Last year, the Seattle City Council unanimously voted to change the federal Columbus Day holiday to Indigenous Peoples Day, making it the second major USA city after Minneapolis to adopt the change, according to Reuters.
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As people around the United States celebrate Columbus Day Monday, with government offices and most schools closed, many others will be hosting festivities for an alternative celebration: Native American Day.
In proclaiming the day Indigenous Peoples Day in Duluth during a public ceremony Monday, Mayor Don Ness noted Duluth had largely been left out of the lists of cities celebrating the day.
LINCOLN-Monday is a holiday many people know as Columbus Day.
“Here in Columbus we continue to celebrate the four images of Christopher Columbus and etched on the statue it says he saw a vision of a new world and in our community we share this renewing vision”.
“This resolution is about more than just a name change, it is about educating ourselves and our children about taking a stand against racism and discrimination”, Councilmember Kshama Sawant, the lead sponsor of the measure, said a year ago. In recent decades, a significant number of tribal members have moved from reservations to urban areas, where a large majority live today.
Columbus Day has been a federal holiday since 1937, but has been a point of controversy in cities and states nationwide for years.
The results were divided along partisan lines, with Democrats more than twice as likely as Republicans to give Native Americans credit.
So Columbus deserves his day, but the native peoples deserve their day too.
This marks the 523rd anniversary of Columbus’ landing. This year, several other cities followed suit. After that, the parade wasn’t held again until 2000, and it has been hard to make it the draw it once was, she said.
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Portland, Ore.; Albuquerque, N.M.; St. Paul, Minn.; and Olympia, Wash., are a few of the cities that have chose to include Indigenous People’s Day in their celebrations on Monday. After witnessing how “barbaric” actions Europeans took against Native Americans, he quit his job to become a Catholic priest.
