“Columbus Taking Possession,” an 1893 painting by L. Prang & Co., Boston.
Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day? Several residents at the September 19 Select Board meeting argued in favor of changing the name of the holiday in Lincoln, though the speakers were not unanimous.
As of October 2021, more than 20 Massachusetts towns including Boston had changed the name of the holiday, and a statewide Indigenous People’s Day bill is being considered by state legislature.
Columbus Day, which commemorates the arrival in the Americas of Columbus (a native of Italy whose voyages were subsidized by the Spanish crown) on October 12, 1492, has been a federal holiday in the U.S. since 1934. The first recognition of the anniversary on a national level was in 1892, when President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration after a mob murdered 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans, according to Wikipedia, which notes that “the proclamation was part of a wider effort after the lynching incident to placate Italian Americans and ease diplomatic tensions with Italy.” Many Italian-Americans now observe Columbus Day more as a celebration of their heritage rather than of Columbus specifically.
Washington Irving’s 1828 book A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus “is the source of much of the glorification and myth-making related to Columbus today and is considered highly fictionalized,” NPR noted in 2013 (“How Columbus Sailed Into U.S. History, Thanks to Italians”). However, public opinion has been turning against Columbus, a change initially fueled by A People’s History of the United States, a leftist view of the country’s past that was published in 1980. It’s now accepted by most that Columbus and his Spanish crewmen enslaved and killed Native Americans, who also died in great numbers from smallpox and other diseases introduced by the Europeans.
“Even at a very basic level, we can understand that we’re memorializing brutality, we’re memorializing abuse, we’re memorializing enslavement,” said Lincoln resident Jason Packineau, who is an enrolled citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota. “I see this name change as an opportunity for leadership, an opportunity to understand we can speak the truth, self-evaluate and learn, and pursue justice.”
Columbus Day serves to “celebrate and honor the value of conquest and war. We know now that Columbus was not only part of that tradition, but he was a particularly brutal participant,” Jena Salon, a member of WIDE Lincoln, said in a statement at the board meeting. “There is no excuse to continue to celebrate and uplift this individual or the tradition from which he comes. We are here to ask the Select Board to stop listing a holiday on our town calendar which explicitly glorifies genocide and human rights violations. This seems like an easy change, one that requires little effort. If we aren’t willing to stand on the right side of issues when they require no sacrifice, what does that say about our true commitment to inclusion, equity, justice, and diversity?”
But John Toto, a Wayland resident and board member of the Italian American Alliance (IAA), argued against changing the name of the holiday. Although he said he agreed that Indigenous people should have their own holiday, he slammed Zinn’s book as being “not true academic knowledge.” He added that Native Americans “also practiced human trafficking, rape as a war tactic, cannibalism — you name it. We don’t talk about that and I wonder why.”
The move to rename Columbus Day is “denigrating him and in fact denigrating Italians,” Toto added. There’s a great deal of divisiveness in the country today, “and this is perpetrating more of that.” He also noted that the day after Thanksgiving was designated as Native American Heritage Day by President Obama in 2009, though it is not a holiday. In an email to the Lincoln Squirrel, he cited several other pro-Columbus sources including an article (“Columbus, Historical Hero: Today’s Cancel Culture’s Convenient Scapegoat”) by Tom Damigella, vice president of the IAA.
The Select Board will continue its discussion of the issue at its October 3 meeting.