I find it curious that a couple of Chinese language and culture schools with a large population of K-12 students with parents from Taiwan, plan to march in a Columbus Day Parade. Those who grew up in a community dominated by ongoing dialogue about social justice and the inaccuracies of history taught in school about the development of North American society, look upon Columbus Day as a day of mourning, and not celebration. The “settling” by Europeans of this region began the end for American people who had lived and loved this land for a long time before supposedly civilized people arrived to slaughter them by means both subtle and direct and to plunder the once abundant land and resources the indigenous people had been sustained by, and had protected, for as long as their people could remember.
Indigenous Taiwanese people have also struggled to maintain the integrity of their culture in the face of current pressure from national China to relinquish independence, and both mass killing and oppression of Taiwan’s indigenous people after Chiang Kai-Shek, former leader of the Kuo Ming Tang, fled there in 1949 after losing the war for China’s domination to Mao Zedong. Perhaps the Taiwanese should show solidarity for the native people of the United States, instead of with the people who vanquished them from the land.
Wanda Jean Lord of Newport, of Cherokee and Choctaw descent and founder of Honoring Our Own Power (HOOP), “a nonprofit organization that supports arts, cultural, environmental and economic development initiatives by and for indigenous people,” says, “For me, (Columbus Day) is a day of mourning.” In a Providence Journal article, Lord adds:
… she was “privileged” to work with a movement at Brown University last year that led to the school’s dropping the Columbus Day holiday from its academic calendar. “I was really encouraged to see people across ethnicity lines coming together at Brown,” she said.
“As a native woman, when I hear ‘Columbus Day,’ the images that flash through my mind are of indigenous people getting their hands cut off because they didn’t bring enough gold to the Europeans.”
She began to weep.
“I see bodies of indigenous people hanging in markets to be sold and fed to European dogs. I see millions of people exterminated because they didn’t make good slaves.”
Jump to article about free speech repression in Taiwan today or summary of KMT’s history in Taiwan and struggle of indigenous people to preserve their culture.