Move to eliminate Columbus Day returns, with potential for two holidays to emerge
Christopher Columbus is presumed to be the scowling figure in this 1519 painting by Sebastiano del Piombo.
Discussion over ending the celebration of Columbus Day in Cambridge is returning for discussion. City officials suggested Monday that they were leaning toward removing Christopher Columbus entirely in favor of a more general celebration of Italian-American heritage, while introducing a separate Indigenous Peoples Day celebration in honor of the people who were displaced, enslaved and killed after the explorer crossed the Atlantic.
The idea of changing local celebration of Columbus Day – a federal holiday since 1937 – appeared in December on the City Council agenda, drawing lengthy and spirited public comment, but has languished as unfinished business since then.
Conversation about the proposal with stakeholders in the community were carried on by one of the motion’s original sponsors, councillor Nadeem Mazen, and vice mayor Marc McGovern, they said Monday. The other sponsor of the motion, Dennis Benzan, lost a reelection bid and didn’t return to the council in January.
Committee work
“We’ve heard from a lot of constituents and I think there’s a lot of interesting momentum behind this, maybe even a win-win solution,” Mazen said. “But we’ve yet to find out, and that’s the basis for moving it to committee.”
The topic will be taken up by a joint meeting of the council’s committees on Neighborhood and Long Term Planning, Facilities, Arts and Celebrations (led by Mazen) and Civic Unity (led by McGovern), the council decided in a unanimous vote.
The same committees will examine the idea of putting a “non-citizen representative” on the council to be elected by residents who are ineligible to vote in municipal elections because of their citizenship, the council decided in another Monday vote. The representative would be able to introduce policy orders and speak on them, in a proposal by Mazen and Mayor E. Denise Simmons, but not vote.
Italian-American celebration
The idea of dual holidays isn’t new – it was raised in December by local Italian-Americans such as lawyer Anthony Galluccio, a former councillor and mayor, who hoped a modified holiday would take place closer to Thanksgiving in hopes that “Italian-Americans not be pitted against indigenous peoples.”
Neither he nor McGovern, who said he is half-Italian and raised in an Italian family, said they had a debate about removing Columbus as the day’s figurehead.
“An Italian heritage holiday has been around for a long time called Columbus Day. And it’s not really fair to have [Italian-Americans] lose that, but … changing the name wouldn’t be a loss as long as it’s replaced with something else. It would almost be like a cleansing,” McGovern said. “You know, I don’t want Columbus representing me, based on what I know.”
“It’s a balance between making sure that we correct the historical record but also not slight a community that has cherished a holiday for a very long time,” McGovern said.
“We literally weep”
In December, supporters of Indigenous Peoples Day such as Mahtowin Munro, co-leader of United American Indians of New England and a former Cambridge resident, testified to the impact of seeing Columbus Day come around annually: “We literally weep when we think of the genocidal cataclysm that began with Columbus and his men,” Munro said.
Now Native Americans may have the second Monday in October for themselves, a yearly date to celebrate taking something back from Columbus.
Moving the idea to the committees would allow the idea of dual holidays to be discussed more openly and transparently, McGovern said.
There is no date set for the joint meeting.
Peace Be Unto You.
At my last public comment at city hall, I reaffirmed that there should two days of celebrations, instead of eliminating one, That was after I discovered that Christopher Columbus was of mixed parentage. Yes, Christopher Columbus was a man of color, He was born at Genoa, Italy. DNA analysis of the his remains, done by forensic scientist at the University of Cambridge, revealed he was 100 % of color. Both days should be recognized.
