By Hannah Good, The Lily, October 9, 2021
When she was growing up on Long Island, Autumn Rose Williams saw Columbus Day as a day off from school — and maybe an excuse for her mom to make her clean the house. She grew up on the Shinnecock Reservation, but she attended school in East Hampton, about 15 miles away. As the only Shinnecock student in her grade, she felt left out of the Christopher Columbus “discovery” narratives she learned about in school.
But Williams’s mom and step-grandmother, who is Jamaican, used the holiday to tell her who Columbus really was. They taught her Columbus didn’t actually land in the United States, and that his legacy is part of a broader narrative that contributes to the erasure of Indigenous and Black women like them.
“It's important to focus on the Indigenous experience because for so long we have been forgotten and erased in the narratives of how we tell history,” Williams said. “It’s time we get the full picture of our history.”
Comments (0)