# Columbus Day v Indigenous People's Day v Leif Erikson Day **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 11, 2021, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbus-day-v-indigenous-peoples-day-v-leif-erikson-day/952323 "2021-10-11T21:56:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 200
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2021, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbus-day-v-indigenous-peoples-day-v-leif-erikson-day/952323/200 "2021-10-28T00:36:30Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > I don’t think you can neatly separate the two concepts when it comes to the history of a nation, which has a geographic context as well as a demographic one. What people do depends to a large extent on the characteristics of the land they’re in, and the characteristics of the land depend to a large extent on the actions of the people in it. But I do, otherwise I have trouble reconciling the idea that a Native American tribe might retain its identity even as it is totally removed from the land. And there are countless other instances where an entire nation of people migrate, perhaps more willingly, yet retain their identity as a people. And while the United States itself has dramatically changed in size, geographically, I do not have any trouble seeing that it is a continuation of the same country. I also have to be able to work out the unusual cases, such as the RoC and PRoC, or of rebellions whether successful or unsuccessful. It seems to me that a clean separation of nationhood from geography is the most straightforward conception. I certainly see some reason to tie national identity to geography, but, thus far I don’t find those reasons convincing. > [@Kimstu](#): > > Some of “those people”—i.e., people in the region at that time—were “the ones doing the colonizing”. Many other people were enslaved or dispossessed by the colonizers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an equally valid claim to be part of American “national identity”. […] > > ? Even while enslaved, they were obviously part of the people of this nation: nobody’s claiming they were the only people of it. Even while enslaved and disenfranchised, they were counted among other people of the nation (the infamous “three-fifths compromise”) to help determine political representation for different parts of the nation. And of course, the enslaved people’s labor and their arts and inventions, of everything from songs to recipes to machinery, had immense and profound impacts on the lives of people in the dominant culture of white Americans. Those people who were enslaved or dispossessed, at the time they were of that status, I do not count as part of the people who enslaved and dispossessed them. National identity is a social construct, it does not exist at birth but arises from social interaction. If I am to define national identity, it is the shared sense within a community of people that each of them belongs to the same state, said state being defined with a common constitution (small c) and history. The critical questions in the case of Native Americans who weren’t U.S. citizens at the time, or even chattel slaves, are whether they would consider themselves American nationals, and whether their fellow Americans (or the law) would consider them American nationals. Only if both questions are answered yes, do we have a shared national identity (the historic person and I). So no, I do not think those historic Native Americans or Black slaves are included in the people of the nation. The former were at the time considered foreigners or savages, the latter property. ~Max --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbus-day-v-indigenous-peoples-day-v-leif-erikson-day/952323)._