SOURCE: http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/23529/christopher-columbus-was-black-2/
Yours In Peace,
Mr. Hasson J. Rashid
OBTAIN CERTIFIED JUSTICE OR ELSE IN THE JUDICIAL COURT SYSTEM, BY CHECKING OUT THE FOLLOWING LINK:
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Peace Unto You,
In regards to “Non-Citizen Representative” to City Council, I think this is a highly questionable idea. First because, we don’t have any idea who these non-citizens are,they could be some of anybody. Secondly, I think that if such an idea should be advance, it should under the watchful eyes of a body like the ecumenical assembly of local chaplains, that were commission into office by the Cambridge City Council in June of 2013, the local and regional media published a story relating and highlighting, the commissioning of five local clergy members as chaplains of the police department (See Attachments). I would feel better if this type of entity was the voice for such a class of people.Of course it is the type of work that a chaplaincy is suppose to specialize in, that is speaking,being, and representing the voice for those who for a number of reasons can’t represent themselves, like the non-citizen entity that is now the focus and subject of a Joint Neighborhood and Long Term Planning, Facilities, Arts and Celebrations committees.
Chaplaincy is an agency that help with mental, physical, and spiritual care of the needy members of the population with, related information and resources, and to help people find comfort and in their lives,regardless of who they are, whatever they believe,and where they are and from.
By the way what ever happen to this group of five clergy men or newly commission chaplaincy? There has not been any public mention or news of their of them and there activities, since that day in June 2013 of there commission. I’m only one person, and i feel that it the job of the collective community at large to come up with an agreeable solution to this matter, and of course with the help of Almighty GOD.
https://www.cctvcambridge.org/node/246444
Yours In Peace,
Mr. Hasson J. Rashid
Cambridge,MA
3/24/2016
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Peace Be Unto You,
Graveyard DNA rewrites African American history
From Africa to Hispaniola
Two of Christopher Columbus‘s shipmates were the first Africans to set foot in the New World, a study has found.
Using DNA analysis of human bones excavated from a graveyard in La Isabela, Dominican Republic – the first colonial town in the Americas – the new study adds weight to the theory that Africans crossed the Atlantic at least 150 years earlier than previously thought.
“African Americans have come to believe that their history began when the first slave ships docked in the mid-17th century, but our results suggest that it actually started far earlier, at the same time as the Europeans’ history on the continent did,” says Hannes Schroeder of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who did the analysis.
La Isabela was founded in 1494 on Columbus’ second voyage to the New World. Seventeen ships deposited 1700 people – including farmers, builders and priests – on the part of the island of Hispaniola that today is the Dominican Republic. Within two years, all but 300 had died of starvation and disease, and in 1498 the town was abandoned.
Last year, one of Schroeder’s collaborators, Douglas Price, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggested that up to seven of the 49 skeletons exhumed from La Isabela’s 15th-century graveyard had belonged to Africans. The carbon and strontium isotope ratios in their tooth enamel, which give clues to an individual’s diet, pointed at possible African origins for the seven.
Talking bones
To investigate whether Africans were indeed among those buried in La Isabela, Schroeder studied a thigh bone and a premolar tooth from each of 10 skeletons dug up between 1983 and 1991, including the seven earmarked as African by Price’s analysis.
After extracting DNA, Schroeder searched for key segments of mitochondrial DNA that differ between people of African and non-African descent, and found that two of the individuals carried DNA segments that are most frequently found in sub-Saharan Africans. Schroeder concludes that two of Columbus’ crew almost certainly hailed from Africa.
Tina Warinner of the Institute of Anatomy at Zurich University, Switzerland, says Schroeder’s rigorous methods mean the result is unlikely to be an artefact. Schroeder plans to analyse a new set of La Isabela skeletons to be exhumed next year.
DNA analyses will never reveal whether the Africans who were laid to rest at the church of La Isabela were slaves or free men who joined Columbus’ expedition of their own volition, says Schroeder. But by studying their nuclear DNA, he hopes to find out exactly where in sub-Saharan Africa their families came from. “Now that would be pretty cool,” he says.
The team presented their findings at the Fourth International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Copenhagen, Denmark, last week.
SOURCE: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19455-graveyard-dna-rewrites-african-american-history/
Yours In Peace,
Mr. Hasson Rashid
Cambridge,MA
OBTAIN CERTIFIED JUSTICE OR ELSE IN THE JUDICIAL COURT SYSTEM, BY CHECKING OUT THE FOLLOWING LINK:
https://HowToWinInCourt.com/?refercode=RH0006