Whatchamacolumn: Name changes that recalibrate history

Columbus Day remains a federal holiday (second Monday in October), but Columbus School is ending its 131-year life in McMinnville.

We’ve joined communities nationwide that have eliminated “Columbus” from names of schools and other landmarks, citing mistreatment of indigenous people by explorer Christopher Columbus in his voyages to the Caribbean and Central America. Besides, Vikings explored parts of North America centuries earlier than — as the old poem says — “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

McMinnville’s original Columbus School was built along Cozine Creek in 1892, exactly 400 years after the first Columbus voyage. It was replaced in 1930 with a new building, which was damaged beyond repair by the 1993 Scotts Mills earthquake. Today’s Columbus School was built on Fellows Street for reopening in 1995.

History.com reports this about Columbus: “There are three main sources of controversy involving his interactions with the Indigenous people he labeled ‘Indians’: the use of violence and slavery, the forced conversion of native peoples to Christianity, and the introduction of a host of new diseases that would have dramatic long-term effects on native people in the Americas. In an era in which the international slave trade was starting to grow, Columbus and his men enslaved many native inhabitants of the West Indies and subjected them to extreme violence and brutality.”

Still, our national capital city of Washington is part of the Territory of Columbia, later renamed District of Columbia. Thus, Washington, D.C., retains name connection to Christopher Columbus.

In recent years, many derogatory words and historic names have been stripped from historic uses: Last year, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names changed names of 650 geographic features using the word “squaw”; U.S. military branches are in the process of renaming bases that honored figures of the Confederacy.

Some jurisdictions even are abandoning Washington and Lincoln names, among others, due to circumstantial transgressions viewed through the prisms of today’s values. That movement has become an element of today’s co-called culture wars, described in a 2022 article in “The American Conservative” titled, “Woke Name Changes Are Just Bad Ethics: This is narcissistic, self-destructive, and inimical to societal preservation.”

Honoring history definitely can be a slippery slope. For example, I found an interesting article on Distractify.com entitled, “25 Legendary Historical Heroes Who Did Unspeakable Things.”

We can continue to debate the use of names that recognize and celebrate historic figures, but meanwhile, in keeping with this week’s news story, it’s “Goodbye, Columbus; hello, Willamette” in McMinnville.

Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.