A lightly edited, machine-generated transcript of the October 8 episode of Liberty and Justice for All, “Beyond Columbus: Indigenous Survival, Colonial Power, and the Fight to Tell a Full Story,” is attached below.
Going forward, we will be following this general format. Every Thursday at 2 PM Central, a new episode will air on KPFT Houston and will be simultaneously distributed on Substack and other platforms.
Each week. I will also post a lightly edited version of the machine-generated transcript of the show to my Substack of the same name, of which this is the first. (Over the next few weeks, if just for the record, I will also back fill the transcripts with comments of earlier episodes.)
This episode is also the first in a regular series of episodes on the meaning of various national holidays which we will do over the course of the year. Expect reflections on Thanksgiving, New Year’s/Emancipation Day, President’s Day, May 1 Juneteenth, and Labor Day, among others, as the year proceeds.
This week in this space, I will restrict myself to offering an eclectic list of books about history and continuing traditions of the first people to settle the Americas, long before Columbus stumbled on the continents in 1492, together with a couple of general books on the history of Italian immigrants in the US.
As we discuss below, Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day is an appropriate occasion to remember the contributions of both those who were here before and those who came after.
Among the books on the history of indigenous America that have most influenced me, I would include:
Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of American History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023.
Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018.
Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
V. F. Cordova, How It Is: The Philosophy of V. F. Cordova. K.D. Moore, et al., eds. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2007.
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England New York: Hill & Wang, 1983.
Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America. New York: Liveright, 2022.
Margaret D. Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Patty Krawec, Bad Indians Book Club, Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2025.
Anthony F. C. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Knopf, 1972.
Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Traditions. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
I have not read as widely in Italian-American history as I have in the history of the first Americans and welcome suggestions from readers and listeners.
For a general overview, I can recommend Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), which is available on the Internet Archive.
And for a rich and detailed his of Italian American radicalism and trade unionism in New York City, see Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
If you have other suggestions in either category, please add them to the comments below.
TRANSCRIPT
Egberto Willies: Welcome to another edition. I think this is number eight of Liberty and Justice for All. Today we’re going to tackle a touchy subject—Columbus Day. We’re going to talk about the folks who came and populated America. We’ll take that in detail.
Before I get started, let’s remember something: we’re all learning, and we all have different points of view. One of the things we want to do here at Liberty and Justice for All is to make sure people don’t have hidden feelings or hidden thoughts. This is a place where you can let it out. And if we’re wrong—if you’re wrong, if I’m wrong, if the professor’s wrong—we won’t have a problem saying, “Maybe we should have done things a bit differently.”
But I think it’s best to open the program today with somebody who is much more studied in history than I am—my co-host and my brother from another mother, El Señor Dr. Michael Merrill. How are you doing today, my friend?
Michael Merrill: I’m doing great, Egberto. Very well, thank you. If anybody has seen the show before, they can tell my background has shifted because we’re taping this episode while I’m in Idaho, which is where I was born and raised. I think I mentioned that in the first show. My sister is hosting me. I’m actually here for the 60th reunion of my high school class, which graduated in 1966. I left soon after for the East Coast and college, then married on the East Coast. Never made it back except to visit.
Egberto Willies: Wow!
Michael Merrill: One of my children prefers to live here, but anyway—
Egberto Willies: Before you go on, you know, in Panama we called you a vendepatria. You’re like a traitor, man—a traitor to Idaho when you moved to the East Coast, brother.
Michael Merrill: Oh, no. No matter how many decades later, when people ask me where I’m from, I don’t say Princeton, New Jersey.
Egberto Willies: Oh, okay.
Michael Merrill: One of the books I read in preparation for today’s episode was The Bad Indians Book Club by Patty Krawick, who’s Ojibwa. She’s an activist, and she starts the book by talking about how important it is to say where we’re from—our clan—so people know where we’re coming from. She says she hasn’t lived in her ancestral homelands much, if at all, but that’s where she belongs. That’s where she’s from.
So, I haven’t lived in Idaho for a long, long time, but that’s where I belong. I carry my Idaho with me.
And the other thing about this show is that for the last several years, I taught a survey course in American history, and we started with colonization. Obviously, everybody knows the Americas were populated by other people long before Europeans showed up. There was a different route to the Americas—the Bering Strait land bridge. Tens of thousands of years ago, people migrated across that land bridge as they had migrated, as you pointed out in an earlier show, initially from Africa up the southern coast of Asia, then spread across the Eurasian continent.
