Last week, the United Nations released its first report on “The State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.” The report finds significant disparities in basic human rights and development standards for indigenous peoples as compared to non-indigenous populations. For instance, in terms of economic rights in the United States, more than twice the percentage of Native Americans and Alaska Natives were found to live below the poverty line as compared to the total U.S. population. And women’s rights standards are even more disconcerting: Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped or experience sexual violence than other women in the United States. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International are working to pass several bills in Congress this upcoming year to address these severe and pervasive human rights disparities. Of course, Native American communities have long been aware of these injustices, and groups such as the Alaska Native Justice Center and the Native American Rights Fund have worked to promote and defend Native American human rights.

While many of us are enjoying the Columbus Day holiday, it is perhaps appropriate to use such free time to consider the differing perspectives of what this day signifies both to the history of the United States and the world. Consider this passage from Christopher Columbus’s log book: “[The natives] do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance…They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” While Columbus’s ‘discovery’ marked the beginning of contact between Europe and the Americas, it also signified the foundations of imperialism that spawned the global slave trade and the genocide (the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, any national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such) of indigenous peoples in the Americas that has continued for more than 500 years. In Costa Rica, October 12th is celebrated as Día de las Culturas (Day of the Cultures). In Venezuela, it is recognized as Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance). For a man who never set foot on what is now U.S. soil, what is at stake in the United States maintaining a day of honor for Christopher Columbus? Whose history does this holiday represent?

Here is a (rather long) excerpt from the first chapter of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” entitled Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress. A Youtube video entitled “Reconsider Columbus Day” has also been circulating in the human rights/indigenous justice blogosphere.