In the United States, they celebrate Columbus Day every year on the second Monday of October, more because of an Italian-American tradition rather than commemorating the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the lands they later called the American continent.
More U.S. cities are joining in repealing this celebration and replacing it with the day of the country’s native peoples.
The last one to do so was Washington D.C. The District of Columbia approved last week to abolish Columbus Day and change it to Indigenous Peoples Day. The change will last only a year, as Alaa Elassar reports on CNN. What the council approved was an emergency legislation: as an NBC Washington report points out, a permanent reform of the law would be necessary so that Columbus Day does not return to D.C. next year.
Eight states, more than 130 cities and 10 U.S. universities have already replaced Columbus Day for Indigenous Peoples Day or Native American Day, Grace Hauck reports for USA Today.
According to the latest U.S. Census (2018), its territory is home to 6.8 million Native Americans –American Indians and Alaska Natives. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the country as Indigenous Nations “with an ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity,” according to the National Congress of American Indians. Of these, 229 are located in Alaska and the rest in 35 other U.S. states.
Columbus Day has been a federal holiday – celebrated nationwide – since 1937. As Yolanda Monge writes for El País, “the figure of the explorer, associated in the U.S. more with his italianness than with Spanish history, has become a controversial symbol in recent years.”
The Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Isabel and Fernando, funded Christopher Columbus’ trips to the Indies that ended, as of 1492, on the southernmost coasts of what is now America. The origin of Columbus has also been discussed, but there are more coincidences that he comes from Genova, Italy.
Although Italian explorer Christopher Columbus is often credited as being the “discoverer” of the New World, millions of people already inhabited the Americas, and the Vikings had reached North America nearly five centuries earlier. Columbus made four expeditions to the Caribbean and South America over two decades, enslaving and decimating local populations and opening the floodgates of European colonization,” USA Today’s Grace Hauck writes .
On these arguments –the killings of native population and the fact that Columbus never set foot on the coasts of North America–, these states and cities approved the suppression of Columbus Day.
Wisconsin, Hauck reported, also approved last week the formal recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day as a replacement for Columbus Day. That state is home to 11 recognized native tribes. In April, Maine and New Mexico changed the name of Columbus Day, followed by Vermont. By 2016, 2017 and 2018, Minnesota, Alaska and North Carolina had done so.
In 2017, the city of Los Angeles made the change of names and celebrations and the following year they removed the statue of Columbus from the city center.
There are other mixed formulas, Grace Hauck reports. Last April in Oklahoma, Republican Governor Kevin Stitt – the only governor in the United States, writes Hauck, who is a member of a Native American tribe – approved the celebration of the two festivities on the same day.
They’re doing something similar in Alabama, which celebrates American Indian Heritage Day, Hauck adds, and also in cities like New York, Connecticut and Oklahoma.
In South Dakota, they commemorate Native American Day since 1990. California, Nevada and Tennessee celebrate it in September, the fourth Friday the first two, and the fourth Monday the last.
Local and state measures to suppress Columbus Day and replace it with a day for indigenous peoples also have their naysayers. Yolanda Monge interviewed Jack Evans, one of the District of Columbia councilmen who opposed the change in Washington. Evans stated that he supports the existence of a day for Native Americans, but not at the expense of eliminating Columbus Day. He also told her that many of his voters contacted him to complain about what they considered an unfair decision.
On the other hand, in New Jersey they stopped the proposal to so something similar as D.C., because of pressure from U.S. groups, who considered the proposal to be “propaganda,” according to Grace Hauck’s report.
Today will take place the 75th Columbus Day parade along Fifth Avenue in New York City — home to a large Italian-American community –. “The world’s largest celebration of Italian-American culture ,” according to the Columbus Citizens Foundation, organizer of the parade. About 130 groups will parade “to celebrate the spirit of exploration and courage that inspired Christopher Columbus’s 1492 expedition to America and and the important contributions of Italian-Americans and other immigrants that followed,” as the foundation describes.