Should we stop celebrating or rename Columbus Day?

Parent Cafe
21

I grew up in an area that to this day has a significant population of American descendants of Scandinavian immigrants. Back in the stone age in elementary school, we were taught that Leif Erikson was the first European to “discover” America. It was until college that I learned that Cristobal Colon actually was the first European to land in the Dominican Republic, LOL.

-Cristobal Colon never set foot on the mainland of North America
-He did not sail on behalf of Italy, which as a nation didn’t exist in his time. He sailed for Isabella and Spain.
-Spaniard authorities actually imprisoned him for a time, after his discoveries of 1492
-No one knows where he is buried. The Dominicans and the Spaniards have fought over whom possesses the actual remains for years!

And all the Native American Day hullabaloo is a bit disingenuous on the part of the cities like Seattle. South Dakota has been officially celebrating Native heritage for years. Don’t know if that makes up for the horrid living conditions on some reservations, though.

22

So the Indigenous People never conducted mass violence?

23

Around here, the kids get a day or two off from school on Columbus Day weekend and they call it “fall break.” End of controversy.

But to answer the OP’s question, I don’t see much to celebrate. CC was a brutal and somewhat delusional man with poor math skills. He participated in building slave fortresses in Africa. He unsuccessfully promoted his navigational scheme for well over a decade and was turned down by the courts of Spain and Portugal (where he had better connections) because his calculations of the size of the globe were way too small. Had there been no land mass between the islands off the African coast and Japan (his purported destination), he and his men would have starved to death. Fernando and Isabel, exultant after their military victory over the Muslim rulers of the southern kingdom of Granada, agreed to fund his voyage. The winds and currents favored his venture, both getting there and getting back. He was a terrible administrator and numerous atrocities occurred on his watch. Until the end of his life, he believed that the Caribbean islands were located off the coast of Japan. He also came to believe that his voyages were foreordained by Biblical prophecy and began referring to himself as the Christ bearer.

24

Do you think congress would be able to change it to Pumpkin Spice Day?

25

For the people noting that the vikings* and the indigenous inhabitants of North America engaged in mass violence, I’m calling you out on false equivalency. That’s a fallacy on many, many levels here, not the least of which is trying to compare the behavior of an individual and a group. There are dangers in saying “the vikings” or “indigenous peoples” behaved in a particular negative way, when in reality some did and some didn’t—not to mention the differences between those groups’ generalized behavior over spans of centuries. Saying that an individual behaved in particular negative** ways, though, that’s a much more tenable position to be arguing from.

  • Whose reputation for viciousness and such is grossly overexaggerated, by the way—they made most of their money from trading and such, not raiding. There were solid political reasons for some of the English chroniclers to paint the vikings as a Menacing Horde Threatening the English Countryside™, however, and so that's the way they're remembered in Anglo-American culture.

** And positive. Yeah, Columbus did a lot of horrid things, but he also had some positive characteristics. The issue is whether, on balance, he was a positive or negative figure.

26

These kind of discussions always come up, and in terms of ‘who discovered America’ it gets to be all muddied and a mess. The Vikings most assuredly did reach the New World, that is not in dispute, though you also could point out that in the end had little to no lasting impact.

More importantly, the standard party line about the “native Americans” being the original settlers has come into doubt, the whole land bridge from Siberia migration about 10,000 years ago may very well have been one of many migrations, there is evidence coming up that there may have been earlier settlers. Explorers from Europe might have come over thousands of years ago, when the ice floes were still in place, skirting the ice to make the trip from what is now Europe.

If there were earlier native settlers, it is also possible that the later migrants, the forbears of current Native Americans, killed them.

And Columbus certainly wasn’t the first European to ‘find’ the New World, the Basque were fishing off the grand banks and were salting down cod on what is new Newfoundland many hundreds of years before Columbus’ voyage, it might have been as early as the 12th century. Thing was, the Basque were smart, because they had a pretty good monopoly on cod in Europe, local stocks had been depleted, so they made pretty good money fishing the Grand Banks by themselves, so why would they tell anyone?

There is no doubt that Columbus has been romanticized, but so have native populations, too. Should we celebrate the Aztecs, who committed human sacrifice and were responsible for wiping out whole populations of people? Should we celebrate the native american tribes in North America who were warlike and spent a lot of time killing other tribes?

