By Brian Montano

Monday, October 11th, was Indigenous People’s Day, or, the holiday formerly known as Columbus Day. Columbus, as we know, is the man who is historically credited with having discovered the “New World”, the American continents of the Western hemisphere, despite there being millions of inhabitants across a plethora of cultures and societies already living there. It’s no surprise to many of us now that what we learned in our history classes did not paint the clearest or most accurate picture of Columbus’ actions. To the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Christopher Columbus is a symbol of a tradition of violence and repression from European colonizers that lasted for hundreds of years. Before 1492, the date of Columbus’ infamous voyage, the population of Indigenous Americans is estimated to have been over 60 million. Columbus brought war, famine, genocide, and disease to the Americas, and within 100 years of his first voyage, the population of Indigenous peoples had already been decimated, and that’s putting it lightly. By that point, they had been brought down to 6 million, a shift so drastic that it’s been theorized that the planet’s average temperature dropped by 0.15 degrees Celsius. On top of that, Columbus was involved in creating the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which spawned a generations-long enslavement of African people in the New World. In the United States today, there are fewer than 7 million people who identify as having ancestry in the indigenous tribes of America, Alaska Natives, or Pacific Islanders. Columbus was never the hero that many of us were brought up to believe he was, and a major struggle for indigenous storytellers is in catching up the general audience as to what really happened in history, and how the legacy of Columbus and colonization is one of immeasurable damage.

Since the 1970s, Indigenous activists and their allies have been pushing for a change from memorializing Columbus to instead celebrating the peoples who lived here before and after him on “Indigenous Peoples Day”. There has been significant pushback to this from traditionalists who claim that Columbus should continue to be celebrated as the brave adventurer who connected people across continents, but finally, on October 8th of this year, the White House under the Biden administration has recognized Indigenous Peoples Day as a federal holiday for the very first time. This is a big step forward in changing the narrative of Columbus to one that is more honest, one that acknowledges the hardships faced by the Indigenous people of the United States, though there is still a major gap to be filled when it comes to education on the subject. For hundreds of years, Native voices were silenced and suppressed, and this cannot continue. Take time to educate yourself on the history of our nation’s Indigenous tribes, their cultures, and the contributions they have made to literature, the arts, politics, and American society at large. For anyone looking for some reading, I recommend Layli Long Soldier’s prose poem “38”, as well as the works of Joy Harjo and Mark Turcotte.