Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is recognized the same day as Columbus Day each year, the second Monday in October. This year, Indigenous Peoples Day falls today Oct. 11, 2021.It is a day to recognize indigenous people and the contributions they’ve made to history, as well as to mourn those lost to genocide and Western colonization—and to remember that Native Americans were actually here long before European settlers showed up on these shores. In 1977, the United Nations International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas proposed that Indigenous Peoples Day replace Columbus Day.

On Friday, President Biden issued the first-ever presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day,

 "Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities," Biden wrote. "It is a measure of our greatness as a nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past — that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them."

which the Associated Press reported as "the most significant boost yet to efforts to refocus the federal holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus toward an appreciation of Native peoples."

Many however had a message for him today asking him as they gathered in Washington DC if he could hear them now. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/10/11/biden-can-you-hear-us-now-ask-indigenous-leaders-amid-arrests-fossil-fuel-protest?utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium= 

Christopher Columbus arrived in the Bahamas on October 12, 1792, beginning a process of colonization and genocide against Native people, which represents one of the darkest chapters in the history of this continent, that  unleashed unimaginable brutality against the indigenous people of this continent.that killed tens of millions of Native people across the hemisphere. From the very beginning, Columbus was not on a mission of discovery but of conquest and exploitation—he called his expedition la empresa, the enterprise. 

Even during his day, Christopher Columbus was viewed as controversial. While his arrival in the Americas, specifically in Ayiti, (Modern Haiti) allowed for the initiation of the colonialization and settlement of the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic slave trade and the amassing of massive wealth for many European countries, many of his contemporaries thought he was unnecessarily brutal.

Columbus deserves to be remembered as the first terrorist in the Americas. When resistance mounted to the Spaniards’ violence, Columbus sent an armed force to “spread terror among the Indians to show them how strong and powerful the Christians were,” according to the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas. In his book Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale describes what happened when Columbus’s men encountered a force of Taínos in March of 1495 in a valley on the island of Hispañiola: " The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and [according to Columbus’s biographer, his son Fernando] “with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed.”

All this and much more has long been known and documented. As early as 1942 in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that Columbus’s policies in the Caribbean led to “complete genocide”—and Morison was a writer who admired Columbus.

Many countries are now  acknowledging this devastating history by rejecting the federal holiday of Columbus Day which  is marked on October 12  and celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead to honor centuries of indigenous resistance.If Indigenous peoples’ lives mattered in our society, and if Black people’s lives mattered in our society, it would be inconceivable that we would honor the father of the slave trade with a national holiday. Let alone allow our history books to laud Columbus as some kind of hero. Because this  so-called “discovery” of the America caused the worst demographic catastrophe of human history, with around 95 percent of the indigenous population annihilated in the first 130 years of colonization, without mentioning the victims from the African continent, with about 60 million people sent to the Americas as slaves, with only 12 percent of them arriving alive.Therefore, Native American groups consider Columbus a European colonizer responsible for the genocide of millions of indigenous people. Not an individual worthy of celebration  because he helped contribute  to the Europeans Colonization of the Americas which resulted in  slavery, killings, and other atrocities against the native Americans.

Columbus' voyage has even less meaning for North Americans than for South Americans because Columbus never actually set foot on this continent, nor did he open it to European trade.

During large waves of Italian immigration between 1880 and the start of World War I in 1914, newly arrived Italians faced ethnic and religious discriminations. In New Orleans in 1891, 11 Sicilian immigrants were lynched. A year later, President Benjamin Harrison became the first president to call for a national observance of Columbus Day, in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival,

Italian Americans viewed celebrations of Columbus as a way to become accepted into the mainstream American culture and, throughout the country, they began to advocate for his recognition.
Though it wasn't recognized as a federal holiday until 1971  Italian immigrants had celebrated Columbus Day for centuries, Mariano A. Lucca, of Buffalo led the campaign for the national holiday. Colorado was the first state to formally recognize Columbus Day, doing so in 1905,

However Native Americans have been a part of the American tradition even before the United States began, but due to hundreds of years of persecution, much isn’t left of the neighboring tribes and many have integrated into modern society.

In the last several years, with growing awareness of Columbus' brutal legacy and what the European arrival meant for America's first inhabitants, at least 14 states and more than 130 local governments have chosen to not celebrate the the second Monday in October as Columbus Day or have chosen to celebrate it as Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead.

Indigenous Peoples have spearheaded the cultural shift in understanding about how to mark this day.

The idea of replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day was first proposed in 1977 by a delegation of Native nations to the United Nations-sponsored International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, held in Geneva, which passed that resolution.

