Thomas Breen Photos
K of C Supreme Director of New Brunswick Graydon Nicholas testifies in First Nation-styled leather vest embroidered with Catholic symbols.
Wooster Sq. Columbus statue. Quinnipiac statue coming soon?
Knights of Columbus leaders showed up at City Hall to call on New Haven to honor indigenous tribes — but leave Christopher Columbus alone.
The Catholic fraternal organization and insurance giant made that pitch at a public hearing on whether to ditch “Columbus Day” for “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
The three-hour City Services and Environmental Policy (CSEP) committee public hearing was held in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall. It featured nearly 20 testimonies from Knights of Columbus members, Italian Americans from the shoreline, and local Indigenous and immigrant rights activists.
The audience at Thursday night’s hearing.
The subject of the hearing was a proposed resolution from Fair Haven Alder Kenneth Reveiz that calls on the city to permanently recognize the second Monday of October — now known as Columbus Day — as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, following in the footsteps of at least six states and 130 other cities and towns throughout the country. Click here to download the proposal.
The committee alders ultimately voted to read and file the proposal, encouraging all concerned parties to keep talking, work together, and resubmit a similar or amended proposal in the weeks and months ahead.
Although Reveiz’s original proposal did not mention Christopher Columbus once by name, the history and symbolism of the 15th-century transatlantic explorer was at the center of Thursday’s debate.
Marie Notarino and Fair Haven Alder Kenneth Reveiz.
Opponents from the Italian-American community of the resolution heralded Columbus Day as a unique point of pride for Italian Americans. They characterized it as an annual opportunity to celebrate their own history, culture, and hard-fought struggles against xenophobic persecution in this country.
The Knights of Columbus representatives took a slightly different tack. They argued that lumping Indigenous People’s Day on top of Columbus Day would do a disservice to the actual history of Native dislocation and massacre in Connecticut. Those atrocities were perpetrated not by Columbus, they claimed, but by lesser known English settlers like John Mason.
“The first reservation was established here when Quinnipiac people were moved from New Haven to East Haven,” Knights of Columbus board member, Native legal scholar and Osage Tribe member Patrick Mason said Thursday. “Talking about Columbus doesn’t acknowledge that truth.”
The proposal’s supporters, on the other hand, argued that Reveiz’s original resolution did not go far enough.
Not only should the city designate the second Monday of every October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, they said; it should also clearly denounce the legacy of genocide, displacement, slavery, and racism that followed European settlement of the Americas.
Like it or not, they said, Columbus played a crucial role in initiating that world historical migration and has long been the symbol of a blood-soaked European conquest.
Indigenous People’s Day proponents: Norm Clement, Chris Garaffa, Ramon Valdez, and Rose.
“Who’s responsible for the genocide of Native Americans?” asked Branford resident and retired Italian American Civil Rights League social worker Marie Notarino. “Columbus? The Italians?”
Not so, she claimed. The British were much more culpable for those horrors. Indigenous Peoples’ Day supporters would be better served leveling their aim at figures like George Washington than at Columbus, who never even stepped foot in what is now the United States.
“I say get another [Italian-American] hero,” Connecticut Bail Fund staffer and Penobscot Tribe member Norm Clement said. “Why don’t we make it Michelangelo Day? That’s the guy I look up to. Columbus was no hero. Columbus was a murderer and a racist and a genocidal maniac as far as I’m concerned.”
“Shut This Down”
CSEP members Adam Marchand, Sal DeCola, and Anna Festa.
The Indigenous Peoples’ Day section of Thursday’s hearing got off to a rocky start when Clement stood up from his bench in the back row of the chambers and interrupted CSEP Chair Sal DeCola’s explanation of how to use the microphones.
Is there a Spanish translator in the building? Clement asked.
Many of his Unidad Latina en Accion (ULA) colleagues, who had joined him for a rally in support of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the steps of City Hall a few minutes earlier, speak only Spanish. Without a translator, he said, they would struggle to follow and participate in the hearing.
“I’m sorry,” DeCola replied. “We don’t have anyone on staff who can do that right now.” He said that the hearing had been on the committee’s docket for months, and that attendees who would like translation services provided need to submit a request for such at least two days beforehand.
Clement: No translator, no hearing.
“I think we ought to shut this down until we can resolve this,” Clement said. If people can’t understand what’s going on, “people can’t be informed.”
DeCola slammed his gavel on the table before him. “We’re gonna take a recess,” he said, not yet five minutes into the hearing.
Five minutes later, a 25 minute recess.
The alders then disappeared for 25 minutes. When they returned, DeCola said that Amity/Westville Alder Richard Furlow would provide Spanish-to-English translation for anyone wishing to testify, but that the committee would not be able to provide live English-to-Spanish translation.
However, he said, the committee will publish a full Spanish-language transcript of the hearing some time next week.
“The Beacon, The Shining Light”
Columbus Day Parade Committee President Paul Criscuolo.
The next hour and a half proved less contentious.
Reveiz explained to the committee that his intention in proposing the resolution was to build a more profound relationship between the city and its Indigenous residents and history. A steady stream of opponents to the resolution took the mic to applaud that effort … but not at the cost of losing Columbus Day.
