To celebrate Columbus, indigenous peoples, or both?

It’s Columbus Day Weekend, and while the debate seems muted in this region — possibly because of a rich Italian heritage in many of our communities — this has become a bone of contention that never existed when children eagerly learned the lines “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue … “

Calls to scrap Columbus Day as a holiday and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day grow a bit louder each year. Several states and dozens of cities have done just that. Others have compromised and declared the second Monday of October both. There’s also the idea of giving Indigenous People their own holiday without dropping the honor bestowed upon Christopher Columbus.

We will not offer an opinion here, but simply encourage an honest and broad debate. And we think that should start with some questions: How many local Native American tribes can most people name? What can we say of them? What do we know of the Iroquois, Munsee, Delaware, Lenape, Erie, Suquehannock? Is “Shawnee” more than the mascot of the long-gone Plymouth High School?

Was Sullivan’s March of 1779 — in which Wyoming Valley played a critical part — a justified colonial response to unprovoked raids by Native Americans allied with the British, or were the indigenous communities simply responding to relentless incursion into their long-held territories, some believing English loyalists were the best option for stemming the loss of tribal land?

Have we ever really reconciled with the fate of indigenous peoples at the hands of European settlers? Do we give due time in our classrooms to them? With all the things our children need to know to thrive in the radically changing world of technology and artificial intelligence, how high should that effort rate in importance?

Along with our region’s place in Sullivan’s March, how many people know much about things like the federally-funded Carlisle, Pa., Indian Industrial School and its methods of “civilizing” Native American children? Was the renaming of Mauch Chunk to Jim Thorpe an honor or misappropriation? Should the town switch back?

How many people who use Nescopeck State Park even know about an architectural review of the site that determined it was never a bustling settlement because of poor soil and no coal to mine, but did serve for decades as a way station for Native Americans traveling from the Lehigh River to the Susquehanna?

And what of Christopher Columbus, a man who never set foot on land that would become the continental United States, who is now believed to not even have been the first European to discover North America, and who managed to get credit discovering a land that had already been discovered by the indigenous communities living there for generations before he arrived?

Do we damn him for bringing the scourges of European disease and conquest to the land? Do we rebuke him for the killings and atrocities he committed in the Caribbean? Or do we consider that he was a man of his times, that he practiced what many of his fellow Europeans did, and opt instead to focus — at least partly — on his remarkable determination to cross uncharted waters in what most of us would concede were frighteningly flimsy ships?

(If you get a chance to see one of the recreations of those vessels, take a tour and decide for yourself. Notice the ledge jutting out from the aft deck over the water; that was the bathroom. The end of the ragged thick rope dangling nearby was the wipe).

Maybe instead of demanding an either/or, we can acknowledge, as they say, that “it’s complicated.” We can stop whitewashing, stop oversimplifying, and remember that we rarely know as much as we think, and never as much as we could.