Protest

Rocky Mountain News:

Protesters attempt to block Columbus Day Parade route

Crowd disperses before marchers pass

By Judith Kohler, Associated Press
October 8, 2005

DENVER — As drums and chants echoed in the background, demonstrators briefly staged a mock death scene in the street today before a Columbus Day Parade passed by.

About 15 people laid down in an intersection before the parade was in view. Other protesters covered them with blankets and carried them away just before police moved in to make arrests.

Police were out in force for the Denver parade, which has a troubled history of arrests and confrontations between supporters and detractors of Christopher Columbus.

Protesters have called him a slave trader who touched off centuries of genocide and oppression against native people. Parade supporters say he was a brave explorer who opened a new world. Colorado is credited with being the first to make Columbus Day a state holiday.

Police said there was no violence and no one was arrested Saturday.

Police spokeswoman Virginia Lopez declined to say how many police were along the parade route but said the number was “adequate.” At least 150 officers were visible at the intersection where the demonstration took place, including Chief Gerry Whitman.

Some protesters spilled red liquid to signify blood. Others held banners reading “Genocide,” “Columbush” and “1492.”

University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill, who caused a nationwide uproar when he likened some Sept. 11 victims to Nazis, was standing along the parade route. He said earlier in the week he wouldn’t participate in the protest as he has in the past because he didn’t want to be a distraction.

Churchill declined comment Saturday. He was accompanied by a man wearing a jacket identifying him as an American Indian Movement security guard, who turned away reporters.

Churchill was among about 240 people arrested last year for disrupting the parade. He and other protest leaders were acquitted and the charges against the rest were dismissed.

Glenn Morris, a member of AIM’s Colorado chapter, said protesters avoided arrest this year.

“It served no purpose to tie up our people in the courts,” he said. Instead, the police and parade became part of the protesters’ street theater, Morris said.

He said the demonstrators who laid on the street represented Indians exterminated since the arrival of Columbus, the people carrying them away on stretchers were the survivors honoring their ancestors and the police cleaning up the red liquid were authorities erasing history.

The protesters, estimated by police at 200, appeared to far outnumber parade supporters, many of whom waved Italian flags.

Todd Squillante said he has lived in the Denver area for 33 years and was at the parade for the first time to show he disagrees with the people who want to abolish the holiday.

“I think they picked the wrong way of attacking their point,” Squillante said. “They may have some valid points, in terms of the whites taking their land, but it shouldn’t have anything to do with Columbus and Italians.”

As the parade rolled by, protesters chanted “Celebrate pride, not genocide” and “Shame, shame.” Some held up large mirrors with signs that read “This is what genocide looks like.”

Parade supporters held up a mirror to parade opponents. Their sign read “This is what racism looks like.” Two women in the parade stopped at a lower downtown intersection clotted with protesters and held up a placard with the words “This is what free speech looks like.”

Ann-erika White Bird, 32, of Boulder said Columbus helped touch off genocide against indigenous people and that the United States is ignoring international treaties and conventions by honoring him.

She said her home state of South Dakota celebrates Native American Day on the traditional Columbus Day while Colorado refuses to change.

“What message does that send?” White Bird asked.

Mike Rosen noted the anti-Columbus crowd back on September 30:

Rosen: Columbus clash, 2005

September 30, 2005

We’re about a week away from Denver’s annual Columbus Day confrontation. Each year at this time, Italian-Americans lawfully assemble to hold a parade honoring Christopher Columbus and celebrating their heritage while the usual suspects – professional Indian activists, assorted lefties and recreational demonstrators who do this kind of thing for fun – violate the civil rights of paraders and seek to block and disrupt the event.

There’s one new wrinkle this year. The Denver City council, in June, passed new ordinances that specifically outlaw the obstruction or disruption of duly authorized parades like this. In the past, the law was vague enough to give disrupters enough wiggle room to escape the consequences for their goonish behavior. They were willing to do the crime, but didn’t want to do the time. So they copped out and lawyered up to score a daily double: civil disobedience and a get-of-jail- free-card.

With the new laws in effect, it’ll be interesting to see if there’s a change in tactics this year. As always, protesters will have the right to speak their minds and stage a counterdemonstration, but they don’t have the right to block the parade. The time-honored principle, here, is that your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.

Steve Nash is a veteran anti-establishment activist who has branched out from his favorite pastime of demonstrating against Denver cops to support the anti-Columbus crowd. In a recent letter to The Denver Post he defended their brownshirt tactics, arguing that “temporarily” blocking the parade for “one or two hours” is merely an “inconvenience” for the Columbus Day celebrants who have no gripe because they haven’t been fully “muzzled.” How generous and tolerant of him.

Indian activism has become a lucrative career for the likes of Glenn Morris, Ward Churchill and Russell Means. Morris won himself a cushy position as head of the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado at Denver, Means has been a movie star and then, of course, there’s Churchill. Hardly the victim of discrimination; he’s exploited it to his advantage. The faux Indian used his dubious claims of ancestry to land himself an affirmative-action hire, a department chairmanship and a six-figure income.

The anti-Columbus Day demonstrators have been at this for the last five years. It’s getting old. They’ve had their day in the court of public opinion. They make some valid points but lose credibility when they indulge in exaggeration and hysterical overstatement. Their campaign hasn’t caught on, as evidenced by the fact that millions of government workers and others feel no guilt in taking the day off as a national holiday.

Indian activists resent the depiction of Columbus as the man who “discovered” America, arguing that their people were here first. Of course they were. So what? The point is that Columbus discovered America – the “New World” – from the perspective of Europeans, who later followed him here and imported their ideas, customs and system of government. Spanish conquistador Vasco Nuñez de Balboa is said to have “discovered” the Pacific Ocean in 1513. But, of course, the fish were already there. Again, it was a European discovery. The only real “native Americans” were dinosaurs and cockroaches. Indians were Johnny-come- latelys, too, many crossing the land bridge from Asia.

Yes, Europeans brought with them diseases for which the earlier inhabitants of this continent had no immunities, but that was incidental, not deliberate. Medical science wasn’t that sophisticated back then.

Columbus was no saint but he wasn’t the devil, either. He was a bold and courageous explorer but a poor governor. He was responsible for repression, enslavement and killing but that’s a far cry from “genocide,” defined as a systematic program intended to destroy an entire national or ethnic group. Columbus’ mission or intent wasn’t to exterminate the Indian population. The world was less kind and gentle in those days (not that it’s all that civilized in many places, today). There was no World Court or United Nations. Treaties were made and broken when it was convenient to do so. National boundaries were routinely established by right of conquest. Indians employed the same practices, killing and enslaving members of rival tribes.

The history of the Americas would have been no different if Christopher Columbus had never been born. It was inevitable that Europeans would find their way to this continent, that the two civilizations would clash and that the more rational and technologically advanced one would prevail over the primitive and outnumbered one.

That’s history, traditionally celebrated by the victors and condemned by the vanquished. Taking the good with the bad, the American experiment has acquitted itself quite well by world standards. As a European-American, I say two cheers for Columbus.