Indigenous Peoples Day and the Italian Medici Family
Bronze bust by Benvenuto Cellini of Cosimo I de’ Medici (1546-7)
The night before Indigenous Peoples Day, I reflected on what was evoked for me. Indigenous People’s Day, formally recognized by President Biden also happened to be the last day of the Medici Portraits and Politics 1312-1570 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so I went and continued my reflections.
Like many artists of my generation, I cut my painting teeth on a close study of the Italian artists of the Renaissance, particularly Leonardo DaVinci (1452- 1518) whose career overlapped this period. But as a child, I never paid equally close attention to the traumatic conflicts Florence suffered as various European factions struggled for regional power. If I had, it might not have shocked me as much to eventually learn how ruthless colonial powers were with Indigenous Peoples.
The Met did a superb job of weaving together the chronology of bloodthirstiness as family members killed each other off, that era’s interpretation of power, made strategic marriages and enjoyed homoerotic cultural circles. What is remarkable to me about the portraits is how thin the painting is, only finding a release of brushwork in the illustration of light in the sumptuous fabrics. The features, even of the hands, are routinely highly stylized, for example in works by Pontormo. Despite that rigidity, the eyes are astonishingly communicative. That was no more apparent than in a bust by Cellini of Cosimo I de’ Medici (1546-7). There are a number of notable exceptions, including a stunning portrait of Michelangelo by Daniele da Volterra (ca. 1544). In passing, it was mentioned that Alessandro, one of the powerful men murdered by family, was likely the illegitimate son of a woman of color, probably a slave. Unsaid, was that she was also likely a victim of rape and forced sex enslavement. There was and probably could not be found, what her origins might have been. Given the timeline, I imagine she may have been a descendant of the Arawak peoples, whom Columbus described as comely, gracious and gentle, but as they were unlettered heathens, prime property, free for the taking to delver as chattel, albeit to another oligarchy, the Spanish crown.
I’ve learned a lot form Indigenous Peoples and still do. I can’t think of anything I’ve learned from Christopher Columbus except about a trajectory of rape and pillage in the name of gold and Christianity, starting with the Arawak people some of whom still survive in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean outposts . On the other hand, Columbus was a man of his times with his own ideals. Under the fine clothing and classical salons, Europe was a savage, brutal place, home of the unholy inquisition as the Renaissance advanced into the Age of Enlightenment.
One of the lessons I’ve struggled to learn from the Indigenous peoples I’ve known has been how to distance myself from outrage by conceiving of injury in time, in which any individual injury is part of a greater plan. I’ve probably gotten this all wrong but about twenty years ago a wonderful Native American woman with whom I was chatting at a Society for Ecological Restoration conference said, “you can’t sustain anger. It’s too exhausting.” I’ve noticed.
As far as I can tell, the way Native Americans have endured the horrible wrongs perpetrated on them has been two ideas that are inherently foreign to me., but I’ve tried to learn from. The first is a matrix of beliefs inextricable from a relationship that goes back thousands of years to a particular place. The second is interdependent with the first, which is how family, traditions, rituals and beliefs are entwined with that relationship to land.
It is therefore chillingly cruel to consider how the Tribes have been driven from their lands, how the children have been ripped from loving arms and in many cases “disappeared,” and how until very recently, their cultures have been entirely suppressed in the name of “civilizing them,” a misnomer for enslaving and exploiting people who were far more civilized than their oppressors. And yet, whenever I’ve spoken with Native American friends, I always express more anger than they do. How to understand that?
At the recent Rising Voices international conference for Native peoples, it was striking how often the importance of acknowledging family relationships was a priori to any other interactions. That is, an admonishment to, “ask first, how is the family?” The other striking point made, again by a Native American woman to me was that in Native communities, “we don’t ask questions, we listen to our elders.” This to a person who prides herself on asking good questions and since maturity has always looked askance at the “authority” of my elders.
When the Native Americans I know speak of listening to the Elders, they don’t just mean the oldest people in their tribes. They mean the ancestors who speak to them in ceremonies, dreams and visions. My ancestors were always too busy fleeing oppressions for thousands of years from land to land to ever connect with the wisdom of a particular land.
Now, as the world faces grand catastrophes, many of us are looking with hope to Native peoples who have millenia of experience dealing with habitat extremes. And yet, across the globe, especially in the Amazon but also in African forests and really intercontinentally, genocide has become an unapologetic and routine weapon to perpetrate ecocidal extractions at the hands of international corporations and many nation states.
It may be inarguable that when Christopher Columbus set foot on the “new” lands, he set in motion centuries of genocidal ecocide. When he and his crew debarked, that was what I would call a trigger point, the place where events and agents come together to set in motion a tipping point, with endless cascades awash in the blood of millions of lives.
I can understand the conflicts of Italian Americans who want to retain their pride in a man from their own country they regard as a hero. But it seems to me that the white western European world has far too many “heroes” with clay feet and bloody hands. It is a hard thing to let go of a hero, a symbol of pride. It is the same problem many Americans from Southern states have faced recently as statues of confederate militia have been retired. It seems it is also very similar to how many Republicans seem to feel about the former President. Another striking distinction between Native Peoples and the white supremacist dominant culture epitomized by the current RNC, is the emphasis amongst the Tribes on the good of a whole community, which includes all the animals, plants, rocks and waters that make up familial systems, as Winona LaDuke has written about it. That community ideal is in stark contrast to golden European heroes, preferably blond.
The notion of a golden hero is very close to a monarchist ideal and evidently dear to the hearts of many Americans, but it seems the drive to rename Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples Day, may be a case of tearing a Dorian Gray delusion off of a corrupt and putrescent picture.
Does that sound angry? Yes, of course it is. I can’t deny my anger but I can see the greater Zen picture. In that picture, Christopher Columbus was an historical figure who moved the Earth for misguided reasons and with devastating and continuing consequences. In the end, he was simply the tool of a greedy Spanish monarchy. It was an era of many greedy monarchies, each trying to out do the other for dominance and wealth as they proudly waved their crosses at the heathens and milked their own citizens. Not much common good and community accountability in that model. I would rather spend the day commemorating the joy, beauty and wisdom of the survivors of all those murdered cultures.