What do you think about Columbus Day?

[LAS14]

I'm listening to an interview with someone advocating replacing Columbus Day with Native Peoples Day. I have a vivid sense of our need to render more respect to native peoples, and to adjust our history books to tell all sides (if that's ever possible) of what went on when Europeans took over this country.

But what should have happened instead? Something different, for sure. But is the alternative to leave north and south America centuries in the dust for all sorts of human achievement?

Puzzled.

Thoughts?

tia
las

[samnsara]

1. i dont care what they call it..yawn..we dont celebrate it anyway in the PNW, but when I was in RI...

...wow they had fairs and parades and caramel corn and everything. I might like it better if I lived there.

[Drahthaardogs]

7. That's because the east coast has a large italian population

Like St. Patrick's Day in Boston

[Ferrets are Cool]

11. Wow! So you have no problem celebrating

a day named after a known rapist of women and children as well as a man who committed genocide as LONG AS there are parades and caramel corn. Just wow.

[Kaleva]

17. Christmas and Easter are worse

Holidays that celebrate a myth used to condone the murder, slavery and persecution of countless millions. Then there's the 4th of July . A holiday celebrating the declaration of independence for a nation that started illegal wars and exterminated native nations.

I hope you don't celebrate those holidays used to justify crimes against humanity.

[cally]

2. Indigenous People's Day

First time in California

[nocoincidences]

3. I like the Canadian name of First Nations

Call it First Nations Day.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. Here in New Mexico they call it

Indigenous Peoples Day.

I don't recall Columbus Day as ever being anything other than a school holiday. I was never aware of parades or any such where I grew up. I never worked a job where I had this particular holiday off. In recent years there has been an inappropriate (in my opinion) condemnation of Christopher Columbus and the diseases he brought to this part of the world. While he wasn't a very nice man, he was completely a man of his time, no worse than any of the other Europeans who came here.

As for the disease thing, it's important to understand that the people who were already here had never been exposed to the diseases the Europeans had been living with for centuries, sometimes thousands of years. Even if the Europeans who came here had been deeply respectful of the existing inhabitants, those inhabitants were going to be decimated by disease. There is no way around it. And yes, I know there were instances of the natives being given blankets that had last covered someone dying of smallpox, demonstrating a pretty keen sense of the germ theory of disease, it wasn't those few blankets that made a difference. It was, quite simply, the interaction of people who'd been separated for too long, and only one side of the interaction brought contagious diseases to the interaction.

Anyway, my local library is closed tomorrow, along with state and federal offices. I rather doubt very many people are doing any meaningful observance of any kind.

[struggle4progress]

5. I listen to this on "Columbus Day"

[Drahthaardogs]

6. Columbus Day was made a national holiday as pay-back

To the decades of oppression of Italian Americans. Personally I wish they would change the name but keep the meaning.

[meadowlander]

8. Because any country not colonised by white people

Must be “left in the dust of history”? Really?

Third world countries are poor because their natural resources and the resultant wealth were stripped by colonisers, not because white people are inherently more innovative than anyone else.

Native Americans bred potatoes, tomatoes and corn. They made massive contributions to our understanding of agricultural practices and to world cuisine. And that’s not even starting to get into all the inventions we owe to the Chinese and to Arab culture.

[democratisphere]

9. All Native American's Day

Christopher Columbus and the Vikings did not discover America. All Native Americans discovered the Americas.

[MineralMan]

10. I think it should be abolished altogether.

If we need a Monday holiday, we should do what some states, like Minnesota, have done. Rename the day in honor of all the indigenous people whose lives were lost in the genocide brought to the Western Hemisphere by white Europeans.

In Minnesota, today is Indigenous People's Day. It is a day of mourning and remembrance. It is not a happy day of celebration.

Few remain of the native peoples who were here when the West was invaded by religious and military people from Europe. In many, many cases, the entire genetic line is now gone of those peoples.

It is our shame. We cannot undo the horror we brought to these shores. The least we can do is recognize what our ancestors have done and take a day of regret for their actions.

[malaise]

12. I post this every year

https://m.

[JHan]

14. truths

[SweetieD]

13. I'm OK with calling it indigenous people's day. However, European contact radically

devastated not just the Americas but also Africa. The first African slaves began being exported to the Americas less than ten years later and the trade went on to last about 375 years, longer than the US has even been in existence.

[Mosby]

16. the Arab slave trade of africans went on for 1400 years

Starting in the late 600s.
https://atlantablackstar.com/2014/06/02/10-facts-about-the-arab-enslavement-of-black-people-not-taught-in-schools/

[WeekiWater]

15. I think the trash company is picking up today...

And I'll be putting in a full day at work.

This will probably be the most I hear of the holiday.