Plan B Forum

A Somerville principal has opened fire on cherished American holidays, blasting legendary explorer Christopher Columbus for “atrocities” and saying “we need to be careful” about celebrating Thanksgiving in a scathing email to teachers — who are already under orders not to let the kids dress up for Halloween.

“When we were young we might have been able to claim ignorance of the atrocities that Christopher Columbus committed against the indigenous peoples,” wrote Kennedy School Principal Anne Foley. “We can no longer do so. For many of us and our students celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated. On the same lines, we need to be careful around the Thanksgiving Day time as well.”

Mayor Joseph Curtatone said, “She raises a fair point. History is messy.” School Superintendent Tony Pierantozzi said her “intention is to be very, very sensitive to all of the many, many cultures” of Somerville. Foley said she just wanted to “open up a conversation.”

“When I grew up, I was taught from a very European perspective of history and it was both embarrassing and enlightening to me when I learned other perspectives,” Foley said. “I want our children and families to know that we are aware of those other perspectives.”

When pressed on the “atrocities” of Columbus and misdeeds of the Pilgrims, Foley said she wasn’t going to “dwell on that.”

“I have friends who are Native American. I have friends from the islands in the Caribbean. I’ve heard their perspective on different things that we say and do — their versions of history,” said Foley.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/column ... on=comment

Leif Erikson Day is an annual American observance occurring on October 9. It honors Leif Ericson (Old Norse: Leifr Eiríksson or the Norwegian: "Leiv Eiriksson"), the Norse explorer who brought the first Europeans known to have set foot in North America.[1]

Madoc or Madog ab Owain Gwynedd was, according to folklore, a Welsh prince who sailed to America in 1170, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492.

According to the story, he was a son of Owain Gwynedd who took to the sea to flee internecine violence at home. The legend evidently evolved out of a medieval tradition about a Welsh hero's sea voyage, only allusions to which survive. However, it attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era, when English and Welsh writers made the claim that Madoc had come to the Americas as a ploy to assert prior discovery, and hence legal possession, of North America by the Kingdom of England.

The story remained popular in later centuries, and a later development asserted that Madoc's voyagers had intermarried with local Native Americans, and that their Welsh-speaking descendants still lived somewhere on the American frontier. These "Welsh Indians" were accredited with the construction of a number of natural and man-made landmarks throughout the American Midwest, and a number of white travellers were inspired to go and look for them.

dgs49 wrote:He thought the indigenous heathens were sub-human, ripe for exploitation.