The 14 people who testified against the resolution broke out into two general categories. The first consisted primarily of older Italian Americans from East Haven, Branford, Hamden, Madison, and Guilford with deep communal and family roots in the Elm City. Many are associated with the Columbus Day Parade Committee of Greater New Haven. All spoke about how Columbus Day represented to them a hard-won celebration of their ethnic heritage.
“He was the beacon, the shining light, that led our ancestors to these shores,” said Branford resident and parade committee President Paul Criscuolo. “They were explorers, just like he was. They came to New Haven, not knowing the languages or the customs, and they were ostracized. They looked for an ideal, an example, a hero, and found that someone in Columbus.”
Criscuolo’s own grandfather came to New Haven when he was just 15 years old in the late 1800s, he said. He remembered his grandfather telling him that the Christopher Columbus statue in Wooster Square, erected in 1892, was a symbol of how even the poorest of immigrants “could succeed in the New World” with courage and faith and community holding them together.
Rosa DeLauro staffer Samantha Palumbo agreed as she read a written statement submitted by New Haven’s Italian American congresswoman.
“The holiday is not just for Italians,” she read. “It belongs to all immigrants.” Replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day would undermine Italian American heritage, she said. “It should be both/and, not either/or.”
“Take A Higher Road”
Thomas Breen photos
Knights of Columbus turns out. Clockwise from top left: Patrick Kelly, Graydon Nicholas, Andrew Walter, and Patrick Mason.
The second group consisted of representatives from the Knights of Columbus, the international Catholic nonprofit and insurance conglomerate that was founded on Hillhouse Avenue in 1882 and is headquartered downtown at 1 Columbus Plaza downtown.
Most of the Knights of Columbus reps, like Deputy Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly and Vice President of Communications and Strategic Planning Andrew Walter, showed up in dark blue suits and ties.
Some, like board member Patrick Mason and Supreme Director of New Brunswick Graydon Nicholas, showed off their Native and Catholic identifies by wearing leather vests or jackets embroidered with rose-patterned Catholic imagery.
All of the Knights of Columbus speakers stressed that the organization does care about recognizing and celebrating Indigenous people. Supplanting Columbus Day, they argued, is historically and symbolically the wrong way to do that.
“What interaction did Columbus have with us?” asked Mason, a New Mexico-based lawyer who specializes in tribal law. “The reality is that Columbus never set foot in America.”
Heaping blame on Columbus simply scapegoats an individual and does nothing to reverse massacres perpetrated by English settlers and the continued pain imposed by the reservation system, Mason argued.
What New Haven should do instead, he said, is “honor and acknowledge the good people who were originally here and resolve that moving forward, we will all do better.”
He called on New Haven to erect on the Green or elsewhere in the city a monument to the Quinnipiac people; to create a public school curriculum that teaches the full history of colonization in Connecticut throughout November, which is already national Native American Heritage Month; and to designate a reconciliation day in November or sometime during the summer in which tribes from throughout the region are invited to “present and celebrate the beauties of their cultures.”
“Today I ask you to take a higher road,” he said. “A more positive road.”
“We are on the side of the Native people,” Kelly said, “and fully endorse a full exploration of local histories.”
When asked after the hearing if the Knights of Columbus would fund any of the proposals put forward Thursday night, Communications Manager Victoria Verderame said, “We’re keeping all options on the table.”
“We Don’t Have That History”
Clement at the pre-hearing presser.
At around 8 p.m., Clement got his turn to testify as the first person of the night to speak out in favor of the resolution.
Kind of.
Clement said he supports designating the second Monday of October Indigenous Peoples’ Day. But, he said, the resolution needs to do more than just that. It needs to condemn the “erasure of indigenous people in this land” that began with the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
“We should have been invited to the table to draft this resolution,” Clement said. “We say in our community: ‘Nothing about us, without us.’ That is a form of erasure. Indigenous people have been erased from this culture, from this land for 527 years. This is just another example of that.”
Growing up in Savin Rock, he said, he had many Italian American neighbors. He said he has great respect for the accomplishments of Italian Americans in New Haven, in Connecticut, in the United States more broadly. And he doesn’t want to take away the pride that Italian Americans have in their own heritage.
“We don’t have that history,” he said. “We don’t have that luxury of tracing our history all the way back to the 1600s” because of the decimation of Native communities by European settlers.
ULA members Paulina and Adriana support Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the steps of City Hall.
Fellow A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition member Chris Garaffa said that, as an Italian American himself, he feels so much pride in his culture’s food and artistic accomplishments and working-class radicalism.
Build a statue to Sacco and Vanzetti, he suggested. Or create a holiday for the many nameless Italian partisans who fought and defeated Mussolini’s fascist government.
“Let’s be real,” he said. “No one here is saying we should deport Italians.”
“Tonight,” he continued, “is not about Italians. It is about native and indigenous cultures. Columbus Day should be abolished entirely and be replaced with Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch part of the pre-hearing event in support of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Columbus was a brave man but a fool and a criminal. There is little in his career to admire. The fruits of his discovery were a mixture of profound good and profound evil.
The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was a genius, a good man, and a much more profound explorer. He was the first human being to look into the sky and see and know how vast our universe really is. All this, without even leaving his house.
If Galileo is a little too intellectual, there is always Marco Polo; though he is celebrated all summer long by the children at the pool.
Holidays are for celebration. To recognize the suffering of the first Americans, we should build something like a holocaust memorial in the state.