Eventually they made their way to Australia as early as 80,000 years ago—got on boats and sailed away just to see what was over the horizon, a stupendous feat of navigation. Later they made their way across the Bering Strait and down the Americas, and the continents were populated.
By the time Europeans showed up, estimates range anywhere from 40 to 80 million people living on the two continents.
And everybody also knows that when Europeans made their way across the Atlantic, it wasn’t a happy encounter for the Americans. The principal problem was disease—many of the diseases were brought by livestock. The Americans had not developed the historic immunities, the herd immunity we now talk about from COVID, that was required for more people to survive. It was a devastating demographic collapse—one of the worst pandemics in world history. Recent estimates are that 10% of the world’s population died as a result of these exposures.
There was also difficulty figuring out how to relate to one another.
When I started my classes, I did two things I’d like to talk about here. First, we discussed the Rutgers land acknowledgment, which is a statement the university adopted to acknowledge the prior tenancy and ownership of the land on which the university sits. I don’t want to start there, but I want to signal that we’ll get to it.
I want to start with an exercise I gave the students. It’s called Three Ships Coming. In 1492, on a small island in the outer Antilles, the people there suddenly saw three ships—large enough to carry a couple hundred people—show up with technologies they had never encountered, including firearms and steel swords.
My challenge to the students was: imagine reading that three alien spaceships have hovered over the world’s capitals for the last few days and are looking for landfall. How should we respond? Do we welcome them? Do we try to fight them? How would we stand a chance if they have the capacity for intergalactic travel?
It led to an interesting discussion where people realized the issues facing both sides were difficult.
Now, I don’t have a brief for Christopher Columbus myself. The only reason he made it to the Americas is because his geography was bad—he thought the world was half the size it actually is. He didn’t know what he was sailing into. He ended up there by luck, and one could say his own stupidity. It was good fortune for him that he found this land. His conduct and behavior were not exemplary.
But the story doesn’t end with Columbus; it starts with Columbus. Understanding the whole history of the relationship between the Americans who were here first, those who visited from Europe later, those brought against their will from Africa, and those who came not to conquer but to live—that’s something we need to discuss.
How would you respond if you read that three alien spaceships were hovering over the world’s capitals this week?
Egberto Willies: You know, everything you’re saying makes me think, “Wow, that’s a hell of a question.” I don’t know. It would depend on two things—whether I thought they were coming to harm me or not.
Let’s move away from the spaceship and even away from Columbus. Take it to the Pilgrims. How would you welcome them?
It seems to be human nature that your first thought is curiosity. You’re protective, but not necessarily wanting to harm. With a spaceship, it’s different—you’re seeing technology you’ve never seen, so you’d be fearful.
But in general, the reception Indigenous folks gave to Columbus on the islands where he landed, and here in America—Plymouth Rock isn’t really true, but let’s use it for argument’s sake—was not a bad reception.
Unfortunately, given the difference in—well, I don’t want to say morality, that’s not the right word—the difference in cultures, there was conflict. One culture believed in ownership and monarchy. The other thought differently. One believed their religion gave them dominion over everything; the other did not. I think that’s the genesis of a lot of our problems.
Michael Merrill: Yes. I disagree with nothing you said. But as always, context is everything.
There’s been a tendency, when we acknowledge the differences between the cultures, to assume a simplicity in American Indigenous cultures that wasn’t there, and to assume an inevitable superiority in European culture that we should not assume. That tendency erases important realities.
Egberto Willies: Explain that. I think I understand the first part, but when you talk about the “superior nature” of European culture—do you think Indigenous folks actually thought this incoming culture was superior?
Michael Merrill: No, no. I’m talking about the assumptions we bring now when telling the story. It seems obvious to us that Europeans had floating gunships—large vessels with cannons and armed soldiers. Boats were basically gunships, tanks on water. The assumption is that because they had this technology, the story was finished—the battle was over before it began.
But one of the most important things historical study can do is restore context. There’s a recent book—I’m going to mangle the Finnish name, but the author is Pekka Hämäläinen. He wrote Indigenous Continent. He’s studied the Comanche Empire, the Lakota Empire. He makes the point, as Indigenous historians have for centuries, that there was spirited resistance to European invasion throughout the entire period of settlement.
