This year, Columbus Day was on Monday, October 11. John Carroll students enjoyed a day off of school, but most students probably did not put too much thought into why we had the day off or the history of Columbus Day.

In recent years, a movement to stop celebrating Columbus Day has gained
popularity, and the holiday has grown controversial. Celebrating Columbus for being the discoverer of North America undermines the struggles that indigenous Americans went through at the hands of Columbus and pushes a very false narrative that Christopher Columbus discovered America.
Columbus Day celebrates the day in 1492 that Christopher Columbus landed in North America. Many people think of this day as the day that America was “discovered.”
This is controversial due to the fact that indigenous people had been living in America for centuries before European explorers arrived, not to mention the fact that other European explorers had already explored North America before Columbus. Another thing to keep in mind is that Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola, or modern day Dominican Republic, which is not a part of the United States.
Columbus did not discover North America or the United States, which makes the fact that Columbus Day is national holiday in the US even more confusing.
By celebrating Columbus Day, it seems as though Americans are praising
Christopher Columbus for discovering a land that had already been discovered and praising him for discovering a place that is not a part of the United States.
Columbus Day was declared an official holiday in 1937 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the day had been celebrated in the past. The holiday was mostly created because of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, lobbied for the holiday to take place as a way to honor Italian-American heritage.
Upon his arrival in North America, Columbus immediately greeted the Native Americans with cruelness and imperialistic views. Columbus took native people as servants, forced them to do hard labor, converted them to Christianity, and sold some as slaves to various European countries. Columbus wrote about all of this in his detailed journals even saying, “They should be good servants and intelligent for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians.”
Not only did the European explorers treat indigenous people violently, they also spread diseases to native Americans. By the year 1506, two thirds of the population of the Taino tribe of Hispaniola (the North American island that Columbus arrived in) had died.
Learning about Columbus leaves you to wonder why the holiday is still celebrated. Not only was Columbus not the first person to “discover” North America, he wasn’t even the first European to do so.
Instead of Columbus Day, many Americans have rebranded the holiday as Indigenous People’s Day. I agree that instead of getting rid of the holiday altogether, we should be celebrating the people who were affected by Columbus, the Indigenous Americans, who often do not get recognition for all that European settlers took from them.
There is no issue in celebrating the origins of our country, but the real origins of the United States begins with the Native Americans, not Christopher Columbus.