Indigenous Peoples Day as Wateca: Leftovers or Renewal?
How being forced to inherit a federal holiday celebrating the most infamous colonizer of Turtle Island got me rooted in Lakota medicine
Truth be told, I’m not wild about Indigenous Peoples Day taking the place of Colonizer Day.
There’s something very hand-me-down about rebranding colonizer holidays that hit me upside the head. I know I’m supposed to like what I’ve been given and be grateful but why does it always have to be used?
Columbus Day commemorates the landing of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, specifically the landing of his expedition on Guanahani (San Salvador) on Oct. 12, 1492. The rest of the story of Columbus is so well known that it’s passed into the canon of American consciousness and doesn’t need any more space in my brain, with the exception of the note that his brutality as a colonizer was so egregious that the Spanish crown—the same monarchs who instituted the Spanish Inquisition—stripped him of his titles and brought him back from Quizquella (Hispaniola).
There exists a sorrow among Indigenous people that harkens back to what could have been. My parents did it, their parents did it, their parents did it. We look at where we live and, filled with the stories of the land before contact and colonization, and we take a brief moment to wonder what it would be like now if we’d never had to deal with non-Indigenous people. Subjunctive history, as British playwright Alan Bennett, called it in his 2004 play (and later film) “The History Boys,” is the unfolding of alternate lines of history following key events.
What would have happened if the mutiny aboard been successful and they returned to Spain? What if Luis de Santangel (the King Ferdinand’s clerk who ultimately advised in favor of Columbus’ cause) had denied Columbus’ scheme one more time? Where my sci-fi brain goes is to instigating total anarchy in this colonized timeline. If we ever achieve the ability to travel through time, what would have happened if we armed our Indigenous ancestors so that every time an invading force came in, our ancestors set the terms, not the other way around.
But those are my feelings, which change with the wind.
What I hold to is the realities of my history. What did happen? When did it happen? How did it happen? Who made it happen? What can I learn from it? Where do I go from here?
Reclamation and rematriation are a part of Indigenous tradition that goes back beyond colonization. In Lakota culture, the word watecha is generally used in slang to mean leftover food. “Get your wateca bowls ready!” is what an emcee is likely to say before the feed/feast at a community event. And, if you’re old school, you’ll hear about someone grabbing their hubcaps.
But the word was explained to me by Jerome Kills Small when I was a student. It’s a contraction in our language that means to make something new out of what’s left over. We make things new again as Indigenous people. It’s part of our inheritance and our legacy, we help to renew things.
Much of this nation’s history is a bloody lie, too much of it. The desire to be right and righteous is strong.
The Indigenous knowledge I’ve received from generations of family stories going back 300 years now is that everything is in a cycle. But that doesn’t mean everything is exactly the same, it’s not a recitation, just a repetition. And every cycle, something new happens, a change occurs and a new cycle starts. I think of the beauty of fractal geometry and how each variation of the pattern is a new universe unto itself.
Indigenous people make things new again. We reclaim and we renew.
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day.