We often emphasize differences and forget similarities. For example, there were no more Europeans in North America in 1700 than Indigenous Americans. The populations were roughly balanced at about a quarter million each in the settled territories—not counting the millions of Indigenous people further inland.
Sometimes we forget the struggle between these cultures was more balanced, and the outcome less certain, than hindsight suggests. Hindsight isn’t 20/20—it’s tunnel vision. We don’t see all the other things that were in play.
Another point: we underestimate the degree of similarity between American Indigenous cultures and European popular cultures. Organized states were institutions of a moneyed and military elite imposed on popular cultures that were very similar to the cultures Europeans encountered when they arrived.
Egberto Willies: You’re pointing out something very important. When we talk about the invasion of outsiders, we often give the impression that the people here were meek, or that they didn’t have their own issues. They had intra‑Indigenous conflicts and inter‑Indigenous conflicts. They fought among each other. They had hierarchical structures. What we see here in America today—things we don’t like—existed then too.
That goes to your point: humanity is so damn similar, even when evolving in distinct places.
Michael Merrill: Absolutely. I encountered this personally my first night in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. I think I mentioned that in an earlier life I was married to an anthropologist, and I accompanied her on fieldwork. The people we met were classic “primitive peoples”—I was greeted by barefoot folks in the mountains wearing bark belts and reed loincloths.
But when I encountered those same people in political or governmental contexts in the city, they changed their clothes. Their clothes weren’t them. It was simply easier to move in the jungle without trousers catching brambles.
I had ingrained prejudices—like assuming people who couldn’t read were dumb. I’d never say it, but I realized it was an assumption. Sitting in a fire circle, having a spirited political conversation about rivalries in Vietnam between Russia, China, and the United States—because some of them had worked in Port Moresby where American GIs passed through—they were as conversant with geopolitical realities as my high school or college classmates.
I realized I was making assumptions based on material culture that were completely unfounded.
Egberto Willies: Let me point that out for the audience, because we do that a lot. I’ve done it myself. I’m an engineer by training, and I’ve had moments that woke me up. You realize there are people who can do things you absolutely need and you can’t—and they don’t know F = MA or E = MC².
For what’s required for existing, they excel. And that ties into what you said about gunboats. Europeans came with technology involving armament—some learned from the Chinese. Folks here didn’t have that. So Europeans tended to believe, “We’re more advanced. We can kill better, so we must be more advanced.”
But in reality, a lot has to do with environment. People in cold environments had to learn certain things to survive. People in hot environments had to learn other things. Killing may have been a priority in some areas and not in others.
Reading doesn’t determine intelligence. Their method of communication was different, and we wouldn’t excel in it. That’s why aptitude tests need caution.
Michael Merrill: Yes, absolutely. We make assumptions. We read internal conditions into external phenomena, which we shouldn’t do.
One more thing: in 1500, 80% of the world’s population lived on half its habitable land—Eurasia. The other 20% lived on the other half. Everyone knows the fight‑or‑flight reaction. When you face fear, you either leave or stand your ground. It was easier to leave in the rest of the world because—
Egberto Willies: Let me ask you something. I want to understand what you just said. I think you’re saying there was a lot more space in America relative to other parts of the world. Did I understand that correctly?
Michael Merrill: Yes, yes, you did. And actually in Sub‑Saharan Africa, too, there was a lot of space. Across the African savannas, there weren’t the same barriers to exit that the mountains in Europe and Eurasia created.
And the point about all of this is that the reason Europeans were better armed is because they weren’t able to flee as often as they wanted. When Genghis Khan came across the steppes with his horsemen and slaughtered 40 million people, there was nowhere to go. So they had to develop technologies of defense, which were then turned into technologies of offense.
Egberto Willies: Hey, Doc, notice what I did there. I took all your fancy numbers and the things you’d talk about as a technocrat. I learned in doing radio that you sometimes have to minimize things a bit. That’s why I brought up the arable land, etc. Go ahead.
Michael Merrill: Yes, yes. Totally valid. And the point is that some people might say, “Well, obviously the Europeans developed these techniques because they were superior.” No—they developed these techniques because necessity is the mother of invention.
Egberto Willies: They had to.
