Columbus Day & Indigenous Peoples Day

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I have this talk every single year on this day
because the last handful of years has been noted that
it's not just Columbus Day, because there are many people
that don't want to observe Columbus Day. But it is
a federal holiday for whatever it's worth. Okay, not that

(00:20):
it means a whole lot when the government shut down,
Am I right? But we we as a society, not
we as us in the studio, but we as a
society have gone back and learned and read about the
tactics of a Christopher Columbus exploration type in the fourteen hundreds,

(00:43):
fifteen hundreds, et cetera. And we don't approve of the
way that they did things and the kind of chaos
that probably ensued upon their landing and what they eventually did.
And it has complicated the history of people like Columbus
and has complicated the history of many people who have

(01:06):
gone as far as the colonialization of the world. And
this is my issue. While I still think it's important
to observe what Columbus achieved in twenty twenty five, it's
very sensitive for a lot of people. So we have
also made this an Indigenous People's Day, so you can
observe Indigenous People's Day. While Columbus Day is the official

(01:28):
federal holiday, you can observe Indigenous People's Day. I have
no problem observing that too. I think it's also important.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that
we only do this once a year. I would hope
that people do this throughout the year. But there is
a great history of the people who also, whether you
want to admit it or not, built this country too,
and it's the Native American population. Now, our relationship with

(01:50):
them has never not always been great, but our relationship
has been strong with them in certain aspects. And it
did take a lot of working in tandem with the
Native Americans for at least a while to really establish
some of the colonies that have taken place up along
the Eastern seaboard. I think it's worth doing both now.

(02:13):
With that said, while I say that and to all
my Canadian friends, happy Thanksgiving, I hate that we are
always trying to assign and project modern day standards and
modern day expectations onto people who lived in different eras.

(02:37):
It is one of the true sins I think of
what we do as a society today. We do it
way too much, and I say we again, as a society.
I try not to do this. It's hard not to.
You read about things that were going on even fifty

(02:58):
seventy years ago, the way we would treat other people,
the way that you would treat animals, the way you
treated property, what you would do with money, how you
would go about a war, and how you would treat
the people in a war. Think about everything that went
on in Vietnam, for instance, that's not really all that
long ago. Historically, if you assigned twenty twenty five standards

(03:26):
and expectations to the people who are living and doing
the best that they can in those moments when that
was happening, they're going to fall short of your standards.
Every time we have evolved as a people. We have
evolved in what we are seeing, and we learn from
those things so we are better in the future. Now,

(03:51):
imagine doing that and assigning all of that to a
guy who was exploring an unknown world, who had absolutely
no idea what was going on anywhere. He had no
idea what he was walking into, but his job as
an explorer in colonial times I mean colonial not for

(04:11):
the United States, but colonial for all of Europe. I
mean It was a race and it was all over
the world. You want to talk about India, you want
to talk about Africa, you want to talk about pieces
of Asia. You want to talk about South America and
in the America's shortly after Columbus were to discover them.
It was a race between the French, it was a
race between the Spanish. The Portuguese were involved. There was

(04:33):
a lot there. I mean, obviously the English ended up
being the dominant kind of colonial powerhouse that still kind
of survived. Beyond that. We came from there, you know, Australia,
South Africa, A lot of major in modern ports and

(04:53):
countries just have survived from the colonial colonization of those
lands by the English. Columbus was in English. Not that
that matters, but his job literally was I am sailing
and I'm going to do. You know the story, you
know the Columbus story. You know how he found where

(05:13):
he landed in the Caribbean. He found it by accident.
He wouldn't even try it. The concept of the world
being round was a new thing. It was something that
really wasn't even universally agreed upon at the time. We
had all this information of like I think we're actually
moving around the sun, not the other way around. I

(05:36):
think we're actually spinning. We're not just like this flat
slab that's just like here. It took us millennium millennia,
multiple millenniums, I'll say, to even understand what this rock
is that we are living on. And in fourteen ninety

(06:00):
two it was super odd right to even think like
how that could affect industry and affect travel. And Christopher
Columbus among some of the other brain trusts of the
types of people that were saying, hey, we need to like,
there's a lot of stuff out here in the world,
and we now have the capabilities through these giant ships

(06:22):
and what knowledge that we're learning that there's places we
can find stuff. Well, Columbus was looking for India, and
he said, well, instead of going all the way around
to the south underneath, what would we would learn is
Africa eventually to get to India and taking like a

(06:43):
long long time, theoretically they could just go the other
direction and run into it too. If the world is round,
I mean, how long would it take for me to
get there? Go in the other direction, And that's what
he did. You're going to have a portion of it's
become political, as all things are. Is it Columbus Day
or is an Indigenous people say? I am of the
camp that it should be both, and it is both,

(07:05):
and I think that it makes sense for both to
be recognized because both are incredibly important to why we're
here in the first place. What I also think is
is that it is clinically insane to do everything you
can to denounce what Christopher Columbus did. I know, the
Harry Potter movies weren't all that, and I totally get it.

