Indigenous Day Shifts From Columbus

Richard Cowes lifted a wooden bear claw filled with smoldering white sage up to one side of Gary Tinney’s face and, whispering a prayer for peace, wafted the fragrant plume of smoke with a hawk feather.

Cowes and Tinney were celebrating Indigenous People’s Day along with 50 people late Monday afternoon on the New Haven Green.

Both Cowes and Tinney live in West Haven. Both are members of the Golden Hill Paugussetts. And both braved the blustery cold not just to celebrate Native American history and culture with a community of peers, but also to reflect on an extraordinary year of symbolic shifts.

In New Haven as elsewhere around the country this year, many of those changes have centered around a reappraisal of the legacy of the 15th century explorer Christopher Columbus, with an eye towards the role he played in a white, European settler-led genocide of Native people.

Those local changes have included the Board of Education’s vote to rename Christopher Columbus Academy on Grand Avenue; the tumultuous removal of the Christopher Columbus statue from Wooster Square; the ed board’s renaming of Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day; the Board of Alders’ renaming of the second Monday of October as Italian Heritage Day; and the alders’ formal recognition of racism as a public health crisis.

“This struggle has been a long one,” said Norm Clement, a member of the local Quinnipiac tribe. ​“It’s been 528 years since colonization in this country.

“But we’re starting to win back who we are. We’re starting to be recognized. Some of the mascots are disappearing. The statues are disappearing. That is all part of the decolonization of this nation. We have to continue to celebrate who we are and what we represent and to do that in a good way.”

The event stood in stark contract to one held earlier in the day in Wooster Square, where a group of Italian-Americans mourned the removal of the Columbus statue by laying a wreath at its pedestal. (Click here to read a story by the New Haven Register’s Ben Lambert about that event.)

Attendees at the Indigenous Peoples’ Day event — much as at Sunday’s Fair Haven celebration organized by Unidad Latina en Accion — spoke of feeling a sense of relief and recognition coming from this year’s nationwide reckoning with the legacy of Columbus, in particular and of systemic racism and white supremacy more broadly.

“It brought up the atrocities we suffered,” said Cowes, who is a teacher at New Haven Adult Education. While that is a painful history to reflect on, he said, it’s an important one for all Americans to understand. ​“It’s clear that there is change going on in the world.”

Tinney, who works as a mail deliveryman in Fairfield, agreed. ​“It represents growth,” he said, when asked what the removal of the Columbus statue and the renaming of Columbus Day meant to him. ​“Change is happening. That’s a good thing.”

Both helped kick off the hour-and-a-half-long gathering with a cleansing ritual in which Cowes and event organizer Clement burned white sage and ​“smudged” the shrub’s smoke along the bodies of those looking for a moment of calm and an opportunity to remember their ancestors.

“Never Forget Who You Are”

No one at Monday’s event reveled at the prospect of replacing one people’s history with another’s.

“Indigenous Peoples’ Day should be an inclusive moment,” said Anthony Barroso (pictured at right), who is from Fair Haven and whose family is descended from members of the Quechua tribe in Ecuador.

“I know there’s a lot of discontent” around removing the Columbus statue and changing the name of the holiday away from Columbus Day. But recognizing the painful history of settler colonialism and white supremacy does not negate the hardships and accomplishments of Italian Americans in this country, he said.

Madeleine Freeman (pictured), a Yale senior who is a member of the Choctaw and Chicasaw nations, said that moving from Oklahoma to the Northeast has been particularly challenging because of the lack of visible recognition of Native history, and of the continued existence of indigenous people.

“In Oklahoma it’s a little bit different,” she said. ​‘We have a lot more celebrations. It’s a very different environment than coming out to the Northeast. For me, it does sometimes feel like I’m in a graveyard. There’s a lot of genocide that has happened. There’s people who don’t know that Native Americans are still people, that they are still alive.”

Coming to gatherings like Monday’s, she said, makes her proud to be indigenous. It reminds her of the resilience Indigenous Peoples’ Day is support to celebrate.

“In less than favorable circumstances, we can all still come together and take part in community.”

“Never forget who you are and where you came from,” said Golden Hill Paugussett Clan Mother Shoran Waupatuquapiper (at right in photo) about what Monday’s celebration meant to her. ​“And always walk in pride.”

After the sage smudging, the attendees stood in a circle to listen to speeches — about Columbus Day, about the history of indigenous people in Connecticut, about the epidemic of missing and murdered Native women in general and about the movement to get justice for East Haven mother Lizzbeth Aleman-Popoca in particular.

The event closed out with attendees breaking off from the socially-distanced circle they had been standing in to dance to the sounds of an audio recording of pow wow music. The sound of the drums and cheers coming from the Clement’s speaker were amplified by the shouts of joy coming from those dancing on the Green.

Click on the Facebook Live videos below to watch parts of Monday’s event.