The unsigned editorial is the opinion of the members of Bienvenidos’ editorial board, excluding the news department, and is the responsibility of the Bienvenidos Editor.
Columbus Day, the second Monday of October each year, has been a federal holiday since 1937. The elementary rhyme, “in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” has helped children remember the year that the New World and the Americas was discovered by Europeans. The same children are taught the names of the three Spanish ships that took him there: the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria. Students might later learn that Columbus landed on Hispaniola, which now comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
What children rarely learn about are the vast Incan or Mayan empires, empires that were squashed by smallpox blankets, greed and Spanish swords. As a nation, we don’t have a day to celebrate the hundreds of independent indigenous languages spoken in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus first stepped foot on an island that he wrongly believed to be in the Indian Ocean. The criticism of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America is not new, but what is striking is that we continue to celebrate it.
While we don’t celebrate any other explorers, as a nation the United States continues to honor the man who helped start the first flood of immigrants to the Western Hemisphere. Christopher Columbus is the only non-American with a federal holiday named after him. He’s also the only person we celebrate who perpetuated genocide, grand theft, slavery and the destruction of entire cultures.
Columbus began by traipsing across the island of Hispaniola, reaching far into the guts of countless established cultures and populations to pull out a new discovery and pride for his native Genoa (now part of Italy) and the Spaniards who funded the expedition. The Eurocentric education that celebrates Columbus doesn’t mention the colonization and deliberate killing and enslavement of indigenous people that populated the “new” lands. It also doesn’t recognize the highly-developed nature of the nations he destroyed in the process.
Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937 under Franklin D. Roosevelt, but has been celebrated in Spain and in Latin America for centuries.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In 1989, the governor of South Dakota ordered Columbus Day to be renamed Native American Day in an effort to reconcile relations between Native Americans and its white population. Hawaii, Alaska and Oregon don’t recognize Columbus Day, and Iowa and Nevada don’t celebrate it as an official holiday at all.
Instead of extensive lessons on Columbus, why don’t we read Bartolome de las Casas, the Bishop who openly opposed the Spanish crown and advocated for the rights of indigenous slaves during his life? Instead of the three Spanish ships, why don’t we learn the names of Incan rulers like Huayna Capac, Túpac Huallpa or Túpac Amaru, all of whom died at the hands of conquistadors?
