Native American activist groups in
Minnesota would like people to learn the real history of Christopher
Columbus and quit putting him up on a pedestal at the State Capitol.
“We all know in 1492 he sailed the
ocean blue. And in 1493 he stole all that he could see,” American
Indian Movement-Twin Cities Chair Mike Forcia said at a rally held on
April 18 outside the Minnesota capitol building, where the statue of
Columbus stands.
For more than 83 years a statue of
Columbus has gazed from the Capitol toward Minnesota’s Justice
Center. For Forcia, real justice would be removing the statue. “We
need to deport Columbus,” he said. “We can’t be celebrating
genocide anymore.”
Genocide isn’t a word most history
books associate with Columbus, but he enslaved Native Americans.
As governor of the large island he called Espanola (today Haiti and
the Dominican Republic), Columbus’ programs reduced the native
population from as many as eight million at the outset of his regime
to about three million in 1496.
Minnesota’s legislature is
considering a bill that would change the engraving on the statue from
“Discoverer of America” to “Christopher Columbus landed in
America.” A co-sponsor of the House bill includes Rep. Dean Urdahl
(R-Grove City), who taught high school government classes 35 years.
That change misses the point, say
Native Americans who marched through downtown St. Paul Saturday to
the Columbus statue. “This is not the right decision with history
to re-engrave another lie with another lie,” said one of the
marchers with a bullhorn. “That’s all we’re doing. From
‘Discover of America’ to ‘Landed in America.’ It’s a lie,
it’s still the same lie. It’s scratched out with another lie. We
want this removed and replaced.”
At the rally, demonstrators covered the
“Discover of America” engraving with a blue sticky note that read
“The father against violence against native people.”
Forcia says Representatives Karen Clark
(DFL-Minneapolis) and Susan Allen (DFL-St. Paul) support removing the
statue “and hopefully we’ll get one of our Dakota people put up
in his place. Because this is Dakota territory.”
Several Native American activist groups
not affiliated with AIM also held an event at the capitol to express
their displeasure with the statue. The Ogichidaakwe council’s elder
group sang and spoke. They hosted a round dance with drum and singers
from the Center Schools of Minneapolis and the red solidarity shawled
women of Minnesota Native Lives Matter and Native Lives
Matter Coalition.
The red shawls honor the survivors of
violence and were from the Minnesota Indian Woman Sexual Assault
Coalition and the Sacred Hoop Coalition.
