Hilary-Anne Coppola
'“One of my siblings was adopted in Brazil. As a child I was taught that his story was only “Indian”. My love for my brother led me to a childhood fascination with people native to Turtle Island, but I found no satisfactory reason why White people and Indians fought throughout history or why native communities are impoverished today.
Now I know what happened here and around the world: White, usually Christian, supremacy, used to justify violence against non-White, non-Christian peoples; legalized by the Catholic papal bulls named the Doctrine of Discovery. The DOD has not been repudiated by the Catholic Church and is a basis for US legal rulings. These decrees motivated mass occupation of foreign lands, subjugation of native populations, and abolished sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and land. The continuing impacts of the DOD are in my story and all of our stories.
Cristoffa Corombo’s contribution to colonization and White supremacy provided Italian immigrants enough “White-ness” to integrate more comfortably into American society; his acts of murder, torture, rape of children, and enslavement were not as well-known then. When I see the monument in Syracuse, I feel sickened by the insulting and misguided glorification of a genocidist. The Columbus my father’s family envisioned was not the real Columbus. I remember my ancestors who suffered and caused suffering to others and am committed to do better by them all. Genocide of a people also kills wisdom and diversity- language, dance, clothing, jokes, songs, food, medicine, scientific knowledge.
The danger of a single story, especially the story of God-approved conquest, is that it distorts the truth and is used by oppressive systems to justify genocide, land theft, racism, imprisonment, segregation, censorship, ecological destruction, taking children from their parents; the impacts continue, and are real today. We must reckon with the truth, and justice and harmony from accepting the truth will follow if we seek with good intent.”