenous paisanos left behind in Mexico, for there was also a massive demonstration in the Mexican capital on October 12. Held one day after the National Conference of Indigenous Peoples, the rally featured Comandante Ramona, of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Her message -- the message of the EZLN -- was that tribal peoples must continue to struggle for the right to retain their lands, to educate themselves according to their own traditions and in their own language, to travel in their own area without having to identify themselves to government officials. We want equality, they said. Dignity, and hope.

Two countries, two holidays, one day, one message. Anybody listening?

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