Understand History of Winners and Losers on Columbus Day

Life often divides us into categories. And one common demarcation is “winner” and “loser.”

Whether competing in sports, applying for a job or seeking admission to an academic institution, we often voluntarily choose to risk being a loser in the hope that we might be a winner. Of course, we could opt out of the competition altogether. To do so would save us from the disappointment of losing. Though, we would also forfeit the possibility of winning.

But life throws some things at us for which there’s no opt-out provision. When a hurricane comes barreling through Florida, there certainly will be winners and losers. But we can’t choose whether or not our property will be in the storm’s path. That reality is beyond human control.

There are still other situations in which the winner status of one group and the loser status of another is a foregone conclusion. Right from the outset, the winners recognize their overwhelming advantage and their equally overwhelming likelihood to win. Which is why I’m sharing these thoughts about winners, losers and Columbus Day.

On October 12, federal government offices, the postal service and banks will be closed as our nation commemorates an event that took place on October 12, 1492, when explorer Christopher Columbus arrived at what was quickly dubbed “the new world.” The annual October 12 commemoration of his arrival we’ve labeled Columbus Day.

But whether we call the upcoming commemoration Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day — as many have chosen to do in recent years — it’s imperative that we understand that Columbus and his three small sailing ships from Spain brought with them the seeds from which grew the Trail of Tears, the Seminole Wars, the Wounded Knee Massacre and other events that solidified the loser status of North America’s indigenous people.

What started in 1492 definitely wasn’t American humanitarianism at its best. It certainly wasn’t a sterling example of American exceptionalism.

Scarcely more than a hundred years after Columbus made his discovery, droves of people seeking a better life for themselves and their descendants began arriving from distant shores, much to the dismay and consternation of those already inhabiting this land.

Many of the new arrivals were so intent on escaping hardship, unfairness and mistreatment that they were willing to inflict those very same evils on the bronze-skinned long-time inhabitants already here.

The indigenous people of North America faced a hurricane-force onslaught of settlers, who pushed them farther and farther into both a literal wilderness and a figurative wilderness of confusion and fear as they sought effective ways to deal with disruptive realities from which they saw no way of escape.

No one knows how many indigenous people in 1492 lived in what today are the United States and Canada. The majority of experts have placed that number somewhere between 1 million and 4 million, with most estimates closer to the lower number. But the figures are at best educated guesses. Preliterate people don’t focus on such abstractions as taking a periodic population census and recording it for posterity.

What we do know with certainty is that America’s indigenous people had little immunity to the diseases and evils the invaders brought with them. Measles, smallpox and “firewater” wreaked havoc — in addition to the bullets fired from the guns of people who saw it as their “manifest destiny” to take from indigenous people the land they had long occupied.

In many of life’s winner-loser outcomes, the fate of the losers is all but inevitable, granted the values, resources and determination of the winners. Thus, any current celebration of the 1492 winners’ good fortune needs to be carefully calibrated — because of the emotional pain it perpetually inflicts on the losers.

Recognizing, acknowledging and working to rectify, wherever possible, the moral blindspots, inequities and shortfalls of the past is not hatred for our nation, as some suggest. Rather, it’s a love for our nation that includes a commitment to its future. Because, as George Santayana aptly noted, “Those who fail to learn the lesson of history are doomed to repeat it.”

The preceding article by Pastor Jim Coffin was printed in the Orlando Sentinel on October 8, 2026.