Strange Entanglements: The History of Columbus Day, the Washington Redskins, and Native American Civil Rights

         On the passage of another homage to the first named European slaver and an atrocious mathematician I felt impelled to add a new perspective to the conversation of the day of “celebration.” There are some strange parallels between the inspiration of this holiday, the national capital’s pro-football team and the Native American Civil Rights movement. Let’s start with Cristóbal Colón, better known to Americans as Columbus, whose name will be mentioned only twice more in this article. The celebration of Columbus Day began, like many of the nationalistic holidays, during the late-nineteenth century and mirrored the trials and tribulations of Native Americans of the period. It became a national holiday in 1934 after many states began adopting the holiday starting in 1906. The holiday was steeped in anachronistic concepts of nationalism, patriotism, and loyalty that seemed even in the early-twentieth century in glaring contrast to the treatment of the First Nations of this continent. The tides are beginning to roll out on this “celebration” but this is a slow ebb certainly. Many more voices this year called for the “celebration” to be dismantled, others suggested that the focus should go to those who suffered the most under European incursions to celebrate their struggles and their resilience. So, in honor of Native American resilience, and as a descendent of the Europeans who proposed the “celebration,” I was inspired to show how the development of this holiday has mirrored the struggles of Indians in the US.
            Much has been written concerning the genocidal practices of the Spaniard’s first incursion into the Caribbean during the late-fifteenth century, I will not cover that here. The story of this ignominious holiday began just after the end of the American Revolution. The 300th anniversary in 1792 was marked by celebrations across the newly formed United States, meanwhile the Iroquois were attempting to regroup and figure out what could be done to protect their lands and reunite the confederated Six Nations after the war had split them apart. Like many other nations, the Iroquois were attempting to establish stable diplomatic relations with the new country but the US proved even less-reliable than Britain when it came to enforcing their treaties if it meant limiting or punishing US citizens. Every nation from the Abenaki in the north to the Seminole in the south were attempting find at least détente after years of bloody war. The fears of the future couldn’t have seemed bleaker than the 400th anniversary in 1892 as the Dawes Act wiped clear millions of acres of Indian Lands and just after Wounded Knee. The US celebrated the first European footfalls and clank of the slavers’ chains with parades and calls to national pride, though admittedly the American public and even some academics were unaware of the more insidious firsts perpetrated in October of 1492. This was even the beginning of an Italian pride movement. The man had been white-washed and placed in public view as an example of European genius, ignoring his monumental mathematical failures (namely he was insanely lucky that North America was in the way as he had calculated that Asia was actually around where Bermuda is, which it’s not!)
            The growing political organization of Native American rights groups gained a foothold right after WWI. Though the Society of American Indians was formed in 1911, it was not till 1918 that the organization developed strong political ties with Washington, DC. They were pivotal in the creation of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 which granted citizenship and voting rights to all indigenous peoples within the US even ones on reservations. Despite this, state legislatures have continued to undercut this federal act through language, ID and taxation requirements. Four years later, the Bureau of Indian Affairs produced the Merriam Report identifying the terrible conditions on the reservations and on tribal lands from economics to health to natural resource control. The BIA under the control John Collier attempted to provide for tribal renewal in the ill-fated and heavy-handed Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Washington was tiring quickly of the seemingly intractable poverty and social inequality it was facing in Indians, not to mention the systemic racial tensions flaring across the entire country.
            Two months before the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, President FDR signed an executive order identifying the second Monday in October as a federal holiday at the behest of Italian heritage organizations. To observers at the time, even to members of the Society of American Indians, this was an innocuous action since few knew the actions that led to the man’s fame nearly five centuries after his death. The public awareness of European colonial actions, the Spanish among them, did not become critically taught in public schools until the late 1950s and 1960s. The implications for this would be complicated further in 1937 when FDR welcomed a new football team to the nation’s capital. Though they were named the “Braves” in 1932, the Boston team became the Redskins in 1933 until they were bought and sent to DC in 1937. The Washington Redskins rose to prominence in the pro-football leagues and was a powerful and fear-inspiring symbol throughout the mid-twentieth century. There was nothing as American as a cigar-store Indian.
            As Native American Civil Rights organizations became more aggressive and active during the 1950s, they were facing a dominantly Republican congress bent on rolling back the progressive agenda of the previous twenty years. They enacted a House Resolution that “terminated” the federal relationship with the Nations of Indians. This allowed many states to disenfranchise Indians both on and off reservations in direct violation of the Indian Citizenship Act. This haphazard Congressional policy led to over thirty years of state-run and federally-supported encroachment on civil and territorial land rights that hadn’t been witnessed since the nineteenth century. By the height of the 1960s most people in the US were well aware of the legacy of Columbus in the Caribbean even if they did not connect it to Native politics on the mainland. Indian Civil rights leaders, already angered by draconian state and federal policies, felt the insult of the federal holiday even more poignantly. For most nations east of the Mississippi the presence of the Washington “Redskins” with plains feather headdresses and non-Indians playing dress-up in massive expensive arenas was too much of an insult to the legacy of the word, the history of mistreatment, and to their legacy of resilience despite all of this.
            So here we are today. The Pamunkey Nation, a people visited by the first permanent English settlement, has their tribal recognition held up by litigious and petty politicians. The Monacans are just as far away. Native peoples in the US are a hidden minority whether we’re talking about the textbooks our students read or in the political discourse. Though, to his credit, Former Governor Chafee did mention the role Native Americans play in race relations in Tuesday’s CNN Presidential debate, but he was the only one.  Washington sends effigies of Plains Indians out to fight their battles for them and then welcomes them by referring to them by the eighteenth century racial slur, “redskins.” Washington still celebrates a murderer and slaver, who ironically miscalculated the circumference of the globe but was lucky enough to accidentally stumble upon an island just before mutiny overcame his ship, again. Both of these are an example of the culturally-blind, misguided, and damaging ignorance our nation’s capital, and by extension our public, exhibits towards the First Nations of the North America. It may be a complicated political mess, but from an historical standpoint, the federal holiday and the football team are both long-standing social manifestations of the racism our nation permits towards indigenous people. Let's break the cycle and no longer tolerate the disrespect of Native American people or their culture.