The District of Columbia and other jurisdictions have passed laws to re-name Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples’ Day or Native Americans Day. In 2021, President Biden proclaimed Indigenous Peoples’ Day to be celebrated on the same day as Columbus Day. (Given my surname, you might suppose that I favor this development. I do not. Let me also correct any perception and say I am not Native American.)

A bit of history of the celebration of Columbus in the U.S.: The first celebration on October 12, 1792, was created by the Columbian Order of New York, better known as Tammany Hall, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the historic landing. The Columbus Obelisk in Baltimore was erected the same year. Following the lynchings of 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891, President Benjamin Harrison declared a Columbus Day in 1892, the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival. So, at the federal level, the first Columbus Day was a reaction to extreme discrimination against Italians. The first statewide holiday was proclaimed by the Colorado governor in 1905. In 1934, Congress passed a statute requesting the president to proclaim October 12 of each year as Columbus Day. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed it a federal holiday beginning in 1971.

I provide you with six areas of inquiry. First, I find the term “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” ambiguous. Are they the peoples of what is the United States? If so, at what point in the development of the United States? The indigenous peoples as of 1776 on the Eastern Seaboard? 1783 to the Ohio River? 1803 covering the extent of the Louisiana Purchase? 1850 California? 1867 Alaska? 1898 when Hawai’i joined the Union? President Biden’s proclamation referred to Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. Or might the indigenous people referenced in “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” refer to all such peoples in North America? In the Americas? In the entire globe, including Australia, New Guinea, Russia, China, Africa?

Second, it is odd to have a government-recognized holiday named after a group of people. Holidays are named after an event or an individual: New Year’s Day, MLK Day, Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day. Non-federal holidays include Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day (not called “Irish Day”), Good Friday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Yom Kippur, Halloween.

I can think of several indigenous individuals from the Americas for whom a holiday could be named, but I suppose it would be difficult to get over 500 federally recognized tribes (and the rest of the public) to agree on any one individual who belonged to just one of the tribes.

Here are five individuals who could be considered, in the order in which they lived:

• (Catholic St.) Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, also known as Juan Diego (1474–1548), a member of the Chichimeca people, Mexico;
• (Catholic St.) Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680), an Algonquin-Mohawk who lived on both sides of what became the Canadian-American border;
• Sacagawea (1788-1812), a member of the Lemhi Shoshone tribe of Idaho, the interpreter and guide to Lewis and Clark for their 1804-1806 expedition; she has been honored by the erection of 16 statues, a 1994 stamp, the name of a Navy ship launched in 2006 and in active service, and a 2000 dollar coin;
• Chief Joseph (Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (“Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain”) (1840–1904), of the Wal-lam-wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nez Perce of the Wallowa Valley, Oregon;
• Black Elk (Heȟáka Sápa) (1863–1950) of the Oglala Lakota on 21 million acres of western South Dakota from the low water mark on the east bank of the Missouri River and 44 million acres of land in Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota.

I provide their full names, the names of their peoples, and their homelands out of respect.

Third, if there is a coherent meaning to the term cultural misappropriation, then changing the name of Columbus Day in favor of the name of a minority group is reverse cultural misappropriation and wrong. Furthermore, it is the hijacking of a current holiday, a day already on everyone’s calendar as Columbus Day, in favor of advancing an ideological agenda. Would it be proper for a town with a large number of people of Polish ethnicity to re-name Cinco de Mayo as Casimir Pulaski Day? In fact, when people in Chicago objected to a holiday named after Martin Luther King, Jr., they did not change the name of that day. Instead, Mayor Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, introduced a resolution on February 26, 1986, to create Casimir Pulaski Day on the first Monday in March.

Fourth, as the option selected by Mayor Washington, an alternative of renaming Columbus Day or adding Indigenous Peoples’ Day to the same day as Columbus Day is adding a new holiday for indigenous peoples.

One might ask, “Who could oppose having a new special day for indigenous peoples?” As noted by the chief executive of the National Congress of American Indians, in a Washington Post op-ed piece, having a day for indigenous peoples “acknowledges American Indians and Alaska Natives as thriving, contemporary sovereign nations who hold their rightful place among the American family of governments” (Dana Hedgpath, “’Indigenous Peoples’ Day to Replace Columbus Day in the District, Other Jurisdictions,” Washington Post, Oct. 10, 2019). Such a day for indigenous peoples would be like Cinco de Mayo when we all, Hispanic and non-Hispanic, celebrate Hispanic cuisine, dance, music, and more — or St. Patrick’s Day when we celebrate Irish heritage, Oktoberfest when we celebrate German heritage, or Black History Month.

