Columbus Falls: Recovering Indigenous Presence in the Public Sphere

• Published in: Resources for American Literary Study
• Main Author: LOPENZINA, DREW
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The Pennsylvania State University Press 2021
• Subjects: anishina*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/resoamerlitestud.43.1-2.0176; https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/rals/article-pdf/43/1-2/176/1508965/resoamerlitestud_43_1-2_176.pdf

ABSTRACT For decades scholars and educators have marshalled archival evidence of Columbus’s voyages in an effort to present a more accurate history of their brutality. Despite these efforts, dominant cultural narratives of Columbus residing in monuments, children’s books, television commercials, and other markers of valorization continue to cast a long shadow over the Indigenous lives and cultures that withstood Columbus’s “new world” excursion. Too often these peoples are represented as empty ciphers of primitivism, their entities readily absorbed and subsumed by the sometimes valorous, sometimes tragic story of western progress. This article calls for the use of Indigenous methodologies to disrupt the cultural ambivalence by which Columbus continues to be perceived as both hero and villain. A greater understanding and appreciation of Indigenous cultures is required in order to forge what Anishinaabe historian Jean O’Brien refers to as a “replacement narrative,” shifting the focus away from Columbus, as either flawed or heroic individual, and placing it on the more complex dynamics of settler colonialism itself. This shift can only occur, however, when we reposition ourselves, as scholars and educators, to read against the grain of the dominant archive, gathering to ourselves the intellectual tools to imagine Indigenous lives and cultures as fully human.