BY SAVANNAH KEYSER
Columbus Day is an American holiday celebrated on the second Monday in October. The holiday honors Christopher Columbus as the first person to discover America. However, Columbus Day is the celebration of a man that, in fact, did not discover America. This day causes a lot of pain for many people. The holiday should no longer be celebrated because it doesn’t have much meaning anymore, and it is a reminder of the horrible occurrences that the natives endured.
The fact that the holiday celebrates Christopher Columbus for ‘discovering’ America is absurd. That man was not the first person to discover this land. Leif Erikson is believed to be the actual first outsider to come to America. He came to North America in around 1000 A.D. and founded Vinland; however, he wasn’t really the first person to discover North America. Natives had been there long before him. The Natives of this ‘new land’ that Columbus supposedly ‘discovered’ had been there for 14,000 years before his arrival.
Columbus was greeted with hospitality when he arrived in the Bahamas by friendly, peaceful people known as the Lucayans, Taínos, and Arawaks. These people labored for hours to fix his broken ship. Columbus was so impressed with their hard work that he seized their land for Spain and enslaved them to work in his gold mines. This was just the first of Columbus’s many horrific grievances. He relentlessly murdered, raped, and enslaved the people who lived on the land that he ‘discovered’, and he claimed the land as his own.
Columbus is not the man from the story we all hear in kindergarten. By his time, everyone knew the earth was round. He traveled to North America looking for gold and land. He was the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Columbus enslaved the Native Americans and punished them brutally if they did not comply. He was feared by many, especially including the Natives.
Columbus Day was created by a group of Catholic men called the Knights of Columbus in the 1930s. These men wanted a catholic hero as a role model for their kids to look up to. The holiday began in 1934 as a result of lobbying by the Knights. The holiday is not an American tradition, rather it is a recent mistake. It celebrates a violent murderer and rapist who took the land of hundreds of thousands of people. The real history of Christopher Columbus needs to be made known, and this holiday that celebrates him needs to be forgotten.