But it is quite clear that retaining Columbus Day while adding a new holiday (on the same day or some other day) for Indigenous Peoples wouldn’t satisfy the people who despise Columbus and despise white Europeans and the Christian missionaries who arrived in his wake. The same Washington Post article quoted some of the language of the D.C. bill. Columbus, it read, “enslaved, colonized, mutilated, and massacred thousands of Indigenous People in the Americas.” The holiday to honor Columbus reverences “a divisive figure whose actions against Indigenous People run counter to the values of equality, diversity, and inclusion — values that the District of Columbia has long embodied — and serves only to perpetuate hate and oppression, in contrast to the values the District espouses on a daily basis.”

If what is alleged about Columbus were true, I would join in the effort to repeal Columbus Day. But it’s not true. See, for example, Robert Royal’s 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History (1992) and Carol Delaney’s Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem (2011). The animus against Columbus resulted in tearing down statues of him in, among other places, Columbus, Ohio, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Richmond, Virginia. As of 2023, 36 of the 149 monuments to Columbus in the United States had been removed, lawfully or unlawfully (Ross Sandler, Director of the Center for New York City Law and Professor at NY Law School, “Toppling Christopher Columbus; Public Statues and Monuments,” CityLandLaw, Jan. 4, 2023). The same animus that resulted in the removal or destruction of statues of Columbus has removed or destroyed statues of St. Junipero Serra in Ventura, San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Mission San Rafael, and perhaps elsewhere. (I recommend to you the biography of the Saint by M.N.L. Couve de Murville, the retired, now deceased, archbishop of Birmingham, England, The Man Who Founded California, Ignatius Press, 2000.)

Fifth, whatever the truth about Columbus, we might easily argue that the indigenous peoples of history are not worthy of public honor. As quoted, the chief executive of the National Congress of American Indians said such a holiday celebrates “thriving, contemporary sovereign nations.” This would suggest that the holiday is about today and tomorrow, not the past. Yet, the critique of a holiday named after Columbus is all about his past, and the past of people who followed him to the Americas. We cannot have a holiday named after indigenous peoples that ignores their past.

In a world that questions celebrating Washington or Jefferson or Francis Scott Key or the Confederate generals because they owned slaves or fought for slavery, why would anyone, indigenous or not, celebrate the ignominious history of the indigenous peoples? Indigenous peoples in the Americas were engaged in constant warfare, torture, kidnapping, and slavery. They were engaged in extensive human sacrifice to their gods. The Aztecs sacrificed 30,000 to 50,000 innocents annually. During their ceremonies, Mayans and Aztecs would cut the hearts out of living persons. Mayans would drown their sacrificed people in their Sacred Canote. Mayans also played a ballgame called pitz in which the losers, like Roman gladiators, were executed.

Into this pagan, oppressive, world came the Castilian Cortes. In Makers of History: Hernando Cortez (1855), John S.C. Abbott tells the story of the 1519 conquest of the 200,000-strong Aztec army by Cortes who was supported by tens of thousands of native peoples to achieve their own liberation. And 12 years later, in 1531, a Jewish-Christian woman, dressed in clothing indigenous to the area, entered the scene and millions were converted to Christianity within ten years. Today, this woman is known and honored throughout the Americas on December 12 as Our Lady of Guadalupe.

It’s true that the Europeans unwittingly brought smallpox to the Americas. It is equally true that the Europeans brought the horse to the New World. (See Timothy C. Winegard’s new book The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity.) Before that, people walked. And the Europeans also brought the wheel to the New World.

What did the indigenous peoples send to Europe? Corn, tomatoes, peanuts, pineapple, sweet potatoes. Okay. Tobacco. No thanks. Syphilis (as unwittingly as Europeans brought smallpox, measles, typhus, and cholera to the Americas). No thanks.

Sixth, and last, I thought a large percentage of the American population were “all in” on the free migration of peoples across borders. So it’s okay with them for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, of Syrians and Africans to enter Europe, and Guatemalans and Mexicans and Venezuelans to enter the United States, without the advance consent of current residents, to achieve their goals and dreams and happiness, but it was not okay for Spaniards, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedes, Italians, Poles, Irish, English, Germans, Chinese, and more, to come to the Americas without the consent of indigenous peoples to achieve their goals and dreams and happiness?

I will applaud the consideration of a holiday named after certain indigenous individuals, but I reject a holiday named for all of them.