It’s that time of the year, everyone. Yes, the infamous Columbus Day has come and gone. Though the Blue Calendar does not acknowledge it anymore, that doesn’t mean that it’s not still a federal holiday. While Columbus never set foot in the territory of the United States of America, Columbus Day has occurred as a national holiday in the U.S. every October 12 since 1937. Columbus Day is celebrated then because that’s the recorded date of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas.

Recently there has been a national push towards getting rid of Columbus Day and reclaiming it in acknowledgment of America’s violent history, and for the people subjugated, pillaged, and systematically murdered in the name of ‘these great United States.’

I am among those who do not believe in the validity of Columbus Day, for it has never sat right with me given the treacherous history that it bolsters.

I’ve noticed a strange silence which permeates all conversations and lectures on what happened after ‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.’ I wonder if we do not speak to the time after the voyage because it requires the conversationalists, teachers, and the like to acknowledge the sticky details that followed. To be clear, I am referencing the rape, murder,  violent colonization, and pillaging that the ‘discovery’ inspired, and most certainly, I am referencing the development of one of the most brilliant and brutal sex, labor, child, and adult, slave trades that the world has ever seen and, furthermore, the systematic oppression that our great nation was founded on.  

We shrink away from the realities of the life of Columbus, not wanting to ruin the esteem of his discovery, but maybe it’s time we talk about it.

Columbus, an Italian merchant’s clerk and talented mariner, was under the government of the Spanish monarchy when he set out on an expedition to find the land, wealth, spices and gold in the uncharted territory across the Atlantic, which he believed to be Asia.

In 1942, Columbus and his crew approached the Americas and landed in the Bahamas where the Arawak ‘Indians,’ lived. Columbus believed the Bahamas were India and thus referred to all natives of the Americas as Indians. This incorrect naming of a people would transcend time as the accepted term for those native to America.

On the subject of the Arawaks Columbus wrote in his personal journal “They would make fine servants….we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” They wore small gold ornaments in their ears and noses, and because of that, Columbus imprisoned many, in the efforts to find their gold reserves. He then sailed the to modern-day Cuba.

In Cuba Columbus developed one of the most prosperous global child-sex-slave trades of ‘Indians’ around the globe. He did not find the spices or gold that he was in specific search of, but in another journal entry he writes about the natives, saying, “Here there are so many of these slaves…although they are living things they are as good as gold.”

When he arrived in Cuba there were about 3 million natives. By 1496, the population of indigenous people was 12,000, and by 1542, fewer than 200. By the end of the mid 16th century, every person identifying as Arawak had been wiped out. There is no other word for this pattern than genocide.

Given the horrors which Columbus committed in the Americas, celebrating the day that Columbus first made efforts to rape and subjugate an indigenous culture and people seems exceptionally inappropriate.

As of 2011, Parker no longer acknowledges Columbus Day, but the nation continues to do so. The states of Hawaii, Alaska, Oregon, and South Dakota do not celebrate Columbus day at all, and the cities of Denver and Minneapolis celebrate Indigenous People’s Day on October 12 instead. Others celebrate Italian Heritage day instead, to recognize Italians who made positive impacts on society such as Galileo Galilei, Saint Francis of Assisi, or Leonardo Da Vinci.

It is my hope that one day, Parker, Chicago, Illinois, and the country at large adopt the custom of celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day or Italian Heritage Day and for starters simply stop celebrating Christopher Columbus.

For now, I want the readers of this paper to think twice before celebrating Columbus Day. I want people to make a conscious decision to learn about U.S. history through the lens of those who found themselves crushed beneath the working wheel of innovation and discovery and the ‘American Dream,’ and to consider them as human beings, as people worth being acknowledged, mourned, people whose resilience calls for celebration.