Chicago Public Schools have decided to stop celebrating Christopher Columbus with Columbus Day and instead recognize Indigenous Peoples Day to honor the history of Native Americans in the United States, according to The Associated Press. Not everyone, however, is celebrating the decision. President Sergio Giangrande, of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, called the change a “slap in the face” to more than 500,000 Italian Americans in Chicago, the AP reported. “For Italian Americans, who endured horrific discrimination and continue to be the subject of stereotypical degradation in popular culture, Christopher Columbus is a symbol for the resilience of a people that have helped shape the cultural landscape of this great nation,” Giangrande told the AP.
Chicago school board members approved the change in a five-to-two vote, in which board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland said about 11,000 of the 355,000 student in Chicago Public Schools are Native Americans, the AP reported. "In addition to our indigenous students in CPS, more than 80% of our students are the descendants of survivors of European settler colonialism,” Todd-Breland said. “I think this is important for all of our school communities and I think it’s the right thing to do now.”
Several advocates have pushed for a change in Columbus Day over the years. Baley Champagne, tribal citizen of the United Houma Nation, told NPR he petitioned Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards in October 2019 to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. "It's become a trend," Champagne told NPR. "It's about celebrating people instead of thinking about somebody who actually caused genocide on a population or tried to cause the genocide of an entire population. By bringing Indigenous Peoples' Day, we're bringing awareness that we're not going to allow someone like that to be glorified into a hero, because of the hurt that he caused to Indigenous people of America.'”
Historians
told CNN that Columbus failed to discover the Americas because Native Americans were already there. CNN reported: “He sailed around the Caribbean, enslaving the people of present-day Haiti, bringing violence and disease to the region and decimating the population. He opened up the Americas to European settlement at the expense of the indigenous population, paving the way for the European slave trade.”
"One of the biggest misconceptions about Columbus is that he was righteous,” professor and Northern Cheyenne Nation citizen Leo Killsback told CNN. “The truth is that he was wicked and responsible for the rape and murder of innocent indigenous people."
RELATED: Poll: Almost 80% of undergraduates support changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day