About National Columbus Day

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Columbus Day is also called Indigenous Peoples Day in the United States.

Columbus Day was an official holiday in the United States, created by a joint Congressional/Presidential resolution on April 30, 1934, and modified in 1968 (36 USC 107). It was always the second Monday of October.

The day commemorates the events of October 11-15, 1492, when Christopher Columbus and his crew first sighted land. Landfall occurred on October 12, 1492; he thought he had found a way to India. He found the Bahamas.

It would take time for him to realize he had found an entirely new continent. Columbus Day, on October 12, is a national holiday in Belize. The Bahamas refer to it as Discovery Day. In Spain, it is called Día de la Hispanidad. In the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, it is called Friendship Day. Mexico refers to the anniversary as Día de la Raza, or Day of Race. The United States also marks the anniversary with Native American Day and the state of Hawaii with Discovers' Day.

FIRST EUROPEANS

Most Americans believe that Columbus was the first European to discover America. No. He's the first to find the islands of the Caribbean, but not mainland North America.

The first European to land on American soil was Leif Eriksson, a Viking, on October 9, 1000 AD. He called the new land Helluland (Stone Slab Land). Eriksson spotted it a year before when his ship was blown off course leaving Iceland but did not land. The following year, he returned sailing south and eventually set up camp in what we refer to as present-day Newfoundland, which he called Vinland since it was bursting with good wine grapes. Archeologists in the 1960s uncovered the original camp in modern L'Anse aux Meadows, a UNESCO world heritage site today.

In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed October 9 as Leif Eriksson Day. On October 9, 1825, the first group of immigrants from Norway arrived in the United States.

Eriksson wasn't the first European to see America. That honor falls to another Viking, Bjarni Herjolfsson. Herjolfsson saw a land covered in trees in 986 AD. He was trying to get to Greenland with his father, Erik the Red. He missed it. However, Herjolfsson did not set foot on American soil; that would have to wait another 13 years.

CONTROVERSY OVER COLUMBUS

Columbus Day has become controversial in the United States because his discovery also led to the genocide of Native Americans, who lost 90% of their people over the next 400 years due to illness, enforced poverty, land theft, discrimination, and wars. That Columbus initiated colonialism, which led to slavery and the disenfranchisement of Native Americans, is another reason several groups do not want the day remembered. However, Columbus Day is significant to Italian Americans, who view the explorer with great pride. An Italian, he sailed to America under the patronage of the Spanish King and Queen.

The Black Lives Matter movement, Native American organizations, and other social justice movements continue to call into question Columbus' legacy and advocate for the abolition of the holiday. As near as I can tell, the state of Alabama was the first state to change its name to honor America's indigenous people.

In 2021, after a rise of activism to recognize indigenous people in the United States rather than their colonizers, President Biden proclaimed the first-ever National Indigenous Peoples' Day instead of Columbus Day.