who someone is :the name of a person (irrelevant for our discussion)
the qualities, beliefs, etc., that make a particular person or group different from others (what concerns us)
Identity is a collective noun as far as we’re concerned, but the argument here is whether it’s necessarily a rigid invariant objective collective, or a fluid, subjective one. You seem to be arguing the former, but the mere fact that people in your own nation disagree with you should be alerting you to the truth of the latter. So by the way you’re using “singular” here, no, identity isn’t singular. No subjective set of predicates is.
It’s not outright stated in the OP, but “These are all things that are part of American history” is implicit in the question that is asked. Hardly a “tangent”.
If all Americans should identify with Native Americans, the current legal status of Christmas should be made equivalent to all other religious celebrations. If the US is not a “Christian nation” why does only that religion get preferential treatment in the form of a federal holliday? If Americans are to truly embrace a Native American national identity, all (widely) recognised Native American (religious) hollidays/celebrations should be made federal or any religious/non-secular holliday that exists or may exist should stop being federal.
Claiming Christianity is not an integral part of a national or cultural identity of the US, yet having “In God We Trust” on its currency and having a federal public holliday for Christmas but not Hindu, Muslim or, indeed, Native American celebrations does not square with me.
So therefore, saying that Native Americans and their history is just as much a part of the overall national, cultural and historic identity of America and most Americans rings hollow. Maybe in the future that might be true but it does not feel to be true currently.
A solution may be to either scrap Columbus Day or change its name to something better and ADD an additional federal holliday to honor Native Americans, as well as having a federal holiday for each (major) religion or for none of them. But if Native Americans as a group get a federal holliday, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Cuban Americans, Filipino Americans, Puerto Ricans etc should all get seperate federal hollidays. They are just as much a part of whatever American national idenity exists as Native Americans are.
Who said that? It’s the OP who believes there is only a single narrative that everyone in the country should embrace. Everyone else has said that our national identity (if such a beast exists) weaves all the cultures, experiences, and traditions that have contributed to making us who we are today. That should include not only western European aspects, but Native American and a host of others.
But I don’t think that was the point being made. I think the point being made was that putting other heritages in a position of full equality means that Christmas shouldn’t, as it is now, be the one and only religious holiday that’s also an official national holiday.
Which I think it shouldn’t be; but it’s certainly not the hill I’m going to die on this year, or probably any year in my lifetime.
But it’s a hijack in this thread. We can have this repeated annual discussion about whether Christmas is secular or religious in its own thread, like we do every year.
Great point, I agree Christmas should not be a federal holiday.
Agreed, should remove In God We Trust from our money (and Under God from the Pledge, though a “pledge of allegiance” in most settings is just fucking weird anyways and I wouldn’t mind if we got rid of it altogether outside the army).
Yes, of course. If a slave-owner’s descendent and a slave’s descendent did not share the same national identity, they would not belong to the same nation.
I assume DAR stands for Daughters of the Revolution. That is trickier, because not all persons interned during WWII were American nationals at the time, and not all survived to become nationals after (people born in Japan could not become citizens until 1952). So in some cases, a Japanese person interned during WWII was also a Japanese and not American national - thus not the same national identity as a Daughter of the Revolution.
… yes, I’m going to say that the 13 colonies pre-declaration are properly British history and the Irish famine is properly Irish history, because the people were British/Irish nationals at the time. &etc.