Americans are guaranteed a minimum of five extended weekends every year. These include the Martin Luther King Day, Presidents Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day holidays, plus the second Monday in October’s one-day vacation from work. In fact, there can be as many as nine three-day weekends in a calendar year, since any time June 19th (Juneteenth), November 11th (Veterans Day), July 4th (Independence Day), or December 25th (Christmas) falls on a Monday or a Friday, it creates another government-approved three-day weekend.
This coming Monday’s day off occurs during what in much of the country is the nicest time of year. Early October in Maine brings pleasant daytime temperatures, cool, crisp evenings, spectacular foliage, slackening traffic, fewer pesky insects, and hardly any signs of the grim five-month winter that lies ahead.
But not everyone is unconditionally enthusiastic about the impending holiday.
The reproachful glance a younger colleague shot at me when I asked if he had anything special planned for Columbus Day weekend was the sort one ordinarily reserves for drug dealers wearing swastika-festooned motorcycle helmets who have just loudly broken wind in church.
“It’s Indigenous Peoples Day,” he huffed in a tone suggesting I had just proposed naming a federal holiday for Osama bin Laden. Actually though, he was right. Multiple states no longer celebrate Columbus Day. Monday is officially Indigenous Peoples Day in Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Maine, and Native American Day in South Dakota.
Schoolchildren of my vintage learned that Italian navigator Christopher Columbus was a determined, plucky underdog who had to go to another country (Spain) to get the funding necessary to sail across the Atlantic and discover America.
But subsequent societal changes, including the revolutionary idea that fact should be more important than folklore when it comes to teaching history, have radically changed Columbus’s image. While he may indeed have been an intrepid explorer, he was also guilty of committing and/or tolerating acts including murder, enslavement, human trafficking, and a variety of similar atrocities which shouldn’t entitle someone to have a holiday named for him.
When it comes debating Christopher Columbus’s worthiness I have no ethnicity- based bias. My lineage contains no connection to any Italians, Spaniards, or indigenous peoples. Then again, maybe it does, since no one in my family seems to know much about the ancestors who preceded us by more than four generations.
But while committing the sorts of atrocities Columbus and his barbarians did is hardly a basis for sainthood, the late 15th and early 16th centuries weren’t marked by good behavior of Caucasians who traveled to other continents seeking new opportunities. While their conduct was far from praiseworthy, it reflected Europe’s status quo at the time. Had the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria all somehow ended up in Davy Jones’s locker, it’s unlikely Amerigo Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama, or whichever European explorer got to North America first would have treated the natives any differently than Columbus and his crew did. They were products of their time, albeit a far less-enlightened one.
Most people are resistant to change, which explains why those familiar with Columbus Day are having a hard time transitioning to a newly-renamed “Day” that’s got twice as many syllables.
Given the abuse North America’s native denizens have been suffering since the initial plague of European invaders began arriving 534 years ago, I’d say it’s appropriate to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.
But there are limits to political correctness. Don’t hold your breath waiting for lawmakers in the Buckeye State to rename their capital city Indigenous Peoples, Ohio.
Andy YoungReturn to main page
Font size: