On Monday October 9th, Convent and Stuart Hall had the day off to celebrate Fall Holiday. Fall Holiday was on Indigenous People’s Day which is a holiday in the United States meant to acknowledge the pain and suffering Indigenous People go through while preserving their communities and culture.
Indigenous Peoples Day is important to commemorate because it recognizes the contributions and innovations Indigenous communities have made to America, such as the kayak, corn production, baby bottles, and rubber, according to the US Embassy.
“I’m a quarter Navajo, and my grandma is from Cheyenne, Wyoming,” sophomore Emilia Lutz said. “I think it’s really important to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day because it recalls my culture, and like my ancestors because I don’t know a lot about my heritage,”
Christopher Columbus was an Italian voyager whose arrival to the Americas in 1492 began the colonization movement of North America, which attempted to rid the region of Indigenous Peoples who had inhabited the land for generations. During this period, the Native Americans worked tirelessly to resist the efforts of these colonizers, utilizing both warfare and diplomacy to preserve their culture, according to Community Life Chair Michael Buckley.
“I think more and more recently, the legacy of Columbus is being reevaluated in the context of the dramatic ways in which encountering Europeans had a negative impact on American indigenous people,” Buckley said. “The idea of celebrating Columbus is maybe a little bit less clear than it was earlier and celebrating the people that were here originally seems like the better thing to do,”
Indigenous Peoples Day was previously commonly recognized as Columbus Day, but was changed as he destroyed many Native American communities by bringing violence and colonization, according to Lutz. For many years, Indigenous groups advocated for the name of the holiday to be changed and finally, in 1992, US cities and states decided to observe Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day.
“It’s important to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day compared to Columbus Day, so we can highlight a clear difference between the two,” junior Nora Weltman said. “Columbus was really bad because he killed a lot of Native Americans that were actually here first, and we are on their land and I think during this holiday especially it’s important to recognize that,”
Another way we can pay tribute to Indigenous People’s Day, is by giving our full focus and respect to guest speaker Kevin Noble Maillard, author of Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story, to educate us further about Indigenous people and ways, according to the Convent and Stuart Hall Libraries.
“It acts as a day to bring awareness to the struggles Indigenous People have gone through in the past, like Columbus, as well as the struggles they continue to go through,” Lutz said, “I’m really excited to learn more and to have somebody there to educate me, and so I can get more awareness about the topic of Indigenous People.”
