#Part 1

The video isn't that accurate. Let's start with a breakdown.

First, the video is produced by Prager University, a non-profit conservative organization that addresses areas such as economics, history, and...politics. Second, the video is hosted by Steven Crowder, a conservative political speaker who often demonstrates an interest in challenging what many on the right perceive to be Left-leaning values and notions in the mainstream discourse. Knowing this helps us to identify their bias.

Right off the bat, the video politically polarizes the presentation by presuming the adopting of Indigenous Peoples' Day to be about White guilt and child indoctrination by "Progressives," demonizing the U.S., and placing Native Americans (note: not a synonym for Indigenous Peoples) within the "Noble Savage" myth. These three things have little to do with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the desire to replace Columbus Day.

Then he goes through a brief history of identifying terms used to refer to Indigenous Peoples, seemingly criticizing such terminology because it keeps changing. Within Indigenous Literature discourses, this has been the case. Why? Because as relations between groups evolve and the development of language, political context, and legal ramifications continue to go on, what we are the manifestations of such evolution. Younging (2018) notes this numerous times in his detailing of terminology applied to Indigenous Peoples in Canadian Literature, where terms were applied to Indigenous groups by missionaries, government officials, and explorers and the determination of a name rested little with the Indigenous group themselves, but with what the colonizer at the time figured was appropriate. The results from this are what we have now--a colonial mindset that believes Indigenous Peoples do not have a right to call themselves what they want. However, since the 60s, many colonial countries such as the U.S. and Canada have seem significant social movements that have shifted the thinking on this and reflect the adopting of more appropriate terms that Indigenous Peoples agree with. So what the video is missing is that it isn't Left-leaning Liberals who are determining the instillation of such a day or even the real structure of it. The structure and existence of the day is brought forth by the resistance of Indigenous groups fighting against marginalization. Having support from the Left naturally draws opposition from the Right, but for Indigenous Peoples, allies from either side of the American political spectrum wouldn't affect the actual meaning behind the day. The terminology that is used is but a mere manifestation of other struggles Indigenous Peoples have endured. The point is moot and vapid. It has nothing to offer in this case except political agitation.

Next, around the 0:40 mark, he talks about how the celebrating of this day is just an "exercise in hating Western civilization, which is really just an exercise in hating yourself." At this point, he has identified his audience. He isn't speaking to all people or including Indigenous Peoples. He is attempting to reach those who identify with "Western civilization," which could be any number of people from any number of backgrounds. Yet, this again identifies that he is missing the point of the day because it isn't self-hating Liberals who are the crux of this day--it is Indigenous Peoples. There is reason to believe that Indigenous Peoples who back the repeal of Columbus Day do not identify with Western civilization and so Steven targets those who he usually targets: Liberals. Hence the "hating yourself" bit, since Liberal ideology originates in the West.

Next, around 0:50, he starts touting the achievements of Columbus. Many things could be said to underscore the achievements of Columbus. But that's exactly what the video is trying to do, in the reverse. They want to reify his achievements in order to underscore the atrocities (the little drop of "he wasn't that great, but c'moooooonnn" is a pitiful attempt to contextualize the situation, which he didn't do at all). Rather than evaluating his achievements, let's look at the fact that for most of the beginning after his "discovery," he wasn't even recognized. I will be pulling some excerpts from a previous Monday Methods post of mine, entitled, "Indigenous Peoples Day and Columbus Day: Revisionist?"

For example, the development of Columbus Day, really the veneration of Columbus as a whole, has an interesting past. Thomas J. Schlereth (1992) reports this (bold mine):

In 1777, American poet Philip Freneau personified his country as "Columbia, America as sometimes so called from Columbus, the first discoverer." In 1846, shortly after the declaration of war with Mexico, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton told his Senate colleagues of "the grand idea of Columbus" who in "going west to Asia" provided America with her true course of empire, a predestined "American Road to India." In 1882, Thomas Cummings said to fellow members of the newly formed Knights of Columbus, "Under the inspiration of Him whose name we bear, and with the story of Columbus's life as exemplified in our beautiful ritual, we have the broadest kind of basis for patriotism and true love of country."^1

Christopher Columbus has proven to be a malleable and durable American symbol. He has been interpreted and reinterpreted as we have constructed and reconstructed our own national character. He was ignored in the colonial era: "The year 1692 passed without a single word or deed of recorded commemoration."^2 Americans first discovered the discoverer during their quest for independence and nationhood; successive generations molded Columbus into a multipurpose [American] hero, a national symbol to be used variously in the quest for a collective identity (p. 937).

For the last 500 years, the myth of Columbus has gone through several transformations, as the above cited text shows. While his exulting went silent for quite a while, the revival of his legacy happened at a time when Americans wanted to craft a more collective, national identity. This happened by linking the "discoveries" made by Columbus with one of the most influential ideologies ever birthed in the United States: expansionism, later known as Manifest Destiny. Schlereth (1992) further details this :

In the early republic, Americans began using Columbia as an eponym in their expanding geography. In 1791, for example, the Territory of Columbia, later the Dis- trict of Columbia, was established as the permanent location of the federal govern- ment. A year later Capt. Robert Grant, in a ship named Columbia, made a ter- ritorial claim on a mighty western river (calling it the Columbia) for the United States in a region (later Oregon, Washington, Idaho) then disputed with the British. Britain eventually named its part of the contested terrain British Columbia. The ship Columbia in 1792 became the first American vessel to circumnavigate the globe, foreshadowing imperial voyages of a century later.

Use of the adjective Columbian became a commonplace shorthand by which one could declare public allegiance to the country's cultural pursuits and civic virtue. It was used in the titles of sixteen periodicals and eighteen books published in the United States between 1792 and 1825 -for example, The Columbian Arithmeti- cian, A New System of Math by an American (1811).^9 Columbian school readers, spellers, and geographies abounded, as did scholarly, literary, and professional societies -for example, the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences, which later evolved into the Smithsonian Institution.