Replacement Holiday

A lot of the stories that I recall about Christopher Columbus from when I was child were Hero stories. The brave and intelligent Columbus making a perilous journey, and in so doing, demonstrating how wrong about the world the benighted and backwards other Europeans were. After all, most of them thought the world was flat. And if someone pointed out that the Greeks had be able to demonstrate the Earth was round, Renaissance Europe looked even worse; they'd somehow managed to forget what had already been established about the planet.

This story is, of course, false. The reason many people felt that the Columbus expedition wouldn't work was they they knew the Earth was spherical, and they knew roughly how large a sphere it was. If the whole distance between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of China had been open ocean, no-one would have heard from Columbus or his men ever again. But "Columbus lucked out that there happened to continental land masses within range of his ships" isn't as inspiring a story.

In any event, Columbus Day was basically instantiated as a celebration of Italian Americans. (Although now there is a theory that says that Columbus was a Spanish Jew.)

But that's changing now, with the push to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Which, of course, has a Hero story of it own. The brave and upstanding Native Americans, dealing with oppressive colonialists from across the ocean, and in so doing, demonstrating how morally bankrupt the benighted and backwards Europeans were (I'm sensing a theme here). Having been enabled by Christopher Columbus (who didn't "discover" anything, since people already lived here), they brought diseases, forced migrations and involuntary religious conversion to the Americas.

In any event, Indigenous Peoples Day is basically being instantiated as a celebration of Native Americans.

As I've noted before I'm somewhat cynical about the whole push for Indigenous Peoples Day. It throws Cristoforo Colombo under the bus but doesn't otherwise do anything... as some Native American activists have pointed out.

But in the end, holidays like Saint Patrick's Day, Juneteenth, Cinco de Mayo and Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day don't come across as celebrations of the various peoples that make up the United States. They're days to go shopping and/or to have a party, but other than that, who cares? I don't see any of this as creating a nation that celebrates the different people that make it up. But maybe that's too much to have ever expected.