Columbus Day vs. Indigenous People's Day
By Antara Singh-Ghai '22
GFA students did not have school on Monday, October 12th, due to the federal holiday Columbus Day, which is being renamed across the country as Indigenous People's Day.
While the holiday is still officially known as Columbus Day in Connecticut, several states, such as Vermont and Maine, along with the District of Columbia, have moved to rename the holiday. This shift has mainly occurred due to a growing tide of criticism against Columbus's legacy several centuries after he died. Much scrutiny has focused on Columbus's legacy in Hispaniola. Initially describing the native Taino people as peaceful and friendly, he instituted a brutal forced labour system on them in the search for gold for the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand. Spaniards brutally punished the Taino if they did not bring sufficient gold, chopping their arms off. They did not have enough time to farm their crops, leading to widespread deaths and dropping birth rates. This system, along with diseases brought by Spanish explorers, eventually led to the death of all Taino people on the island, along with the extinction of Taino culture. While nothing can be done today about the ramifications of Columbus's actions on Hispaniola, Indigenous activists claim that celebrating a person who committed such horrific crimes is wrong and reflects poorly on America.
Criticism of Columbus's actions has coincided with rising doubts about his claim to fame: "discovering" the Americas. People were living on the continent for centuries before his arrival on the island of Hispaniola in 1492, making it impossible to discover. There is also strong evidence suggesting that Europeans, such as Vikings in present-day Greenland and Eastern Canada, had reached North America before Columbus arrived. Indigenous activists claim that there is no point in celebrating someone who did not even achieve his main legacy of discovering the Americas.
Proponents of maintaining Columbus Day claim that the day is not about the man's actions or being the first person to "discover" the Americas, but the legacy of his journey, leading directly to European colonization and the United States' founding. Some proponents also see it as a way to celebrate a person of Italian heritage, which is particularly important given the large number of people in the United States of Italian descent today.
By shifting Columbus Day from its traditional focus on the man who "sailed the ocean blue" to a day celebrating the indigenous people of the Americas, Indigenous rights activists want to reclaim a holiday based on a man who they say led to the destruction of their cultures and forced displacement from their ancestral lands. Proponents of Columbus Day, however, claim that his actions are an important part of history that cannot be erased regardless of the holiday existing or not.
