No More Columbus Day in Yakima-What’s Replacing It?

Apparently a growing number of communities across the country are dropping Columbus Day in favor of celebrations often referred to as "Indigenous People's Day".

The Yakima City Council has followed suit, and starting next week, the city will stop officially referring to Columbus Day, and instead celebrate Indigenous People's Day, saluting Native Americans, according to KNDO-TV.  It will be observed October 10th.

The movement began a number of years ago, when certain special interest groups challenged the idea that Columbus discovered the "New World," or the Americas. These groups said native populations were there for hundreds if not thousands of years, and celebrating discovery by the "civilized" world was demeaning. A formal request was made to the city council, and the measure passed by a vote of 5-2.

While some people don't really care either way, some support the idea, others say it's the latest effort in revisionist history. They say Columbus' discovery was named from the perspective of the established world, or what was known at that time to the European and even Asian world.

Some supporters of this movement have tried to reposition Columbus as a violent, conquering explorer who enslaved the native populations, and plundered their resources as well as spreading diseases from Europe that were previously unknown in the West. The Chicago Tribune, in 1992, made an excellent point that while there's a lot of misinformation about him, and yes, he was NOT the first to discover America, people are missing the point.  At that time, and following, Columbus was the idea of what it meant to be an explorer.  To venture to places unknown. Some said he was like the NASA of the old world.  The Tribune says too many people try to blame misfortunes of the last six centuries on him.

Some have commented the term Indigenous makes the people sound like aliens or strange creatures. The word actually means occurring naturally in a place or location, or native to that area...a place of origin.