Ivy League Student Paper: Native Americans Should be Thankful for Columbus
The Daily Herald has published racist content three times in as many weeks.
By Amanda Girard
Maier ’17: Columbian Exchange Day
By M. Dzhali Maier
I’ve always thought Columbus Day was a celebration of the massive economic, political and cultural phenomenon known as the Columbian Exchange.
Regardless, the day is still mainly about him and his "discovery." So don't tell Natives what they should celebrate. The issue is what we do celebrate and whether we should celebrate it.
If the point of Columbus Day isn't obvious, consider how Americans throw tantrums whenever someone renames "their" day. Like Columbus Day, Indigenous Peoples' Day could be about the "Columbian Exchange," but white folks would never buy that. They want to "honor" their whiteness, not some fair and equal exchange between Natives and Europeans.
Every plant except half of them
This wasn’t just a one-way deal. Without the Columbian Exchange, there would be no Hungarian paprika, French vanilla, Italian tomato sauce or Belgian chocolate. New World plants, such as the potato (native to South America) revolutionized the diets of the Irish, the British and the Russians.
A good portion of our medicine came from Native sources. Airplanes and e-mail, which seem to be Maier's prime examples, were mostly American inventions. American, not European.
Europeans don't get credit for things we invented hundreds of years after they left. Americans invented things because they had land and resources (taken from Natives) and freedom and democracy (taken from Native examples). One could argue that everything they invented was a hybrid.
Europeans and Asians didn't invent the same things as Americans because they didn't have the same background. They didn't have the same combination of European and Native elements. The zeal of feeling unburdened--by crown or church--was an American and arguably Native tradition.
No Hiroshima or Auschwitz?
If Native civilizations had been left alone, they might've invented the same things. For instance, an Aztec computer scientist at the Tenochtitlan Institute of Technology might've come up with the first Internet protocols. When the Aztecs met the Europeans, they were both communicating by methods such as smoke signals and carrier pigeons. Who says the Europeans would've developed faster than an untouched Aztec civilization?
Meanwhile, Natives might not have invented overpopulation, global warming, atomic bombs, genocide, or species extinctions. You know, because they weren't hell-bent on conquering nature and all its inhabitants like the Europeans were. So Maier's comparison is specious. You can't compare today's Europe to 15th-century Native America any more than you can compare medieval serfs to today's Native scientists and engineers.
For more on Columbus, see Rise of Indigenous Peoples' Day and Renaming Columbus Day Angers Italian Americans.