After 30 years of ongoing protests, Indigenous activists launch new campaign to remove Tampa’s Columbus statue

Since 1992, several Indigenous groups have called for the removal of Tampa’s Christopher Columbus Statue.

For Natives, Columbus represents pedophilia, slavery, rape and genocide. It’s well documented that the explorer, who was lost and found himself in Hispaniola,
committed brutal atrocities upon the peaceful Indigenous people he found there.

He and his men even fed Indigenous babies to dogs, sometimes in front of horrified parents.

And while some believe that Columbus discovered America, he never actually set foot on the continent. More than that, there were already millions of Indigenous people living in what is now called the U.S. before any European set foot on the continent.

This Saturday, the Florida Indigenous Alliance (FIA) will launch an official campaign against the statue during a protest at Columbus Statue Park, located at 300 Bayshore Blvd. in South Tampa.

In the past, FIA and other groups have gathered at the statue on what some celebrate as Columbus Day (now known in several states as Indigenous People’s Day) to demonstrate against the glorification of genocide. They’ve covered the statue in fake blood while Tampa police defended it.

But Sheridan Murphy, a longtime Indigenous rights organizer with FIA says that this time, the effort to remove the statue isn’t going to stop.

“After this Saturday, we’re going to keep the pressure on to remove it, and we’ll use every tactic we can,” Murphy said.

Murphy, FIA and the American Indian Movement have already asked current and past city councils to move the statue from the public eye, but he said they’ve not even received an acknowledgement from current city council members.

Last month, FIA sent yet another letter to city council demanding the removal of the statue.

“They haven’t responded at all,” Murphy said.

Creative Loafing Tampa Bay also emailed every city council member to ask if they had a response to the demand to move the statue, but didn’t receive an answer.

Local Indigenous people are left to wonder if the City of Tampa respects the lives of Native people, and if local leaders support the glorification of the genocide of their people.

“The celebration of Columbus’ invasion of Caribe, Arawak and Taino lands is a celebration of the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples and the theft of Indigenous lands,” a flyer for the event on Saturday reads. “Continuing to celebrate that kind of event impairs reconciliation and understanding.”

In recent years, FIA has pointed out that Germany doesn’t have statues to Hitler, and so the group wonders why Tampa continues to celebrate the genocide of Columbus when nearby St. Petersburg removed their statue to Columbus years ago.

“These statues honoring genocidal maniacs must come down!” FIA wrote in an Instagram post.

There are some who argue that Columbus’ contributions to society outweigh the atrocities he committed.

“In what has become known as the Columbian Exchange, Columbus’ voyages enabled the exchange of plants, animals, cultures, ideas (and, yes, disease) between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres,” the website Biography wrote. “Once the Europeans were able to reach nearly all parts of the globe, a new modern age would begin, transforming the world forever.”

But for Indigenous people, the transformation brought on by Columbus and other Europeans was one of enslavement and torture. African slaves were also purchased and traded on the Columbian Exchange, creating a vast international slave trade responsible for uncountable atrocities.

While Columbus was of Italian heritage, he was exploring on behalf of Spain, and for that country he helped create a very profitable chain of slavery plantations across the world.

“The Spanish were one of the first groups to trade slaves, which created a steady slave trade on the columbian exchange,” writes professor James Malloy. “This also helped boost Spanish profit.”

Others argue that removal of statues of Columbus would be “erasing history.” But as Esquire Magazine points out, real history isn’t learned from monuments that glorify brutal historical figures without any context about the horrors they committed. And moreover, there are more positive Italian historical figures that are worth celebrating in place of Columbus.

Indigenous people are tired of the U.S. glorifying profit-driven genocide. At a forum last night, multiple members of FIA pointed out that the celebration of Columbus and colonization only contributes to the suffering Natives face today.

From Missing and Murdered Indigenous women across the country, to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Native people, to the polluting of Indigenous lands to the discovery of boarding schools were Native children were tortured and killed—FIA says that all of these things are connected to the glorification of colonizers of the past.

“The reality is if we don’t address these issues, humanity is in danger,” Murphy said during the forum last night.

This article appears in Oct 6-12, 2022.