Hilary-Anne Coppola
“I am thankful for this group and the support they have given me as I connect more with my family’s Italian piece of our history. As a child, I was often dissatisfied with the “historical record” presented to me in a educational context, as I could find no reasonable explanation for why European colonists and Indigenous people were in conflict for hundreds of years, or why Indigenous communities are impoverished today.
I have since learned the truth about what happened here and around the world: European Christian supremacy, used to justify violence against non-”White”, non-Christian peoples; legalized by the series of 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 involving unceded Indigenous lands. These decrees motivated mass occupation of sovereign lands, subjugation of native populations, and abolished liberty for 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 widely-known then as they are now. When I see the monument in Syracuse, I feel sickened by the insulting and misguided glorification of a historical figure who led an attempted genocide. The Columbus my father’s family envisioned was not the real Columbus.
The danger of a single, narrow-minded story, especially the story of God-approved conquest, is in how it distorts the truth and is used by oppressive systems to justify murder, land theft, racism, enslavement, imprisonment, kidnapping children, segregation, censorship, destruction of our earth; the harms continue, and are real today throughout the world.”