Identifying with the Oppressor on Indigenous People's Day

There are so many things wrong with the final letter to the editor from today's Star Tribune:

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
Celebrate the historical role

It's unfortunate that Columbus Day is seen by some as honoring Christopher Columbus the man and ignoring what he did in the year 1492. Despite his personal faults, Columbus had the courage and determination to do something nobody in the Old World would do: sail west and change the course of history and Western civilization.

If not for Columbus, the New World may not have been discovered until much later. The history of the European nations and America could have been completely different. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and John Adams could have lived their entire lives in Europe. We could be speaking French or Spanish now instead of English.

We should have a national holiday to celebrate the discovery of the New World and the root of the beginning of the 13 American colonies. It's what happened in 1492 that made the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving possible. Whatever the pilgrims and Indigenous people did at the first Thanksgiving, it did not change the course of history.

Happy 1492!

John Wong, Edina

Here are a few of the letter's problems:

• The writer thinks you can name a holiday for a person without implying that it honors him, somehow separate from his acts.
• He says no one else ever sailed west from Europe to the Western Hemisphere.
• He calls parts of the planet the "New World" and the "Old World," which are of course common terms, but their use reproduces the idea that the "new" world was empty and just waiting to be exploited by the advanced "old" world.
• He says that Columbus was the key factor that directly led to our present reality of living in an English-speaking country. There were many other factors along the way; should we have a holiday for every one of them? And of course, in his thinking, the way we are today is unassailably great and should be celebrated without question.
• The whole final paragraph is a mess of problems. Among other things, it uses the incorrect word "discovery" and calls for celebrating colonization and, essentially, genocide. Wong has not, of course, read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States or Charles Mann's 1491 or 1493 or anything else that could have informed him.
• Finally, the fact that the Star Tribune decided to publish this letter at all on what is now called Indigenous People's Day in the city that bears the newspaper's name.
  

As James Loewen points out in Lies My Teacher Told Me, his highly regarded critique of high school history books:

Columbus is not a hero in Mexico, even though Mexico is much more Spanish in culture than the United States and might be expected to take pride in this hero of Spanish history. Why not? Because Mexico is also much more Indian than the United States, and Mexicans perceive Columbus as white and European.... Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history (p. 64).

At the end of his chapter on Columbus, Loewen writes this: "When they glorify Columbus, our textbooks prod us toward identifying with the oppressor" (p. 69). 

That's exactly what letter-writer John Wong is doing as well, and the Star Tribune is helping him.