Michael Merrill: Exactly. And an interesting anecdote: historians report that when the Dutch brought the first blunderbusses and muskets to the Americas, the Iroquois learned to use them quicker and better than the Dutch did. They outfought them with their own weapons.
Again—necessity. It’s not capacity, as you pointed out earlier. Human beings are pretty much the same beneath the skin—and even at the skin. The differences are superficial compared to what we have in common.
Egberto Willies: Man, and in these times, that’s why this program and others like it are so important—to give that context. But Doc, today’s program is supposed to be on the Columbus Day issue. Why don’t you bring in the real core you want to talk about?
Michael Merrill: Well, a couple of other points with respect to that. I referred to the Christopher Nolan Odyssey movie in another episode—it comes back again today. In the film—whether or not Nolan has Homer right, I leave to the experts—one of the points made is that Zeus’s law requires you to be kind to strangers. And I think that’s also an American ethic: when strangers showed up on their shores, even in strange ships, there were two immediate impulses.
The first was caution and fear—just as anyone seeing spaceships hovering over their capital would be afraid. You would wait to see what happens. Are they going to—well, the movie Independence Day is pretty funny about that.
Egberto Willies: Yeah, no kidding.
Michael Merrill: In any case, they were appropriately afraid and cautious. But they were also brave souls who ventured out to see: Who are these strange people dressed in strange clothes, holding cloth, chanting strange things on the beach? What are they even talking about?
Then it turned out they had interesting things to trade. So they began to trade with one another. There was plenty of common ground.
A digression—but in case I forget later: some of the most important historical work over the last 20 years on relationships between first Americans and later Americans is Richard White’s The Middle Ground. It’s about how the French and Indigenous peoples interacted in the Great Lakes region and found ways of living together that weren’t always murderous or exploitative.
That option was always present. There isn’t a single story here.
For every murderous band like the Paxton Boys, who wanted to kill people and take their land, you find others who just wanted to live in peace with their neighbors. Or missionaries who believed their worldview was better but also believed coercing conversion was pointless—you have to convince people, not force them.
All of these options existed throughout the entire story. My hope today is to open up questions in people’s minds—maybe the way they think things went isn’t how it really went. There are other ways of viewing the story. And it’s important because we’re writing the story now. What story do we want told about us?
Egberto Willies: I want to use item 4 in the cheat sheet you had for the program today, because I think it’s one of the most important statements. It says:
“Invasion, colonization, migration, and displacement are part of the human story everywhere human beings on earth were or wanted to be—including Europe and Asia before anyone there even knew of the Americas, and in Africa and the Americas before anyone ever heard of Europeans.”
Michael Merrill: Yes.
Egberto Willies: I think that’s one of the most important statements in our cheat sheet. It takes away the innocence of everybody. If you’re going to have an honest discussion, that’s where you have to start.
It is true that America was colonized. It is true that land was taken. It is true that concepts of land differed. But to believe that colonization was something inherently evil within the European psyche—who have simply been more successful at it over the last 500 years—is not the case when you look at the totality of history.
You have to start from that statement you placed in item number four.
Michael Merrill: Yes. This returns to a theme we’ve looked at before. Earlier we described it as “good or bad”—are historical figures good people or bad people? Does it matter if we judge them?
Egberto Willies: Yeah, that one turned you for a loop. You sat for a long time thinking about whether we should call people bad.
Michael Merrill: Now instead of “good and bad,” we’re using “innocent and evil.” But the point is the same: nobody is born a saint, nobody is born a devil. Everybody is born with a little of each in them. The struggle has always been to let the better angels of our nature master the worst angels of our nature—individually and collectively.
So the real question is: what can we learn from these encounters?
To learn from them, we first have to understand them. And we have to be willing to consider that our first impressions may not be sustainable when we look behind the curtain or spend more time staring at the picture. Other things begin to emerge.
Egberto Willies: Explain that in detail. I think that needs more explanation—what you mean by first impressions. Because if I come over here in a slave ship, my first impression is actually correct. What do you mean?
Michael Merrill: I mean that we today—thinking we understand the history of relationships between Europeans and Americans through discovery and invasion—have first impressions and first judgments about what that was like. We have to be prepared to suspend them, to test whether our assumptions are correct.
Let’s take the question of ownership of land.
