Rick Mazzadra and Norm Clement at Monday’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
To a song and a drumbeat, they lifted their arms to accept blessings from all four cardinal directions. They knelt on one knee to feel the grass in their hands. And they looked skyward to thank the Creator in the last light of day.
That age-old ceremony from the Taíno, the indigenous Caribbean people whom Christopher Columbus first encountered more than 500 years ago, was repeated on the New Haven Green on Monday afternoon for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the celebration created as an alternative to Columbus Day.
Angel Lionheart Ortiz reads a letter from a Taíno leader.
The prayer’s words gave thanks, but its performance also hinted at defiance. In a country that pushed Native Americans off their ancestral lands and into reservations, then taught them to forget their customs in residential boarding schools, simply repeating it showed 500 years of efforts to stamp out their traditions hadn’t worked.
“We’ve been in obscurity for so long, for us, the Taíno, 527 years since the invasion,” said Angel Lionheart Ortiz. “The history books erased us, but we are writing ourselves right back into history. We’re still performing our ceremonies. We’re still gathering. We’re still telling our oral stories from thousands of years ago. We continue to do that.”
Nearly 50 people circle up for prayers and songs at Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
During the hourlong get-together, participants circled up on a corner of the Green. They purified the space in a “smudging” by burning white sage. They held a round dance as students from Yale’s Blue Feather Drum Group sang in the center. And they gave speeches about what they’d learned from their elders and how else to stay politically involved.
The event came after a debate this summer after Fair Haven Alder Kenneth Reveiz suggested permanently naming the second Monday of October, now known as Columbus Day, to Indigenous Peoples’ Day in New Haven, as close to 100 communities have already done. Opposed by Italian-Americans and the Knights of Columbus, that proposal didn’t make it out of committee.
Despite that setback, more than 50 people showed up on Monday for Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Organizers said that was the largest turnout for the event in New Haven so far.
Norm Clement, Connecticut Bail Fund staffer and Penobscot Tribe member, said the day was a chance to remember how Columbus started the European colonization of the West and the genocide of its native peoples.
It came after a three-day weekend of activism, including a Friday evening rally to rename Christopher Columbus Family Academy, the elementary school in Fair Haven, and a Monday morning confrontation, between Yale College students and their dean, over the university endowment’s fossil fuel investments.
Blue Feather’s Mikki Metteba, Madeline Freeman, Truman Pipestem, Nolan Arkansas, Jay Scotfife, Hema Patel and Evan Roberts.
But on Monday afternoon, politicians were noticeably absent from the celebration, just across the street from City Hall. Only Hamden Councilman Justin Farmer joined in.
Clement contrasted that with Saturday morning’s event in Wooster Square, where officials like Mayor Toni Harp and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro participated in a wreath-laying around Columbus’s statute in the park.
“Even though City Hall has proclaimed Indigenous Peoples’ Day today, no one from there comes to celebrate with us. Every politician in town was on Wooster Street this Saturday,” Clement said. “That’s a problem for me, and I think it should be a problem for all of us.”
New Haven was originally inhabited by the Quinnipiac. Ravaged by smallpox, the tribe negotiated a treaty with English settlers in 1638 that limited them to a two-square-mile reservation on the East Shore, considered to be the first in the country. They traded away most of the land around the harbor, primarily for dining utensils, cloth coats and hatchets.
Within a century, as encroachment made hunting untenable, the Quinnipiac were prevented from farming outside their lands and denied opportunity to buy back what they’d sold. Just before the American Revolution, the last tribal members sold off their lands and merged with the Tunxis in Farmington.
Clement: “We’re not going anywhere.”
Clement pointed in the direction of the Knights of Columbus headquarters just a few blocks away. He said it was strange to have that society, named “in honor of a person who tried to erase us,” towering over New Haven.
“We’re not going to allow that to happen. That’s why we’re here today,” Clement said. “We’re not going anywhere. We are still here.”
“We will get rid of that, and we will get rid of the statutes in honor of Columbus, the school that is named in honor of Columbus. Those will be erased from our memories one day,” he added. “We don’t coexist with that; we cannot. We need to decolonize our minds from those things.”