1492.

It’s a number etched into our minds. Many know it as a fateful year and historical shorthand that our country officially recognizes today with a national holiday dedicated to a wayward sailor who is credited with “discovering” an already-inhabited land.

The historical amnesia that it takes to tell the story this way is impressive and sad, with ramifications for how those who were “discovered” by the line of European explorers (Christopher Columbus, Kit Carson, Lewis and Clark, etc.) are treated and viewed by larger society today.

Put yourself in the shoes of a little Isleta Pueblo youth who is taught about Columbus’ triumphant “discovery” of a new land, with all of this land’s thousands of years of history prior to this squeezed into the term “pre-historic.”

Consider the Zuni Pueblo elder who sees schools, roads, post offices, and museums dedicated to the all-American hero Kit Carson, with no mention of the “scorched earth” campaign of genocide that he led against countless indigenous nations.

Imagine the non-Indian crowds that flock to the New Mexico History Museum. Located in the center of Santa Fe, a city that profits incredibly off of American Indian heritage, art and culture, the museum greets visitors with a plaque summarizing New Mexico’s history. The only mention of the land’s original inhabitants is in the following three passages:

 New Mexico, a part of the new nation, was expected to protect Mexico’s interior from foreigners and hostile Indians.

Hostile Indians were the greatest threat to communities. Disruptive raids caused the abandonment of numerous small frontier settlements.

Attempts to stop hostile Indians so depleted the treasury that it was often impossible to provide arms for the settlers.

(In first reading this, I can imagine a guest thinking, “Hmm, I never knew there was a tribe called the ‘Hostile Indians.’ I wonder if they are a Pueblo nation?”)

And on and on and on.

The way we continue to tell the history of this land, including this week’s holiday celebrating its “discovery” perpetuates much of the inequities and discrimination of the past. If this land known to many tribes as Turtle Island was not legitimate until graced by the touch of European feet, if Kit Carson’s campaign to decimate entire communities is seen as “American heroicism” and if the only contribution to our state’s history by the land’s first peoples was to serve as hostile hindrances to development, there is little hope that we have made much progress in how we treat this population.

As one American Indian elder from the Occaneechi Saponi Tribe of North Carolina is fond of saying, “It is time to change the HIStory to make it OURstory.” At the least, we must begin to tell the story truthfully, acknowledging the blatant disregard for human lives and cultures that characterized the first centuries of the United States. And we must see that because the story is still told as a triumphant European conquest over this land and its peoples, we perpetuate the ways of our past, dehumanizing both the  first nations of this land and all who threaten to disrupt the fairy tale, such as immigrants who are labeled as “illegal” human beings.

One way that OURstory is being told is through Indigenous Day, a recognition by Americans, American Indian and non-American Indian, that understanding and appreciating the diverse cultures of the Americas that existed for thousands of years before 1492 is at least as important as recognizing the “re-discovery” of this land by the Spanish.

Indigenous Day also celebrates the rich contributions of those from throughout the Americas to our current-day societies. Moreover, it implores all of us to face the injustices and exploitation that continue to occur in these communities, often benefiting capitalist interests (uranium and oil companies digging for wealth, resorts and commercial farms grabbing for water, etc) just as they did hundreds of year ago. It requires us to ask hard questions about why it is acceptable that many tribes have no access to quality schools or health care, have rampant unemployment and poverty, and living conditions of a developing nation.

Having visited the New Mexico History Museum recently, I left feeling ashamed and embarrassed; as a European American, it was my ancestors who were depicted as the clandestine heroes, the tamers of the primitive wilderness of the “New World” at the expense of a truthful telling of the tale, and in blatant disregard for the land’s first peoples.  And then, in leaving Santa Fe, a road sign meant for me popped up, reading,

“A country that forgets its past has no future.”

May we use this day to begin to remember.

 

Anthony Fleg is a family medicine resident physician at the University of New Mexico and a coordinator for the Native Health Initiative.