The movement to rename Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day has taken on renewed steam this year, with a number of cities across the country adopting the new name for the controversial October holiday. The shift makes sense, not just because of the horrors that Columbus helped usher into the Americas (and that he personally supported in many cases), but also because of the thorough absence of Native Americans from our roster of national holidays.
If it takes renaming an existing federal holiday to bring Native Americans into those collective American conversations (where, inarguably, they have played a more central role than an Italian explorer sailing for Spain who never set foot on what would become the United States), that seems a more-than-worthwhile step.
Yet at the same time, before we move away from Columbus Day we can and should better engage with a number of telling historical contexts for the holiday, each of which can help connect us to forgotten American histories. For example, while some of us know about the role Italian Americans played in the holiday’s late-19th century growth, there’s virtually no collective memory of the historical event that most contributed to that trend.
That would be the 1891 lynching of 11 Sicilian immigrants in New Orleans, triggered by the killing of the city’s police commissioner (a crime for which all 11 men had been found innocent). President Benjamin Harrison’s 1892 call for a national observance of Columbus Day, while connected to the 400th anniversary of the explorer’s first voyage, was also a rebuttal to this act of mob violence and the anti-Italian sentiments it reflected.
Remembering the histories of Columbus Day not only connects us to such forgotten events, but also shows us how our collective mythos of the explorer has developed alongside our national identity. In order to get to the point of naming an official national holiday after Columbus, another American history first had to unfold: the gradual mythologizing of Columbus, both as the “discoverer” of the new world and as a beneficent patron of all its peoples.
That process began around the time of the American Revolution, when the concept of the new nation as “Columbia” truly took shape. In works like poet and minister Joel Barlow’s bestselling epic The Vision of Columbus (1787), later revised as The Columbiad (1807), the explorer became the symbol for that idealized image of the United States. And in his hugely popular fictionalized biography A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), American mythmaker par excellence Washington Irving cemented both the links between Columbus and America and the images of the explorer as a friend to Native Americans (among many other striking inaccuracies).this is a rewrite of real history why did they feel throughout history they needed to glamorized the moral-less figures of their descendants while they carry on the vile and humane acts of those same descendants????????? click the link below get the 411 on ol' Chris himself.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/10/14/8-myths-and-atrocities-about-christopher-columbus-and-columbus-day-151653
