By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Those old enough to have been in Catholic elementary school back in the mid-20th century probably remember October’s Columbus Day being celebrated with an added religious perspective.
Like the larger U.S. society, the school kids observed the advent of what was regarded as the gift of the beginning of Western, Christian civilization on North American shores. But they also knew that heroic Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, acting for the Spanish crown, and the vanguard he represented meant the arrival of Catholicism to a pagan people.
Not anti-religious people, but ones with an incomplete, pagan religious understanding of a limited place in the cosmos. The Cross was planted in a part of the world that wasn’t new to the indigenous already here, but it was the New World to Europeans far from their native places.
In the 1960s in the U.S., virulent new strains of leftism and multiculturalism began to plant their own banners on this soil. Jealous of competition, they looked forward to supplanting the prevailing faith with their own. It was sort of Columbus in reverse. The Italian explorer no longer was the legate of God, but a face on a contrived wanted-criminal poster, maybe designed in a university art class.
While Indian, or Native American, heritage might have seemed distant from daily 20th-century life in, say, New York’s Manhattan metropolis — even though Manhattan Island is what the Dutch purchased from the inhabitants already there in 1626 — residents of the Mountain West were well aware of living on what had been Indian-controlled territory not so very long before.
Located in central Phoenix in the mid-20th century was the Phoenix Indian School, a well-established boarding school to bring youngsters off rural reservation lands and acculturate them into the dominant lifestyle of the surrounding city. These kids weren’t to be exterminated, like many historic victims had been, but taught their three R’s and job skills to participate in modern life.
The ruling U.S. society’s intentions were good. The effort also implied cultural superiority of Christianity to the overridden ways of 19th-century tribes’ deserts, forests, plains, and valleys.
Eventually this federal Indian boarding-school system was phased out and students received local schooling back where they came from. Much of the social transition already was accomplished.
As I wrote in the February 20, 2014, issue of The Wanderer about the good and the bad, when Indian students moved deeper into the 20th century, their boarding-school milieu offered what other high schoolers had — “sports trophies, prizes for debating skills, yearbooks, letterman sweaters, cheerleader clinics, choir robes, and graduation gowns and tassels.”
When assimilation won, they eventually were invited by the authorities once again to recall their tribal heritage rather than bury it. But a severe cultural dislocation first had been imposed decades earlier. To quote two more paragraphs from that 2014 article:
“To be sure, early on the youngsters were living in what had to be judged primitive conditions in their villages before they were snatched from their families. They were shipped off to be deloused, renamed, sheared of their long hair, put into trousers, and photographed with pained, lost expressions on their faces.
“A little boy with a new ‘American’ name had been forced into a very different world. But his previous special clothing accented with porcupine quills back in the village showed that parents can love children by a campfire every bit as much as with electric lights.”
These days we may consider it unthinkable that dominant authorities would have free rein to do as they please with children’s and families’ lives. But that’s exactly what Barack Obama’s left-wingers consider it their sacred duty to do through, among various usurpations, mandated bathroom invasions against the innocent, sexual deviancy pushed as a necessity, massive abortion, and anti-Christian multiculturalism as the new faith system.
Current social challenges to Columbus Day range from assertions of genocidal slaughter to suggestions that Indigenous Peoples’ Day merely allows these natives to be remembered for their contributions.
The Community News section of the September 28 Phoenix-based Arizona Republic paraphrased one local resident that observing such a day “is not to condemn anyone. Rather…the aim is to celebrate the city’s earlier inhabitants, starting with the Hohokam who built hundreds of miles of canals and made civilization flourish in a desert” a thousand years ago.
An opinion article posted October 9 at the Wall Street Journal site, “Straight talk about Christopher Columbus,” by David Tucker, noted that the insights of Western civilization eventually were to provide their own remedy to colonialism:
“This revolution in thinking, which ultimately undermined European imperialism, was announced by the Declaration of Independence and its assertion of the self-evident truth of human equality. It was carried further by the British, who suppressed the slave trade with their all-powerful navy, commercial might and insistent diplomacy, and who led the campaign for the abolition of slavery. It was completed by American insistence after the world wars of the 20th century on the right of self-determination, the right of people to self-government.”
A Cesspool
Rob Haney, a Catholic and retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, headquartered in Phoenix, told The Wanderer that the rise of indigenous peoples’ observances doesn’t have a benign origin.
“How appropriate that Indigenous Peoples’ Day can trace its origin to 1992 in Berkeley, Calif. Berkeley is ground zero for cultural degeneracy and a cesspool for breeding radicals. Any practice which celebrated our unique culture and heritage has been attacked by the left,” Haney said.
“A significant number of socialists in our Catholic hierarchy have been willing participants. The rot coming out of the University of Notre Dame is a prime example.
“(Saul) Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is the textbook used by universities to indoctrinate our youth, as Obama was schooled by Alinsky. Obama has changed America from an ethnic melting pot into separate cultural enclaves working at odds to one another. We no longer have a unique American culture. The illegal alien and Mideast migrant invasions and Obama’s playing the race-baiting game are destroying us,” Haney said.
Ann Howard, a retired Arizona criminal-law attorney with a mixed-ethnicity family, told The Wanderer that those who think Columbus Day represents European exclusivity are mistaken.
“The people advocating for the replacement of Columbus Day by Indigenous Peoples’ Day reek of ignorance and hypocrisy. With Alinsky-like tactics, they have turned Indigenous Peoples’ Day into a politically correct sacred cow,” Howard said.
“There is much to be learned and adopted into all societies from the indigenous. But these people pushing for the abolishment of Columbus Day are motivated by a dislike of everything European, including European descendants in America. In my own experience, it is deteriorating into dislike of white people,” she said.
“These advocates seem to have forgotten or never knew that the culture the Europeans brought to America was the patrimony of the whole world and all those peoples of any race, any tribe, any color, anywhere who have accepted it,” Howard said.
“The roots of that culture, of course, are the Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian culture. By accident of history it was the Europeans, predominantly white, who accepted it and advanced it and gave to the whole world which will accept it — the best of medicine, law, philosophy, science, hospitals, orphanages, agriculture, and on and on.
“The inventions by Europeans which all of us enjoy number in the thousands, a fact not repeated by other cultures to the same extent. This we call ‘Western Civilization.’
“But it could have been any cultures who so developed that historical gift into a complex civilization. In fact, in its centuries-long development, it has had people of every race as contributors. It is not Europeans who own it. It is all people,” she said.
“If the indigenous people and their enablers do not want to respect that gift and the first giver of that gift, Columbus, to America, then they are, under the power of the gift of freedom given us by the Founding Fathers — also beneficiaries of Western culture — able to do so.
“But honesty and self-respect should impel them to give up and avoid all the attributes of Western civilization. They should go back to their old ways,” she said. “Leave Columbus Day as a celebration of the arrival of the gift of Western civilization brought here by Christopher Columbus. It is the patrimony of us all.”
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