Why I’m Not Proud to Be Basque on Columbus Day
Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. You may know it as Columbus Day.
As an American, I am ashamed on this day for our history as a country.
As a Basque American, even more so.
Let me explain.
Growing up in American schools, we didn’t learn much about the genocide and abuse of Native Americans throughout US history. Only in high school did the curriculum start to touch on these issues, but even then it was for a brief discussion of smallpox blankets and a unit on The Trail of Tears. Then we all moved on to other things.
Until that point in my education, it had all been happy relations between Pilgrims and Indians for Thanksgiving celebrations and the “cooperation” of Native Americans in “helping” Spanish monks build up California in the colonial Mission system.
Not a word on rape, murder, execution, massacres, genocide, enslavement, forced Christianization, forced removal, transgenerational trauma, cultural appropriation, and the numerous other inhuman acts European colonizers committed against Native Americans.
The little knowledge I have on these topics (I do not by any means claim to be an expert) has to do with readings I did outside of American education.
But for years growing up, whenever I learned of the abuse of Native Americans, I felt some small sense of security that at least my people were not colonizers.
My family were recent immigrants to the United States and had no role in stealing Native American lands and oppressing their cultures and languages. For centuries my family were stuck in rural France, working the land, and being oppressed in their own way by the French monarchy and subsequent Republics. Right?
But every once in a while I would hear Basque people mention something about how the men who sailed with Christopher Columbus were Basque, that Columbus’ ships were made in the Basque Country. One theory even holds that Columbus himself was Basque.
