Westborough considers changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Westborough considers changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day

By Stuart Foster, Contributing Writer

WESTBOROUGH – Diversity and Inclusion Committee Chair Cara Presley encouraged the Westborough Select Board to adopt Indigenous Peoples’ Day in place of Columbus Day during the Select Board’s July 20 meeting.

Presley said that the Diversity and Inclusion Committee has taken a number of steps over the past year to learn about Indigenous Peoples’ Day, including consulting the founder of the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Massachusetts, researching legislative efforts to make Indigenous Peoples’ Day a state holiday and examining the actions of other municipalities and states toward changing Columbus Day.

“By instituting the new holiday, we will publicly celebrate and raise awareness about the culture and history of indigenous people,” Presley said. “By replacing Columbus Day, we honor the perseverance of indigenous people, despite their suffering at the hands of European colonists, led by Columbus, who overtook inhabited lands and committed genocide of indigenous people.”

The debate over Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day is controversial throughout the United States.

While opponents argue Columbus should not be celebrated due to his role in helping prompt the rapid decline of native populations, supporters disagree.

“We believe that the detractors of Columbus have not presented an honest account of his role in history,” the Italian American Alliance wrote in a recent open letter to the .

“Christopher Columbus is the penultimate symbol of the Italian American and immigrant communities,” that letter said, saying that “The origins of Columbus Day in the United States are founded in the very principles of equality and justice.”

One Select Board member, Patrick Welch, said that he supports Indigenous Peoples’ Day and was looking forward to researching the issue more before deciding where he stands. Welch said, however, that he was cautious with regard to the mutually exclusive nature of replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, recalling the experience of discrimination experienced by Italian Americans throughout American history.

“It seems like this kind of trends more toward exclusion of the Italian-American community,” Welch said.

Presley said that she did not want to discount the experience and history of discrimination against Italian-Americans. She said that changing the holiday is only due to its specific association with Columbus.

“Replacing Columbus Day is not an erasure of the history of religious and ethnic discrimination and violence that was experienced by Italian-Americans, who deserve our recognition and honor,” she said. “But it is a disassociation from Columbus, a man known to have committed atrocities against indigenous people that would today likely be considered crimes against humanity.”

Select Board Chair Allen Edinberg said the Select Board could establish an agenda item for the topic. It could also hold a public hearing on whether to change the holiday.

Presley said that, if the Select Board votes to approve of the holiday change, the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which voted to endorse the change, would launch community-wide educational lessons about Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Fourteen states, the District of Columbia, and more than 130 American cities observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day, according to a 2020 count by the Smithsonian.

Locally, Westborough and Shrewsbury schools have both recently recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day by marking the date as Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Legislation has also been put forward in Massachusetts State House and Senate to designate the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

As these changes take place, the day remains known as Columbus Day at the federal level.

For too long, research was done on First Nations peoples, not with them. Universities can change this

For too long, “research” was an activity done to or on Indigenous people; it was something imposed from the outside. This was especially the case for people who came from communities that were oppressed or marginalised in the colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Indigenous people throughout the world feel they have been the subjects of endless measurement, recording, and invasion of privacy with little or no apparent benefit except for the scholars who make careers out of it. Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls this approach “research adventures in Indigenous lands” in her book Decolonising Methodologies.

Our collaboratively edited volume, Community-Led Research: Walking New Pathways Together, represents a substantial step towards redressing power imbalances that continue to characterise much academic research.

The book asks how to move research done to and on people towards for and with people. It features both community and academic voices and reflects on research that foregrounds non-academic priorities.

Read more: Indigenous scholars struggle to be heard in the mainstream. Here’s how journal editors and reviewers can help

Since the global Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and beyond, academic researchers have recognised the political and moral responsibilities we have to those impacted by our studies.

To meet their responsibilities to different communities, researchers have incorporated methodologies such as:

participatory action research, in which members of the community affected by the research actively participate in different parts of the project

public patient involvement, in which non-academic people work as employees or volunteers in organisations’ high-level work

community-based participatory research, which aims to equitably involve community members and others in research projects.

Each of these are slightly different, and are used variously in different disciplines, but their increasing presence affirms that involving communities in research is crucial for good research outcomes.

However, we have found approaches putting community at the centre of research beyond disciplinary siloes have not yet been documented in a comprehensive way. Our book builds on previous research by bringing together various community-led approaches, including from education and social work, health and medicine, and archaeology.

Stories, not blueprints

The chapters in our book reflect on community-led approaches to research in different spaces. They consider questions of identification of a community, appropriate protocols, and how to build positive collaborations.

The authors do not attempt to provide a template that can be applied in all research situations. Nor should they. As several chapters point out, there is a risk to “community-led” becoming another buzzword that ends up being appropriated for marketing or institutional propaganda.

We found community-led research must be built on a foundation of real relationships, mutual respect, and true reciprocity. We have all come into community-led research from different disciplinary perspectives and research experiences, as well as personal experiences.