One of the principal justifications Europeans used to explain why they should rule the land rather than the people who were here first was that Europeans had a concept of ownership. Ownership, they argued, was essential for liberating energies that created prosperity—prosperity Americans couldn’t enjoy because they supposedly had no concept of ownership.
But based on my own experience with people in similar situations, every culture has a concept of ownership. It’s just that each concept is different.
European cultures had collective ownership—what they called “tenancy in common”—and they parceled out rights to work different lands according to what was best suited for their techniques and conditions. To assume Americans had no concept of ownership because theirs was different is a mistake.
Understanding their concept requires learning a different language—not assuming our meaning of words applies universally.
Egberto Willies: I want to tackle ownership a bit because I need your help. Don’t you think the idea of ownership—which meant taking—was more problematic, and in fact created most of the violence as the Europeans moved westward.
Michael Merrill: I don’t think it was ownership versus no ownership. I think it was two different conceptions of ownership. It was private ownership—exclusive—versus collective ownership, which is both exclusive and inclusive.
From what I understand—and I should make clear, my understanding of Indigenous American history is that of a well‑read amateur—it’s not my field, but I’ve read deeply to do the work I’m doing now.
Egberto Willies: Well, that puts you orders of magnitude above everybody else, so I think we’re okay.
Michael Merrill: Okay, I’ll stop apologizing. Anyway—
Egberto Willies: We were talking about ownership—collective ownership, not necessarily singular.
Michael Merrill: Yes. My sense is that Americans negotiated with one another. The Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois, the Five Nations—could not simply go to someone else’s hunting ground and use it as if it were theirs. They needed permission. There were clear lines about which nations had rights in which areas, and within those lands, which clans or families had which rights.
Some rights were common rights—similar to England and much of Europe. There were common lands where people could glean. The royals wanted to keep you from hunting rabbits because they wanted them for themselves—but that was a constant struggle.
So these same conceptions existed in both places. What’s different about European notions—and this is the theme of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation—is that Europeans increasingly treated labor, land, and money as commodities. Historically, these were understood as natural resources used to facilitate activities, not things to buy and sell.
During the encounters in the Americas, traditional ways of organizing work—shared cooperative activities with varying rights and duties—confronted a different way of doing things: If we reward selfishness more than sharing, we’ll all get richer.
Egberto Willies: Boy, you’re hitting me with my stuff now. Go ahead.
Michael Merrill: That’s the central move of commodity society. It’s in Smith, in Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. But if you only reward selfishness, it doesn’t turn out well. The problem is—when does it stop? It becomes a war of all against all unless you’re careful.
Egberto Willies: I wish we didn’t reward selfishness but understood self‑interest. Selfishness is bad; self‑interest is understandable. And don’t you think you can mix self‑interest with the collective? The collective isn’t mutually exclusive from self‑interest—but selfishness is mutually exclusive from the collective.
Michael Merrill: I personally don’t think selfishness and selflessness are mutually exclusive of one another. They’re both primary instincts. There are good self‑interested reasons to be social, and good social reasons to encourage self‑interest.
We’re governed by love and fear. Love draws us to people; fear makes us stand back. We are selfish and social in equal measure. The problem is figuring out how to balance those impulses to produce joy—a life we want to live. And that’s not just an individual problem—it’s a problem in families, communities, countries, and across the globe. Each step up the ladder adds orders of magnitude of complexity.
Egberto Willies: Okay, now that we’ve discussed the social‑political portion, let me ask you point‑blank—and I’m putting you on the spot: Should we really revere Columbus? Should we really have a Columbus Day?
Michael Merrill: We celebrate Columbus Day because prominent Italian‑Americans felt they were underappreciated in the evolving melting pot of the late Gilded Age and Progressive Era. They wanted recognition for their own contributions. It wasn’t just the WASPs and Anglo‑Saxons.
There was also a Catholic versus Protestant element, since Italians were overwhelmingly Catholic and most of the country was still overwhelmingly Protestant.
All of these things were going on. And it seems to me that, as with all gestures of acknowledgment, signaling acceptance and recognizing the contributions of people who differ from the dominant narrative is a good thing. In that context, there’s an argument to be made for Columbus Day.
Columbus himself—as I said earlier—was a heroic captain in the sense that he was willing to risk his own life and the lives of his hundred or so sailors to sail into the unknown. But he wasn’t the first to do so. He was only the first to return.
Egberto Willies: But remember, he was doing that to seek a fortune, right?
