Who Do We Think We Are?

Crossing lines, wrecking lives, and editing the truth to save our pride.

On August 6th, Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court overturned former Mayor Jim Kenney’s 2021 decision to rename “Columbus Day” as “Indigenous Peoples Day” in Philadelphia. For some, it was a victory for tradition. For others, it was a gut punch — a reminder of how hard it is to shift the story we tell about the past.

History is messy, and smoothing it over only ensures we’ll make the same mistakes again.

Before Columbus

For centuries, schoolbooks and popular culture painted the Americas before 1492 as a vast, untamed wilderness, sparsely populated and waiting for “civilization” to arrive. But modern archaeology, genetics, and scholarship — like Charles C. Mann’s 1491 — have turned that narrative inside out.

Before Columbus set foot in the Caribbean, the Americas were home to bustling cities and vast trade networks. Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, rivaled or surpassed any European city of its time in size and infrastructure. The Inca built roads and terraced farms across mountains. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy developed a sophisticated political system that influenced the framers of the U.S. Constitution.

These societies were not static or primitive. They were dynamic, innovative, and deeply attuned to their environments. Indigenous farmers domesticated maize in a feat of early genetic engineering. Amazonian peoples enriched their soils to sustain large populations for centuries. Far from “untouched wilderness,” the landscapes Europeans encountered had been carefully shaped by human hands for millennia.

The Lenape, Then and Now

Here in Pennsylvania, the Lenape Nation — whose forebearers have lived in the region for more than 10,000 years — fished these rivers, cultivated the land, and maintained complex systems of governance long before William Penn arrived.

By the late 1600s, when Penn and earlier settlers like William Warner began negotiating with Lenape leaders, the nation was already reeling from waves of disease brought by Europeans: measles, smallpox, influenza. These illnesses, against which they had no immunity, devastated communities. Negotiated land agreements were undermined by encroachment and cultural misunderstandings. The result was a steady erosion of sovereignty and population alike.

Today, Pennsylvania remains the only state that refuses to formally recognize the Lenape Nation — denying them benefits, services, and protections that other states provide to their Indigenous peoples. Three decades of legislative efforts have stalled. Meanwhile, the Lenape continue to fight for acknowledgment in their ancestral home.

An Island Apart (Same Old Story)

Half a world away, in the Bay of Bengal, lives one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes: the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island. They are believed to be direct descendants of some of the first humans to settle the region tens of thousands of years ago. Their isolation has been their safeguard — and they have made it clear to outsiders, with arrows if necessary, that they want to be left alone.

That insistence is not hostility for hostility’s sake. Like the Lenape in the 1600s, the Sentinelese have no immunity to common diseases. Even a minor virus could rip through their population with deadly consequences. This is why India strictly prohibits any contact.

Yet outsiders keep testing the boundaries. In 2018, a U.S. missionary was killed after paying a fisherman to drop him there with high hopes and a waterproof Bible. Just last April, a 24-year-old YouTuber from Arizona was arrested for paddling up and trying (unsuccessfully) to summon tribe members with a loud whistle.

The impulse behind these intrusions — the belief that one’s own goals outweigh the survival of an entire people — is the same dangerous entitlement that’s fueled so many tragedies in our own history.

The Stakes Today 

When we debate the name of a holiday, we’re debating which version of history gets the microphone. Columbus Day has long celebrated the “Age of Discovery” without grappling with what that “discovery” meant for the people who were already here: disease, dispossession, and in many cases, death. Indigenous Peoples Day doesn’t erase Columbus from history — it reframes the story to acknowledge the civilizations that predated him, and the costs of European colonization.

Recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day in Philadelphia doesn’t undo the past, but it does show that we value truth over myth, and respect over erasure. And recognizing the Lenape Nation at the state level would be a long-overdue step toward justice in the place where their story began.

The same respect applies globally. Whether it’s the Sentinelese defending their shores or the Lenape fighting for recognition, the principle is the same: Indigenous peoples have the right to decide the terms of their own survival.

The Distance That Matters

The greatest threat to Indigenous communities has never been the miles between us — it’s been the refusal to honor those miles, those boundaries, those sovereignties. In Philadelphia, that means remembering the Lenape not as a footnote, but as a living nation still here today. On North Sentinel Island, it means leaving the beaches empty of our footprints before we destroy another functioning society.

History already shows what happens when we don’t. The only real question is whether we’ve learned enough to stop repeating it.

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