A Very Short, Fanciful Story

By Sharon K. Cook-Gordon-Spellman

Once upon a time in an America of the late 1900’s and early 2000’s, some descendants of Columbus and the Pilgrims and some descendants of Turtle Island’s* native people fell in love with one another, married and raised children. Every October and November they celebrate Columbus Day, Indigenous People’s Day, Halloween, All Souls Day and Thanks-giving, and all families are now living happily ever after.
The End

*”Turtle Island” is a Native American term for the
North American continent

During the elementary school era of my childhood, Columbus Day was not associated with genocide. No mention was made of slaughter, exploitation or slave trade. As elementary school children, we celebrated the beauty and grace of three wooden sailing ships, the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. We celebrated the ocean currents beneath the ship’s hulls, the winds that filled the ship’s sails and the navigational techniques that allowed the sailors to move three wooden ships safely across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. Even more, we celebrated the questing, adventurous spirit of exploration and discovery, the daring attempts of a group of people who were determined to conquer ignorance with truth. We celebrated the eye-opening knowledge, finally made known to ordinary people, that the earth was in fact not flat, but round.

Now, in the year 2006, bolstered by the eye-opening knowledge that mistreatment, genocide and exploitation of fellow humans was never supposed to be, nor was it ever a necessary component of, this great scientific achievement and exploration, is it possible to redeem Columbus Day? Is it possible to throw out the proverbial “dirty bath water” without throwing out the proverbial baby? May we celebrate, and vicariously recall and remember, the joy and elation associated with this great adventure, which was accomplished by some of our ancestors, while simultaneously feeling a sense of humility, atonement and maybe even shame, for past wrongs committed by some other of our ancestors and perpetrated upon some other of our ancestors? Can the sense of wonder and praise for the awe-inspiring diversity of human cultural and social origins be reconciled with deep-felt regret for those human enactments and deeds which brought harm to that diversity?

On Columbus Day, I listened on the car radio to some Indigenous People’s Day celebrations. I heard wise elders speak ideas, histories, practices and ways of living they hope to teach and pass forward to their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. I heard beautiful voices sing traditional and modern Native American songs; heard drumming of sounds like earth’s heart beats, moving like liquid life, in rhythmic tides still flowing within all things. In mind’s eye I saw converging paths: The path of Columbus from across the ocean blue in 1492; the steady gradual foot paths of millennia of generations before and behind him; the steady footpaths of millennia before and behind these wise elders I was listening to, crossing from Asian steppes, through eons of time to North and South America; other footpaths of anonymous explorers crossing through millennia of time over sheets of ice, over land, from continent to continent; all paths, like streams and tributaries of one great river, originating from a single main headwaters somewhere in Africa.

Today I remembered some other kinds of moments, from over two years ago, while rocking my second-born grandson to sleep in my arms, and gazing into his newborn eyes. As I walked and rocked and hummed him to sleep, an instrumental, “Kissing in the Rain,” by Tori Amos, was playing over and over on the stereo, and these thoughts and words kept recurring in my mind and I whispered them to him: “Here you are with us now, and think how long it has taken you to get here, to be here, on this planet, just as it is right now.”

Happy Columbus Day, Indigenous People’s Day, Halloween, All Souls Day and Thanks-giving to one and all.

Sharon K. Cook-Gordon-Spellman has been a year-round resident of the western slopes of the Sierra foothills, near Nevada City, California, since 1972. Her monthly column for Multilingual Living Magazine is about the joys, trials and tribulations involved with being a grandmother of three bilingual children.

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