In July 1990, representatives from 120 Indian nations from every part of the Americas met in Quito, Ecuador in the First Continental Conference (Encuentro) on 500 Years of Indian Resistance. The conference was also attended by many human rights, peace, social justice, and environmental organizations. This was in preparation for the 500th anniversary of Native resistance to the European invasion of the Americas, 1492-1992. The Encuentro saw itself as fulfilling a prophesy that the Native nations would rise again “when the eagle of the north joined with the condor of the south.” At the suggestion of the Indigenous spiritual elders, the conference unanimously passed a resolution to transform Columbus Day, 1992, "into an occasion to strengthen our process of continental unity and struggle towards our liberation." Upon return, all the conference participants agreed to organize in their communities. While the U.S. and other governments were apparently trying to make it into a celebration of colonialism, Native peoples wanted to use the occasion to reveal the historical truths about the invasion and the consequent genocide and environmental destruction, to organize against its continuation today, and to celebrate Indigenous resistance. (Indigenous Peoples' Pow Wow Website)

In the past twenty years the celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day has become a counter narrative to Columbus Day as way of correcting historical wrongs in acts of reconciliation  and the roots of this rethinking go back several decades.

On October 6, 2000, the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council wrote in a statement that "Columbus was the beginning of the American holocaust, ethnic cleansing characterized by murder, torture, raping, pillaging, robbery, slavery, kidnapping, and forced removals of Indian people from their homelands." The organization called for the federal abolition of the holiday.

In June, 2020, protestors in three cities targeted statues of Columbus, according to The Smithsonian Magazine. 

A statue of Christopher Columbus in downtown Syracuse has been the subject of lawsuit against a plan by Mayor Ben Walsh to remove it, according to syracuse.com.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States, Indigenous people have experienced some of the highest mortality rates in the county. High rates of diabetes, obesity and other poverty-related health problems make Native Americans more vulnerable to the virus than other populations. 

Nationwide one in every 475 Native Americans has died from Covid since the start of the pandemic, compared with one in every 825 white Americans and one in every 645 Black Americans.

The true death toll is undoubtedly significantly higher as multiple states and cities provide patchy or no data on Native Americans lost to Covid. Of those that do, communities in Mississippi, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas have been the hardest hit.

The findings were part of the Color of Coronavirus project, and provide the clearest evidence to date that Indian Country has suffered terribly and disproportionately during the first year of the deadly coronavirus pandemic. Native Americans have suffered 211 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 121 white Americans per 100,000.

Indigenous leaders took coronavirus more seriously than many communities from the beginning and certainly more seriously than the White House took the virus. By late Spring 2020 the rate of infection among Navajo Nation communities was worse than New York, then the center of the pandemic in the US.

Even then it emerged that Native Americans were being left out of demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus across the US, raising fears of hidden health emergencies in one of the country’s most vulnerable populations.

Centuries after Columbus Native peoples are still fighting to protect their lands and their rights to exist as distinct political communities and individuals.Because  of historical traumas inflicted on indigenous peoples that include land dispossession, death of the majority of the populations through warfare and disease, forced removal and relocation, assimilative boarding school experiences, and prohibiting religious practices, among others, indigenous peoples have experienced historical losses, which include the loss of land, traditional and spiritual ways, self-respect from poor treatment from government officials, language, family ties, trust from broken treaties, culture, and people (through early death); there are also losses that can be attributed to increased alcoholism.  These losses have been associated with sadness and depression, anger, intrusive thoughts, discomfort, shame, fear, and distrust around white people   Experiencing massive traumas and losses is thought to lead to cumulative and unresolved grief, which can result in the historical trauma response, which includes suicidal thoughts and acts, IPV, depression, alcoholism, self-destructive behavior, low self-esteem, anxiety, anger, and lowered emotional expression and recognition .These symptoms run parallel to the extant health disparities that are documented among indigenous peoples.

Today is about acknowledging all this whilst  honoring the rich history of resistance that Native communities across the world  have contributed to and  it is  also about sharing  a deep commitment to intergenerational justice. Celebrating Indigenous People’s Day is a step towards recognizing that colonization still exists. We can do more to end that colonization and respect the sovereignty of indigenous nations.

 May we spend this day, honoring Native Peoples’ commitment to making the world a better place for all. Reflect on their ancestral past , the ongoing struggles of indigenous peoples in protecting their lands and freedoms,celebrate their sacrifices and celebrate life whilst.recognizing the people, traditions and cultures that were wiped out because of Columbus’ colonization and acknowledge the. bloodshed and elimination of those that were massacred, whilst transforming this day into a celebration of indigenous people and a celebration of social justice  that allows us to make a connection between  painful history and the ongoing marginalization, discrimination and poverty that indigenous communities face to this day. We cannot dedicate just one day to acknowledging Indigenous People's, each and every day should be an act of solidarity, by us honouring and advocating for Indigenous rights.