Today is meaningful regardless of whether it’s called Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples’ Day, regardless of if you have a holiday, and regardless of your cultural frame of reference. Human history is relentless in its complexity but relevant to current events. Today is an occasion to pause, study, and discuss how migrations, conquests, invasions, interpersonal and economic connections, and various belief-systems, among all aspects of our lives, have contributed to conflict and oppression, and in some sense, opportunities. There are inevitably a variety of perspectives on the current situation that do not need to be divisive, though they sadly are. Please see a few resources that come to mind this year that might guide your understanding of these topics, or at least illuminate how I'm thinking about them.

Resources

Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a classic text by Paolo Freire

The Power and the Glory is a novel by Graham Greene

“A window to the see...” by Raúl de Nieves is an installation at The Henry on the University of Washington Campus

The poem Aun by Pablo Neruda