(07:25):
Home Alone could have been a lot better, I understand,
but it just wasn't. That's a different Christopher Columbus. Yeah,
he's a guy. He's a director. Chris Chris Columbus is
what he would go by. But yeah, he's he's got
a long list. He was a big time director. You
look it up. You're looking at me like I'm crazy.
It's a good you know, good good movies for sure. Yeah,

(07:49):
Chris Columbus, Yeah is a Yeah, he's still going at it.
He's sixty. He's sixty seven years old. Now wow. He
got old. Yeah, Home Alone, Grimlins, Goonies that he wrote
the screenplay to those two. He did the first two
Harry Potters as the director, was the producer of the third,

(08:10):
Harry Potter directed Percy Jackson and the Olympians. So there
you go. Yeah, he's got a lot of stuff. Chris Columbus,
what a crazy guy. No, the real Christopher Columbus, you know,
the one that colonized Will helped at least colonize. He
didn't do it himself. But when you evaluate what he did,
and this is the thing, you cannot just say, well,

(08:32):
Christopher Columbus should be you know, should have been a
nice guy if he was going to go explore what
was the point of that. You can't be anti colonization.
You can't just go back in time and say, well,
everybody should have stopped colonizing things. Look back at the Crusades.
I mean, that's essentially just a fight over land and
in ideology all over Europe that was going on for

(08:55):
a long long time. Man, a long time. They didn't
have anything better to do than to fight and to colonize.
And when you had a modern civilization, and this hopefully
doesn't sound too risk gay to talk about, but the
European nations they had great technology of the time, They

(09:18):
had a lot more intellect as far as it relates
to how the world operates, and they were learning with
every single thing that they did. It wasn't just well,
let's conquer this area for no reason. They really also
wanted to know what was out there to see how
it could be utilized. And it was an arms race
between many different nations in Europe to figure out who

(09:41):
was going to be in charge of a lot of
this but stuff. And you can fast forward for five
hundred years and that battle was still raging between the
European nations as to who was going to control what
I You look at the maps and how they were
changing during World War One and World War Two. It
was crazy back then, right when that happened. I couldn't

(10:03):
imagine living over there. But that was part of what
we're talking about here. And yet all of a sudden
we go back to fourteen ninety two and say Columbus
should have been a nicer guy. That's just not how
the world was. So, yes, he landed in the Caribbean,
and yes he encountered many different indigenous peoples, and yes
they enslaved a lot of them, They used them for labor,
They tried to do what they could. They had no

(10:24):
idea what to do with themselves. They didn't even expect
to run into that stuff. When they go back, when
he goes back to Spain after he finds this stuff,
you know they are going They're like, so, how was
your trip to India, Christopher Columbus, And he's like, so,
remember the whole earth is round thing? And I went
the other direction to see if I could run into
India faster with that, I'm going to go all the

(10:46):
way to the south. I didn't run into India. There
was an entirely different group of people in multiple land
masses over there, and that was in stibly significant because
then it became a race to see what could be
done over there. The reason we are sitting here today

(11:07):
is because of the colonization of this land. I am
aware of that it was going to happen. It was
going to happen from someone at some point in history.
And going back five hundred plus years to denounce that
behavior it achieves nothing except makes it seem like we

(11:28):
shouldn't be celebrating. Christopher Columbus. Celebrating isn't what we're doing.
We are not celebrating. We don't I'm not trying to
say that we need to make Christopher Columbus a statue
here in Omaha and say, Wow, what an amazing job
that that guy did. What I'm saying is what he
did and we know he did was significant, incredibly significant,

(11:49):
and it's not just a matter of significance as it
relates to Yes, he was the first to find this place,
but what the chain of events was after that, And yes,
the people who were indigenous, they didn't have that technology,
they didn't have that knowledge, they had no idea who
he was. It was a kill or be killed situation

(12:09):
for everyone involved, and that was just what the world
was in fourteen ninety two. So I don't want to
get political. Hopefully you don't find yourself having to have
this debate too awful, Munch. I think there's plenty of
room for it to both be Columbus Day and Indigenous
People's Day on multiple levels. And I think the most
important thing that we can talk about here is why

(12:31):
Columbus is still important even if you disagree or the
twenty twenty five version of Humans denounces what his strategy
was when he got where he got, and then what
type of colonial race took place after he got back,
but hopefully we can still acknowledge the fact that was
still an incredibly important thing and the only reason we

(12:51):
have this civilization and society we have right now is
because he did that, and then European nations race to
try to figure out how they can get pieces of this,
and it was just how history played out at the time.
We don't have to say, well, he was a big jerk.
You want to know, by twenty twenty five standards, pretty
much everybody was a pretty big jerk in fourteen ninety two,

(13:13):
even the indigenous people who on just the sheer side
of someone who was different than them, they were willing
to try to kill them too. The idea that they
were innocent and not killing each other in these lands
is kind of an insane thought, right. There's a lot
of history about the tribal wars that were going on
and raging for land and space in what is the
United States now for centuries before we started to colonize it.

(13:37):
Even while we had colonized it, they were still fighting
each other for space in for land. It wasn't just
the Europeans versus the indigenous peoples. It is another great
misconception about the relationship that we have here in North America.
So yes, Happy Columbus Day. Yes, Happy Indigenous People's Day,
and even more so yes, Happy Canadian Thanksgiving. Hopefully you're

(13:59):
having a great day