The article Support Indigenous Rights: Abolish Columbus Day published by Bill Bigelow on the Common Dreams platform on the occasion of “Columbus Day” as part of the Abolish Columbus Day campaign. He calls for the holiday to finally be abolished and for an “Indigenous Peoples Day” to be established instead.
In the text, the author talks about the fatal (symbolic) effect of the holiday, about counter-movements, about current struggles of Nations – in particular the Standing Rock Sioux Nation against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) – and the narrative of the “discovery of America” by Christopher Columbus, which, like a book of Genesis, constitutes hegemonic discourses and historiography and continues to produce suffering, violence and oppression.
“Through the conventional story of the ‘discovery of America,’ the school curriculum has taught students to celebrate colonialism and racism, and to disregard the lives of the Taínos, and other Indigenous peoples. The Columbus-discovers-America story has long been a kind of secular book of Genesis-‘In the beginning there was Columbus…’-the original Only White Lives Matter myth. And it has played a central role in the curricular erasure of the humanity of Indigenous peoples.”