Columbus Day will hereafter be known as Indigenous People’s Day in Lincoln after the Select Board voted unanimously to change the name of the holiday on town documents, two years after the Lincoln Public Schools did the same thing.
The vote came after discussion and public comment continued from the board’s September 19 meeting. All Lincoln residents who spoke were in favor of the change, though two others at the virtual meeting representing Italian-American organizations argued against it. One of them was John Toto, a Wayland resident and board member of the Italian American Alliance (IAA), who supported a day to celebrate indigenous people but said that such a day already exists: Native American Heritage Day, which falls on the day after Thanksgiving but is not a federal or state holiday.
Toto argued that Columbus was not guilty of enslaving or murdering the indigenous people he encountered and that those atrocities were committed by Spanish sailors and settler who came after him. “To go after Columbus… we believe is petty and hateful,” Toto said. “Trying to rewrite history the way this proposes is not American and to me it’s scary and smacks of McCarthyism. It truly makes me sad as an Italian-American.”
Brian Patacchiola, a member of Sons and Daughters of Italy and the IAA, said Columbus Day is of “incredible cultural and symbolic significance to the Italian-American community” and urged the board not to support “removing one ethnic group’s holiday at the expense of another.” The charges against Columbus are “flagrant and salacious lies” stemming largely from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which he called “a work of total fiction,” and he cited the work of other scholars including Carol Delaney and Mary Grabar.
But Jessica Packineau and her daughter Evie read from diaries by Columbus’s crew detailing atrocities they committed.
“It would behoove the Italian-American Society to reconsider their heroes,” Jessica Packineau said. “It’s pretty extraordinary that the entirety of [Italian-American] heritage would hinge on one person… This is an opportunity to shift the focus from the violence and brutality onto the survival, the resilience, the extraordinary myriad of cultures and customs and language and traditions and wealth of diversity that the word Indigenous encompasses — it would be an enormous gift for our community.”
“I’m frankly baffled by [Italian-Americans] hanging their hat” on Columbus,” Kim Jalet said. The holiday was established at a time when Italians were “new immigrants and were being treated poorly. Now they’re assimilated, and there are many ways to acknowledge their culture.” Even if Columbus himself never set foot in what is now the United States, “he played a role in getting the ball rolling” for what was done to Indigenous people in his wake, she added.
As a Select Board member, Jonathan Dwyer said he was a “huge fan of adjusting to circumstances and revisions” and listening to Lincoln residents. “For 88 years it was Columbus Day — for the next 88 years I’d like to see something different.”
Board member Jim Hutchinson said he would have preferred to measure to come to the town as a citizens’ petition but pointed out that Lincoln residents who spoke were unanimously in favor of changing the name of the holiday.
“It’s really not about Christopher Columbus the man, but about the idea that we are celebrating a moment in time that turned out to be a tipping point of destruction for many people in the country,” board member Jennifer Glass said. “This day has historically told one side of the story and not acknowledged the full experience of our history… This is an opportunity to say ‘let’s think about our history’… and that definitely leaves room” for celebrating Italian-American contributions in other ways.