Michael Merrill: Well, he was doing that because Christian Europe was at war with the Islamic world, which was more powerful in the Middle East. Europeans couldn’t get the riches from China they were used to receiving through the Silk Road. So, they looked for a way to sail around Islam and go directly to China. They didn’t want to bargain with their Islamic enemies.
Egberto Willies: The Moors, yeah.
Michael Merrill: The Portuguese had found a sea route around Africa—the Horn—and the Spanish had been beaten to the punch. Then, Christopher, the Genoese sailor, comes and says, “Look, I think I can get there by sailing west.”
Egberto Willies: The other direction, yeah.
Michael Merrill: He told the Spanish that they wouldn’t have to go around Africa. And they were willing to give him a little money and let him try. As I said, nobody else would do it because anyone who knew astronomy knew the world was bigger than he thought, and the trip would take longer than he believed.
It was only by sheer dumb luck that he succeeded. Plus, Columbus had learned something distinctive: sailors had long been bedeviled by the Atlantic trade winds. They could sail one part of the ocean but couldn’t return on the same route. They’d get stuck.
Columbus, because he had traded with the Azores and ventured further north than usual, knew of another set of trade winds that would bring him home. He was confident he could get there and return.
All of these things made him stand out as a mariner in the 15th century in ways that deserve some kind of honor—whether that deserves a national holiday is another question.
But the politics of national holidays are deeply tied to ethnic and religious identity. There’s no getting around that.
I think the rise of Indigenous Peoples’ Day as an alternative to Columbus Day is essentially saying: “Okay, sure, it was a big deal that Europeans arrived. But the people who were already here knew it was here. We’d known it was here for a long time. You found it—fine. You transformed it through mass migrations over the next several centuries—fine. That’s worth remembering. But let’s also remember the whole story.”
It wasn’t just some lone genius who sailed west and discovered it. It was a complicated process. Let’s remember all the other people involved—not just the explorers, adventurers, and conquistadors.
Egberto Willies: Yeah, I think it should have been a holiday that went nameless. Because when it comes to Christopher Columbus—if you’re Italian, or if you celebrate life as being good when you happen to have the dominant weapons at that point in time—then it’s good.
But I remember with my daughter, and we have a little time for a one‑minute story. My daughter was in school around Columbus Day. I always wanted her to have pride in herself and pride in a system that doesn’t necessarily give it to her. I told her: when the teacher says Christopher Columbus discovered America, ask, “How can you discover something that was already there?”
I gave her a list of questions to ask. The teacher had no answers. What I wanted to show my daughter that just because it’s in a history book doesn’t mean you should take it as is. Because for that Indigenous person sitting in that class honoring Columbus Day, they’re looking at the person who destroyed their lineage. Many people don’t see or learn that.
That’s why Indigenous Peoples’ Day—or whatever you call it—needs context. It affects the psyche of kids from the moment they start learning.
Michael Merrill: This is also where it’s important to return to the Rutgers Land Acknowledgement and note the Lenape peoples of New Jersey. In their land acknowledgment statement at their art center in eastern Pennsylvania, the thrust of it is essentially: “We are still here.”
Too many land acknowledgments, including Rutgers’, sound as if there are no more Indigenous Americans, or that their influence is only felt in place names. Then they are just performative virtue signaling—an empty recitation of “thank you to the people who were here before, blah blah blah.” Now let’s move on. Done and over.
Such acknowledgements are rightly seen as performative. But there is something important being acknowledged: the values—values you mentioned earlier—not just from Indigenous peoples but also from European peoples who weren’t wedded to military power but were concerned with their neighbors. We need to remember and acknowledge those values.
Land acknowledgments are also about acknowledging the land itself. The land is the source of us all. We are from dust to dust. We come from the land; we return to the land. How we treat the land is how the land will treat us.
Egberto Willies: Amen.
Michael Merrill: If we attack it, it works on a different timescale. Geology doesn’t follow our minute hands. It has its own timescale. But believe me—the geological clock is ticking. The climatological clock is ticking. We will not escape paying for what we do to the Earth.
For me, that’s what Indigenous Peoples’ Day is about: being reminded that there are relationships to the land—and people who had those relationships—that we ought to remember. Not because we’re wonderful for acknowledging it, but because the message is important and we should learn it.