I am not saying Columbus was a great person we should celebrate, I am saying that you have to be very careful when creating a saint, as they did with Columbus and with other historical figures associated with the ‘founding’ of the US and the New World, but it also is dangerous to try and turn any human beings into Saints. Columbus was not alone in cruelty, the legacy of the Spanish Conquistadores in South America was not exactly pure, and there were plenty of sinners, including the Catholic Church who aggressively set out to destroy native cultures in the New World, and who while at times tried to balance out the horrors inflicted on native people, like forced labor in the mines that killed many 10’s of thousands, also quite willingly accepted the very silver and gold that those people had mined. Columbus voyage did spur other explorers, there is no doubt, and in that sense it did lead to the colonization that led to the US being founded (among other things, Columbus basically lied a great deal of what he saw, he exaggerated things which of course triggered the greed motive). I would much prefer that maybe we have a day when we actually talk honestly about things, whether it is Columbus or those who quite frankly mythologize what the Native Americans were as people or groups of people, human beings can do amazing things and also can make the name human being something to be whispered about, not to be mentioned in polite society.

As far as the earth being flat, that is very much a myth, while no doubt there were people who believed that still when Columbus sailed, given the ignorance that was still very common, it was not widely believed and Columbus certainly knew it wasn’t. Among other things, by that time Ancient Greek texts were coming into Europe and they had the writings of Eratosthenes who calculated the circumference of the Earth 200 years before Christ, not to mention observations being made at the time. Still, there was a lot of fear and ignorance in the world, and if you look at the size of the ships they were sailing on (they were tiny), and how rough and dangerous deep ocean voyages are, it still took people either crazy enough, or greedy enough, or just plain brave enough, to undertake those kind of trips, if they didn’t believe the earth was flat and they would go off the edge, they didn’t really know what was going to happen to them, either, when they sailed west, and while there may not have been sea monsters, there were terrible storms, fear of starvation, lack of water, and any number of things that could kill them, including reefs and the real villain of ships of the time, the shipworm, that could riddle the hull and make it leak.

27

It’s a state holiday here and no mail is delivered either. No school. Some districts have professional development for teachers on Columbus Day.

Most schools around here have school on Veterans Day…and have programs to honor veterans. To be honest, I think that is a better way for these holidays to be done.

Ditto Presidents Day and MLK Day. Do something to honor these days…not a day off to go shopping or whatever.

28

Everyone knows that it isn’t Columbus Day, it’s Canadian Thanksgiving! :wink:

29

The idea that we shouldn’t celebrate the the discovery and colonization of the “New World”, acts that led to the existence of every single person posting on this board, is absurd. That doesn’t mean we ignore the actual history but I’ll be bleeped if I’m going to start thinking that the existence of this country was a terrible thing.

30

When MLK Day initially became a holiday the State of NJ decided we would no longer get Columbus Day off. They were met with an uproar from various Italian-American groups and reinstated the day. A few years later there was a brief discussion to take away Lincoln’s Birthday but that did not happen. They finally went to one President’s Day but it took a few years.

Also at least in NJ the government workers have nothing to do with the holiday schedule. It is not subject to negotiation. It is usually the various interest groups that get a holiday declared by legislation. In my close to forty years working the holiday schedule has never once been pushed by any of the unions.

31

How do you propose changing Columbus Day? It would take an act of Congress. Enough said.

32

Lergnom–quite a leap there, rhetorically. I can acknowledgement what’s good about this country, while at the same time acknowledging that some terrible acts that went into its founding. That’s what grownups do.

And neither of those concepts has anything to do with this Columbus, who never set foot here.

33

Our schools are in session, government is closed. It’s one of the two days DH is off while the kids were at school. (Veterans Day is the other.) We’d go out for brunch and then he’d head in to work anyway.

34

^^ And here, none of us (K–12 students, public university employee, and private industry employee) get Columbus Day or Veterans Day off. Le sigh. :((

35

“How do you propose changing Columbus Day? It would take an act of Congress. Enough said.”

Is this statement accurate? I thought that the constitutional tradition prevents the federal government from actually imposing “National Holidays” upon the states. While the U.S. government can designate federal holidays for its workers and its own operations, the states are free to ignore them. Nitwit Governor Evan Mechum of Arizona absolutely refused to initiate state observance of MLK day back in the 1980s. And when I was a lad the State of Washington officially observed Feb. 22 and not ‘President’s Day’ to honor G. Washington.

36

How about we rename Columbus day to “Discovery Day” or “Exploration Day?” That way, we could still celebrate America’s discovery without tying it (with dubious accuracy) to a pretty indisputably horrific man. The day could also serve as a celebration of other discoverers or explorers - Lewis and Clark, Neil Armstrong ,etc.

37

The Americas being “discovered” is almost as problematic as celebrating Columbus.

Though I’d be fine with a Genocide Awareness Day.

38

Well, in fairness, the first wanderers across the Bering Land Bridge did a pretty good job of discovering the Americas…

39

It is a bank holiday.

40

@apprenticeprof “Encounter” day would probably be more neutral, but also vague and bland. The first landfall was actually quite cordial. Things turned nasty a bit later.

I think I prefer “Pumpkin Spice” Day.