Why Are Some Americans Cancelling Columbus Day?

Some U.S. cities and states have officially changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day. Learn why -- and why some Americans disagree with the change -- in this episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum Here for more than five hundred
years after stepping ashore on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola,
Christopher Columbus is a divisive figure here in the so
called New World. He opened to European explorers and colonists
on the second Monday in October. As many Americans celebrate

(00:23):
Columbus Day with a fall cookout or big sales at
the mall, others will observe Indigenous People's Day, a holiday
born of protest against a conflicting historical icon. In May
of twenty nineteen, Vermont became the most recent state to
officially replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day. Vermont joined
North Carolina, Alaska, South Dakota, Oregon, Minnesota, Maine, and New Mexico,

(00:45):
plus the District of Columbia and at least a hundred
and thirty cities across the United States that have replaced
Columbus Day over the tainted legacy of the fifteenth century explorer.
Columbus was once revered as the brave navigator from Genoa, Italy,
who defied credit to seek out a Western passage to India. Sure,
he miscalculated the distance from Spain to India by nearly

(01:06):
eight thousand nautical miles that's around fourteen thousand kilometers, but
he stumbled onto two continents largely unknown to the Europeans
in the process, and no Columbus never actually stepped foot
in North America, but many European Americans still saw him
as the nation's de facto discoverer. But then a new
image of Columbus began to emerge. From his journals. We

(01:28):
learned that when Columbus first met the indigenous Hyeno people
of the Caribbean Islands and noted that they were peaceful
and didn't have advanced weapons technology, his first thought was
to enslave them. Columbus wrote, they would make good servants.
With fifty men, they can all be subjugated and made
to do what is required of them. Indeed, on Columbus's
second voyage to the America's he rounded up one thousand,

(01:50):
five hundred native Arowak men, women and children and held
them in pens while his ships prepared to sail back
to Spain. He chose five hundred to be taken to
Europe and sold into slavery. Two hundred of them died
on the journey, and those who remained in their homeland
through a combination of forced labor in Spanish colonies and
European diseases like smallpox, the native populations of the Bahamas

(02:12):
and Hispaniola were virtually wiped out within decades of Columbus's arrival.
By low estimates, there were one hundred thousand Arawak on
Hispaniola in fourteen. By fifteen fourteen, only thirty two thousand remained,
and by fifteen forty two there were only two hundred.
Some historians claimed that up to three million Tyano died
in that same time period. We spoke with Carrie Gibson,

(02:36):
historian and author of Empires Crossroads, a History of the
Caribbean from Columbus to the present day. She said Columbus
didn't come over in the spirit of scientific inquiry and
cultural sensitivity of First, he was mistaken in his navigation. Second,
he was looking for gold and for people to enslave.
When you realize that, it's very hard to still hold

(02:56):
him up as a positive symbol, it makes a lot
of sense that some people are pushing back against Columbus
day The movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's
Day started back in nineteen seventy seven at a United
Nations International Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations. Instead of
celebrating Columbus's arrival as the foundation of the America's, participants

(03:17):
proposed an alternative holiday that would recognize that Native people's
had inhabited these lands for millennia. South Dakota ditched Columbus
Day for Native Americans Day in ninete in Berkeley, California,
became the first place to switch to Indigenous People's Day.
In Since then, more cities and states have distanced themselves
from Columbus and embraced a new holiday that, in the

(03:39):
words of Maine's proclamation, celebrates quote the historic, cultural, and
contemporary significance of the indigenous peoples of the lands that
later became known as the Americas. The anti Columbus Day
movement has its detractors, though some believe it's a case
of political correctness run wild, while others alleged that repealing
Columbus Day would be in a front to another ethnic group,

(04:01):
Italian Americans. The National Italian American Foundation or n i
a F wrote in a statement when Columbus Day was
founded in nineteen thirty seven. The federal holiday provided a
sense of dignity and self worth in light of the
hostility and discrimination that many Italian immigrants, Italian Americans, and
Catholics more broadly faced. An estimated four million Italian immigrants

(04:24):
came to America between eighteen eighty and nineteen twenty, mostly
farmers fleeing desperate poverty in their home country. Italian immigrants
faced terrible discrimination and outright violence, and early Italian American
civic groups latched onto the Genovesi Columbus as a symbol
of pride, connecting Italians to the broader American experience. The
first Columbus Day celebration was in seventeen ninety two to

(04:46):
commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to
America in San Francisco. Italian communities started celebrating an annual
Columbus Day as early as eighteen sixty nine. Then, in
eighteen ninety one, the Italian immigrant community in New Orleans
was the victim of the largest mass lynching in US history.
Eleven people were killed. Following this, in President Benjamin Harrison

(05:10):
called for a general holiday the four anniversary of Columbus
landing and proclaimed Columbus a pioneer of progress and enlightenment.
At the urging of the Knights of Columbus. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt made Columbus Day an official federal holiday in seven
and the holiday has since become a day when many
Italian Americans celebrate their heritage through community festivals and parades.

(05:33):
Given the painful history that led to the founding of
Columbus Day, groups like the n I a F are
some of the staunchest opponents of state and national efforts
to erase it from the calendar. The n I a
F wrote, we believe that to repeal Columbus Day as
a federal holiday, which is celebrated by over twenty million
Italian Americans, only to replace it by another holiday celebrated
by another ethnic group would be culturally insensitive. The group

(05:57):
says it does not oppose in Jenous People's Day as
long as held on another day beside Columbus Day. Gibson
the Historian doesn't have an easy answer for solving the
Columbus Day controversy, but encourages deeper reflection on the long
and complicated history of the lands and people that we
call American. She said, the minute Columbus arrived in Hispaniola,

(06:18):
everything changed. We're still having discussions about how it changed,
and historians are still dealing with the legacy of that
initial encounter. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and
produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more on this
and lots of other controversial topics, visit our home planet,

(06:40):
how Stuff Works dot com, and for more podcast from
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.