Egberto Willies: That is so important. So, given that we’re playing this show the week before Columbus Day—what many also call Indigenous Peoples’ Day—how do you think it’s best to honor the holiday? Should we honor it at all? And how do you speak to that Indigenous kid who sees colonization as offensive? How do you get over that hurdle as people wake up to realities?
We used to be given information and simply take it at face value. Today we can learn from people we couldn’t learn from before.
If we look at the continent of Africa—everyone had a different impression of how big it was, how valuable it was, and what technologies were indigenous. There are buildings and structures in Sub‑Saharan Africa that nobody knew about—some hidden by accident, some by design. Now people know things.
Michael Merrill: Yes.
Egberto Willies: People are learning things because much was hidden. What we learned about Columbus Day—much was hidden. Some by design.
We have about six minutes. I’m going to ask you to take over. First: what do you think about Zinn’s book? Second: how do we go forward discussing Columbus Day in a way that may not make everyone feel good, but can be good? I don’t care about feeling good—I care about what is right and what we can live with.
Michael Merrill: Okay. Why did you ask me about Howard Zinn?
Egberto Willies: I waited until the end. I wanted to ask at the beginning, but it felt more apropos now.
Michael Merrill: My experience is that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States opened many people’s eyes to the fact that the history they learned in high school isn’t the only history they can be told.
I actually met Howard Zinn. I invited him to Columbia when I was running my forum seminars, to talk about SNCC and other things. He was engaging and charismatic throughout his career. Everybody has blemishes and blind spots—he had his own.
Egberto Willies: For the audience—what would be his blind spot?
Michael Merrill: I’ll get to that. When I was dean at the college, some instructors came to me and said they wanted to use Zinn’s book in their history class. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s the right text for these apprentices.” I gave them a challenge: “I will open the book at random. If I can’t find an egregious error of fact or interpretation on that page, you can use the book. Will you accept the challenge?” They wouldn’t.
My problem with the book—which I still celebrate for opening readers’ eyes—is that it tells a story of loss. It doesn’t tell a story of triumph. In every instance, defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory. As soon as you win, the worm in the apple corrupts the prize—whether it’s the Civil War and abolition, or the New Deal.
The heroes of his book are people who stand against overwhelming odds, despite the costs, even at risk of their lives—not because they will achieve something, but because they are, in my terms, virtue signaling. That’s the ultimate message of the book.
When I talk to working people about changing the system, they say, “Why should I sacrifice myself? It’s pointless. I can’t win. Even if we change it, it’ll be the same.” And I say, “No, it doesn’t always stay the same.” But if you read Zinn, that’s the lesson you get.
Egberto Willies: You’ll come to that conclusion. Okay, Doc, we only have about two minutes—tell me about Columbus Day now.
Michael Merrill: I want to talk about holidays in general. Holidays—holy days—were times when you stepped away from daily activities and contemplated the eternal, God, and your own saintliness. A civic holiday is a time when we, as a people, step back and contemplate the themes of that holiday.
I would hope we spend Columbus Day learning one or two new facts about the relationships between Europeans and the Americas. Read something you wouldn’t normally read. Ask Google: “Was this true? What’s the other side of the story?” Take a moment to reflect on the limitations of our own knowledge and see if we can expand it.
One of the things I do with my family—not every holiday, but many—is we spend a moment with everyone gathered. I say, “Okay, we’re going to talk about the meaning of Thanksgiving. The meaning of Labor Day. The meaning of July 4th.” And we talk not just about the conventional stories, but the underside—the hidden stories. And we’re going to do that for a Thanksgiving show in a couple of weeks, by the way.
Egberto Willies: Well, let me tell you folks—you’ve been listening to, and today I’ll use his title because he did a great job—Dr. Michael Merrill. I appreciate the conversation. And let me tell you what I got out of it: we have a lot more to talk about. A hell of a lot more. And it’s going to enlighten the audience, which is growing.
Michael Merrill: So next week, as a foreshadow, we’re going to be talking with Randall Ray, one of the founders of modern money theory. We’re going to talk about money—what it is and why it’s important, and what it means for us today.
Egberto Willies: You’ve been listening to Liberty and Justice for All with Dr. Michael Merrill and yours truly, Egberto Willies. Thank you kindly. And remember, you can go to libertyandjustice4all.net and continue the conversation. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful rest of your day.