Columbus Day, or ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’?

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Reuters
Native American activists “laughed, wept and sang their way out of Seattle’s City Hall” last week after City Council members unanimously voted to approve an official renaming of Columbus Day as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” according to Daniel Beekman at The Seattle Times.
“This is about taking a stand against racism and discrimination,” said the council member Kshama Sawant in an interview with The Times. Christopher Columbus played “such a pivotal role in the worst genocide humankind has ever known,” she explained. “Learning about the history of Columbus and transforming this day into a celebration of indigenous people and a celebration of social justice … allows us to make a connection between this painful history and the ongoing marginalization, discrimination and poverty that indigenous communities face to this day.”
The resolution was met by a small but passionate opposition. “Italian Americans are deeply offended,” the Seattle resident Lisa Marchese told Mr. Beekman. Given the 15th century explorer’s roots in Genoa, Italy, Columbus Day is often used as an occasion to celebrate Italian-American heritage. “In the council chambers Monday, a half-dozen people held Italian flags to demonstrate their support for Columbus Day,” Mr. Beekman reports. “By this resolution you say to all Italian Americans that the city of Seattle no longer deems your heritage or your community worthy of recognition,” Ms. Marchese said.
Today marks the first celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Minneapolis as well. “Poetry, music, dance and a ‘pre-colonization’ feast will be part of the celebration,” reports Erin Golden for The Star Tribune. “It’s a validation and a correction of a historical wrong that has perpetuated a negative image of American Indian people,” explained Jay Bad Heart Bull, president of the Native American Community Development Institute, speaking with Ms. Golden, “by celebrating somebody that has really been nothing but bad for American Indian people and indigenous people across this continent.”
Public schools in Portland, Ore., are instituting a similar shift in focus. In Hawaii, the holiday is known as “Discoverers’ Day,” in honor of the Polynesian settlers who first populated the islands. “In South Dakota, it’s known as Native Americans’ Day,” according to Kelly House, writing for The Oregonian.
It’s a controversial day with a turbulent history. “This historically problematic holiday — Columbus never actually set foot on the continental U.S. — has made an increasing number of people wince, given the enslavement and genocide of Native American people that followed in the wake of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria,” writesYvonne Zipp for The Christian Science Monitor. “The neighborhood wasn’t exactly empty when he arrived in 1492.”
Back in 1992 — 500 years after Columbus’s fateful landing in the Caribbean — Berkeley, Calif., was the first American city to repurpose his day in honor of Native America. “Talk of an alternative Columbus Day dates back to the 1970s,” writes Nolan Feeney for Time, “but the idea came to Berkeley after the First Continental Conference on 500 Years of Indian Resistance in Quito, Ecuador, in 1990. That led to another conference among Northern Californian Native American groups.” Attendees brought the idea in front of the Berkeley City Council, after which they “appointed a task force to investigate the ideas and Columbus’ historical legacy.” Two years later, council members officially instated Indigenous Peoples’ Day in lieu of Columbus by a unanimous vote.
The California state senator Lori Hancock, then the mayor of Berkeley, remembers encountering Italian-American pushback similar to that in Seattle. “We just had to keep reiterating that that was not the purpose,” she told Mr. Feeney. “The purpose was to really affirm the incredible legacy of the indigenous people who were in the North American continent long before Columbus.”
And it’s worth noting that not all Italian-Americans tote Christopher Columbus as a symbol of cultural pride. “Those supposed leaders in the Italian-American community who oppose Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the same day as Columbus Day do not speak for all of us of Italian descent,” writes Margaret Viggiani of Seattle in a letter to The Seattle Times. “They certainly don’t speak for me. I, and many others, agree wholeheartedly with the long-overdue change and applaud the Seattle City Council for doing it.”
“Why should anyone take pride in honoring the life of a man who brought misery and degradation of the native peoples of this hemisphere?” she asks. “It’s time to give due to the important and overlooked accomplishments of the many indigenous people who inhabited this hemisphere long before it was named the Americas.”
Others have suggested Italian-Americans affix their pride to other cultural icons — significant individuals of Italian-American heritage, like Antonio Meucci, credited with inventing the telephone; or Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to hold the office of speaker of the House in the United States Congress. “But I’d also suggest that most of the Italian-Americans really came to this country looking for safety and economic opportunity,” Ms. Hancock told Time. “And I’m sure we could find some of the Italian-Americans who stood up for that and helped make that happen. Maybe we should look into that. The Berkeley City Council, as you know, will consider many things!”
In any case, the importance placed on Columbus and his involvement with the colonization of the Americas may be exaggerated on both sides of the debate. Per usual, politics, contemporary and historical, have had a profound effect on who is remembered, and who is forgotten. As Christopher Wanjek wrotefor Live Science back in 2011, “What Columbus ‘discovered’ was the Bahamas and then an island later named Hispaniola, now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On his subsequent voyages he went farther south, to Central and South America. He never got close to what is now called the United States.”
“So why does the United States celebrate the guy who thought he found a nifty new route to Asia and the lands described by Marco Polo?” Mr. Wanjek wonders. “This is because the early United States was fighting with England, not Spain. John Cabot (a.k.a. Giovanni Caboto, another Italian) ‘discovered’ Newfoundland in England’s name around 1497 and paved the way for England’s colonization of most of North America,” he explains. “So the American colonialists instead turned to Columbus as their hero, not England’s Cabot. Hence we have the capital, Washington, D.C. — that’s District of Columbia, not District of Cabot.”