Today is Columbus Day… although there seems to be a bit of momentum in certain cities (including Cincinnati) for making it more of a Native American/Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

 

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Here’s a blurb from the Cincinnati Enquirer about it:

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is not a new idea. The idea was first broached in 1977 at the United Nations’ International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas. Since then there has been education about how Native American people suffered during American colonization – countering what many people learned about Christopher Columbus in grade school.

In 1992 Berkeley, California City Council symbolically renamed Columbus Day for indigenous people. Other cities have followed suit. The most recent adopters include Denver, Colorado and Spokane, Washington.

You may think that’s political correctness gone astray (historically speaking, the Native Americans likely came from another continent, so they are neither “native” nor “indigenous” to North America).

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However, the fantastic blog/comic/website The Oatmeal has an enlightening post about Christopher Columbus that will certainly give you pause and probably make you reconsider why we celebrate this holiday. And with one of the presidential candidates threatening to build a wall to keep out immigrants, the post is timely too.

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