Indigenous Day, the Day of the Race, Columbus Day 

   

    We commemorate this Monday of October to remember and celebrate when the West met the East of this new hemisphere. Spain and its Italian captain came a-sailing on three famous vessels, La Ninha, La Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Catholics helped discover the world, which would continue to transform and evolve into what we know it to be today.

    Christopher Colombus, or Cristobal Colon, or Cristoforo Colombo, of Italian descent but sponsored by Spain, was quite the figure. Derided by many for being cruel and racist, history and its influencers and researchers have depicted him as sycophant to genius, from prophet to lunatic. 

    One growing religion (mine), has a holy book that was translated in the 1820s that has some verses describing the man and the movement that his discovery would bring: the seed of ancient peoples inhabiting these continents, to be named after another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, would be mixed with those of the West, the Europeans who would continue to cross the Atlantic Ocean and settle and colonize, conquer and intermix, interbreed as it were. What do have?

    A new race, a new people from the north to the south. Plus, all the Europeans. Then Africans, then a host of others, including Chinese, then Indians, Arabs, Persians, Turks, then more Africans. Most of the native tribes survived, albeit pushed and shoved and at times crushed by disease, encroachment, cruelty, lies and broken promises, greed, Manifest Destiny...

    This is our day, humanity. Look into it.

    And I went to West Virginia, Morgan County, and liked it...