Native American students met in the middle of the Green at 12 a.m. Monday to remember Columbus Day with drums and music from the Occom Pond Singers, a campus musical group associated with the Native American community.
The event is not a protest, but an opportunity to raise awareness about the unfortunate and generally overlooked consequences of Christopher Columbus' arrival in America, Native Americans at Dartmouth said.
"The Columbus Day commemoration is recognition of over 500 years of colonialism exacted by foreign powers that continues in the form of ecological, social and political violence today," Tim Argetsinger '09 said at a NAD meeting.
Native American studies professor Colin Calloway, who is of British descent, agrees that there is more to Columbus' arrival than the day reflects.
"We have to recognize that [Columbus Day] is not just a success story, not just a story of nation building and triumph. There's always a flip-side of that, always someone on the receiving end," Calloway said. "For many people Columbus represents Europe coming to America and all the wonderful things that happened after that, but for the people who were already here, Europe coming to America was not necessarily a good thing."
Though Dartmouth's Native American community has met on the Green during Columbus Day for years, few students outside the Native American community are familiar with the ceremony.
This lack of non-Native support for the Columbus Day remembrance makes Native American students feel separated from the Dartmouth community, according to NAD co-president Schuyler Chew '09. In the future, Chew and others hope to receive support from the Dartmouth community outside of NAD.
"We hope to bring people from outside their realm of knowledge. It feels good to see that someone outside our culture can understand it," Marissa Spang '07 said.
According to Argetsinger, the songs performed at the ceremony do not have lyrics and are intertribal so that they can be shared among Native Americans from different tribal origins.
"The people, the events and the symbols that we choose to represent our history really matter," Calloway said. "We want them to say something about who we are. When something like Columbus Day comes up, how we remember that says a lot about what we value."
