October is National Diversity Awareness Month

It’s Columbus Day! I don’t know what plans you’ve made, but in my family we like to mark the occasion by traveling uninvited to a stranger’s house to exchange smallpox for syphilis. Plus, it’s also Indigenous Peoples’ Day – same day. To celebrate that, I’d dearly love to travel to Alberta for a visit to the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site Interpretive Centre. But what I’ll probably actually do is cook up a nice tomato sauce and serve it over polenta, a meal that syncretizes Cristoforo Colombo’s Genoese roots with Native American crops. Then I’ll play “Apache” on Spanish guitar.