As the editors of the volume, we were inspired by working with young people, Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Each of us has our own ideas about community-led research because of who we work with and where our interests lie. We reflect on our own work individually below to give a sense of different experiences in the field.

Rawlings: While young people clearly make up a large and important part of our community, they often don’t get a seat at the table, even when research is “about” them. They can be seen as not critical or sophisticated enough to partner in research, or as needing “protection”, where they are seen as too innocent to take part in research about sensitive issues.

Imagine, then, co-designing research with LGBTIQA+ young people about their experiences of self-harm and suicide. While some young people may baulk at participating in this kind of discussion, research shows they benefit from conversations about their distress and trauma, particularly when they feel it might benefit others.

We found this to be the case as we co-designed our research in partnership with a youth advisory group. Not only did the young people benefit, but our research was higher quality, too.

Flexner: My first trip to Vanuatu, in 2011, was almost a parody of cultural and linguistic misunderstanding, and geographical disorientation in the remote southern islands of Erromango and Tanna.

However, that initial fieldwork experience proved formative. It taught me how to work with community through the chiefs, elders, and knowledge holders facilitated by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre filwokas (fieldworkers). It set up intellectual engagement with cultural traditions encapsulated by the Melanesian term kastom (which translates as customs or traditions).

After a decade of research in Vanuatu, I still find myself learning new things, and finding new ways to work with the people who call these islands home.

Riley: A huge concern in First Nations communities is in having no control over what research is undertaken or the right to veto the interpretation of data and findings. This is due to the fact much past research has helped to form government policies and practices concerning First Nations lives with little life improvement. This is clearly evidenced in current Closing the Gap statistics.

Often, First Nations peoples find they are called upon when the government and researchers arrive at an impasse and they do not know what else to do. Let us change this approach and ensure First Nations peoples are asked what research they want undertaken first and what benefits they want from the research.

That is, how can research improve First Nations people’s lives and enhance community development?

Read more: Nigerian academics weigh in on the faults and frustrations of managing COVID-19

New pathways and old limitations

Although we are inspired by the contributions in Community-Led Research: Walking New Pathways Together, we also need to recognise and acknowledge the limits of what we do. Universities remain institutions that many people, especially Indigenous people, associate with colonialism.

Besides our work in the communities, one of our great challenges is how to make the places where we work as academics more welcoming, inclusive, and egalitarian. Further, there are very real differences that regularly map onto differences in class, nation, geographical region, and identities.

It is impossible to dismantle 500 years of history in a single project, no matter how much goodwill the researchers and community establish together. Community-led research is in part about changing academic research, but it is also about changing other kinds of relationships in the world we all live in.

There is great promise in so many new approaches people are taking in their research, and their understandings of the groups of people they work with both inside and outside of academia. Community-led research is, however, a type of research that is still developing and we do not believe our work is finished. Rather, our pathway is just beginning.

Interview: China’s development benefits all peoples, says former Bolivian president - Xinhua

Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 18:10:47|Editor: huaxia

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Former Bolivian President Evo Morales and chairperson of Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism party receives an interview with Xinhua in La Paz, Bolivia, July 6, 2021. (Photo by Rene Quenallata/Xinhua)

LA PAZ, July 26 (Xinhua) – The “socialist policies” have made China the world’s second largest economy, “a productive and complementary economy for the benefit of all peoples,” former Bolivian President Evo Morales has said.

China’s development is in sharp contrast with the “individualistic and competitive predatory” behaviors by the United States and the West for decades, Morales, also chairperson of Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism party, said in an interview with Xinhua.

Morales expressed his admiration to the Chinese government and people over China’s achievements since the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) 100 years ago.

China’s achievements in poverty alleviation have also impressed Morales, who said the fact that China has lifted over 700 million people out of extreme poverty “caught my attention.”

Putting people first is the vision shared by the CPC and Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism party, according to the former president.

“What unites … the Communist Party of China and the Movement Towards Socialism … is that: first the people, first the humble people, first poor people, seeking equality, (and) fighting, working for equality,” said Morales.

Morales spoke highly of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, as well as the principles of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits.

Noting that the BRI will benefit not only Chinese people but also many other peoples across the world, Morales expressed his “respect” and “admiration” to the Chinese president, the CPC, and the Chinese people “for projecting humanity thinking.”

According to Morales, Bolivia has considered the plan of building a railway linking South America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, which would benefit not only Bolivia, but also other South American countries.

By aligning with the BRI, such a plan could create more space for cooperation between Bolivia and China, he said.

China’s commitment to multilateralism, international law and the United Nations is “extremely important” for tackling today’s global challenges, Morales said, adding that the current challenges, such as climate change and social inequality, “can only be solved through true global cooperation.”

Morales said his country and China maintain a relationship marked by broad and diverse cooperation, and reciprocal respect, which has fostered the development of political trust, economic complementarity and mutual learning.

“China is more than 17,300 km away from Bolivia, but that distance has not been, and is not, an obstacle to strengthening our ties of brotherhood and cooperation,” he added. Enditem