Happy Indigenous People’s Day! 9 Things White People Have ‘Columbused’

Today, October 12 is Indigenous People's Day. I do like this phrase from this piece below: "We got Columbused!" I take this to mean war with native people's, genocide, colonization, theft, appropriation, and distorted perspectives of our communities with an enduring impact as the actual violence of "getting Columbused" hides behind, and masquerades today as, white privilege, entitlement, and neoliberalism.

Indigenous People's Day used to be—and still is in many places—Columbus Day. Thankfully, the name for this holiday got abolished in 2017 by the Austin City Council.  What we must acknowledge is how Columbus Day is a day of mourning for Indigenous peoples.  

Indigenous People's Day, in contrast, reclaims and re-casts Indigeneity, land sovereignty, and struggle as ongoing decolonial projects from Indigenous people's perspectives.

For school curriculum, a good place to start is with Rethinking School's publication titled, "Rethinking Columbus Expanded Second Edition:The Next 500 Years."

-Angela Valenzuela

#decolonize

Happy Indigenous People’s Day! 9 Things White People Have ‘Columbused’

Happy Columbused Day!

Source: GraphicaArtis / Getty

UPDATED: 8:00 A.M. ET, Oct. 12, 2020 —

A growing number of states are officially recognizing Monday as Indigenous People’s Day, a new name replacing or being celebrated alongside Columbus Day, an old holiday that honored a slave-owning, racist, disease-spreading Spaniard who is controversially credited with “discovering” land that was already occupied by Native Americans. The fact that the latest installment of Indigenous People’s Day fell in a year marked by a nationwide racial reckoning made it all the more significant.

Continue reading HERE.

Rethinking Columbus Expanded Second Edition:The Next 500 Years

Edited by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson