Summary of this post and my position on article 10

I support Article 10, the resolution to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day in Belmont, and I proposed an amendment to standardize the punctuation of the name of the day, to reduce the chance of misreading a particular sentence, and to address concerns about the inaccuracy of some historical claims.

I intend to vote in favor of Article 10 regardless of whether my amendment passes, though I believe my amendment includes some improvements and helps promote an important norm of intellectual honesty.

In this post, I explain my amendment. I do not explain my reasons for supporting article 10.

The amendment and changes in context

Click to see the amendment text I submitted. Note that I used ellipses to indicate blocks of text that I was leaving unedited.

Click to see the changes in the context of the full article.

I noticed the inconsistency in punctuation and a potential misreading of one of the resolutions when I first read the article. I mentioned this to those who submitted the article and was told these could be addressed by proposing changes on the floor of the town meeting.

Subsequently, a meeting was held between town meeting members of precincts 2 and 3, and several people challenged the accuracy of some of the historical claims in the article. I had been taking the historical accuracy for granted and felt challenged to do a closer review.

I believe that cultivating a norm of intellectual honesty is important both to being able to resolve disagreements and also to best advocate for the vulnerable in society. It was with this in mind that I reviewed each of the claims in the article, as a non-expert, non-historian, not in an effort to determine the capital-T truth, but to get a sense of what seemed like settled history and what seemed controversial.

I believe that avoiding controversial claims helps us present the fairest and strongest case for the article.

The language of the original article was prepared by the United American Indians of New England, and as such includes what I presume that organization believes is important. Given this, I only made small adjustments to what seemed to me to be controversial claims rather than do any major rewriting, so as to preserve as much of the original intent as possible.

Although I have kept the original submitters of the article apprised of my proposed changes and intent, I do not have their endorsement for my amendment.

I very much wish I would have thought to review the text more closely sooner so that I could have engaged in more discussion with the submitters and others before submitting an amendment.

Rationale behind the five specific changes

Punctuation and clarification

1. Standardizing on “Indigenous Peoples Day”

I standardized the punctuation of the name of the proposed day to “Indigenous Peoples Day”. The original article contains three different punctuation schemes: “Indigenous Peoples' Day”, “Indigenous People’s Day”, and “Indigenous Peoples Day”. I was told by the submitters of the article that the Coalition for Indigenous Peoples Day MA recommends the version without an apostrophe, which is why I chose that.

2. Emphasizing the diversity of Indigenous Peoples

In resolution 3, “Belmont Public Schools to observe this day … to the end that the culture, history, and diversity of Indigenous Peoples be celebrated and perpetuated”, I changed “culture” to “cultures” and “history” to “histories”, because one point of the day is to emphasize the diversity of tribes that exist. By pluralizing “culture” and “history”, I believe that point is made clearer. The different tribes have different cultures and histories.

Changes to historical claims

3. Substituting an unconventional usage of “transatlantic slave trade”

I changed the claim “the first voyage of Columbus to the Americas initiated the transatlantic slave trade” to “the first voyage of Columbus to the Americas initiated the European enslavement of Indigenous persons”. Columbus captured and enslaved natives as part of his first voyage and did so in subsequent voyages. While it’s true that he took these slaves across the Atlantic, it appears highly unconventional to refer to this as part of the “transatlantic slave trade”. Wikipedia, Britannica, the Smithsonian Museums, the United Nations, etc. all refer to the transportation of African people to the Americas as the “transatlantic slave trade” and do not reference the trade in Indigenous people as part of that.
The submitters of the article pointed me at this document which contains several quotes from scholars referring to Columbus' trade in slaves. Only one quote (on page 3) refers to Columbus has having any connection to the “transatlantic slave trade”. I was unable to find any such usages myself.

I think it’s better to stick with convention. Also, because some Native Americans were already experiencing slavery in the Americas, I clarify that Columbus initiated the European enslavement of them.

4. Uncertainty around Taino population estimates

Population estimates for the number of Taino people pre-contact and later vary very widely. Cook and Woodrow (1971) estimate there were as many as 8 million Taino people pre-contact. A 2020 DNA-based study published in Nature estimates no more than a few tens of thousands pre-contact. This student paper led me to a number of sources with different estimates.

My main takeaway is that the number pre-contact is very much not settled and depends on the method of estimation used, but it does seem clear that the number reduced significantly. Hence I add the qualifying language “what may have been”. I added “fewer than” to the post-contact number, because that struck me as plausible and relatively settled.

I removed “was” from “was reduced” because the “was” implies that an agent (i.e., a person or persons) did the reducing (i.e., killing), and while certainly the policies had a big effect, it’s not clear that most of the reduction in population was due to Columbus' policies. I elaborate on this in the next point.

5. Uncertainty around the main cause of Taino depopulation

A claim is made that that starvation and overt extermination policies were the main causes of most of the deaths of the Taino. Reading the last paragraph of the Depopulation section of Wikipedia, several sources are cited as saying disease was the main reason for the reduction in the Taino population. I don’t feel prepared to defend any cause of death as the main one, so I rewrote the section similarly to how Yale Genocide Studies discusses the reasons for Taino deaths: “Within twenty-five years of Columbus' arrival in Haiti, most of the Taíno had died from enslavement, massacre, or disease.” That is, I mention each cause of death, not saying one had more impact than another.

To my eyes, the above removes the most disputable historical claims in the article and replaces them with what seems generally accepted.