A Day To Share

The three-day weekend just past is generally known as Columbus Day weekend, but in recent years the holiday has an alternate identity, Indigenous Peoples’ Day. More than four decades after the idea was first suggested in 1977 at a United Nations conference, former President Joe Biden issued a proclamation in 2021, making it a federal holiday alongside Columbus Day.

President Donald Trump countered that proclamation with one of his own last week, restoring Columbus Day as the lone federal holiday, bringing it “back from the ashes,” in his estimation.

This matters only symbolically, except for the federal holiday designation — people can choose to celebrate either holiday, or both, or neither. The Pew Research Center says 17 states and the District of Columbia honor Indigenous communities on that day, and the proclamation won’t change that.

This has become another battle in the culture wars. But it doesn’t need to be. There is reason to celebrate both — and, in fact, the dichotomy is a healthy acknowledgment of history, and a chance to make the day about more than just banners and parades.

Trump’s proclamation touted the explorer’s “extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance and virtue.” But the day has a deeper meaning as a cultural touchstone for the Italian community. In 1892, Benjamin Harrison first marked Columbus Day in response to a horrific act: Eleven Italian immigrants were murdered in New Orleans by a lynch mob. Seeking to counter that hatred, Harrison commemorated the day, which became a federal holiday in 1934 after action by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

So Columbus Day was an effort to soothe anti-immigrant sentiments, and it’s grown into a holiday giving Italian Americans a day to celebrate their heritage. That’s valuable and worth protecting.

At the same time, Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebrates Native Americans and other native cultures that have faced oppression, and worse, from settlers and colonizers. Holding it on the same day as Columbus Day is provocative, but it’s also appropriate: It’s representative of the complicated, not-so-storybook way that history, including American history, unfolds.

It is, ultimately, not just a holiday for Italians and Italian Americans, or Native Americans and Indigenous people around the world. According to the Census Bureau, only 5 percent of the population identifies as having Italian ancestry, and only 3 percent identify as having Native American ancestry, alone or in combination with another race. That leaves 92 percent of America to mark the second Monday of October however they wish.

For many, it’s a day off. For 8 percent, it has an intensely personal meaning, a celebration of heritage. For the rest of us, we can choose to mark the holiday as we wish, thinking about America’s deep debt of gratitude to Italian immigrants who helped build the nation, or the Native Americans who were treated abysmally but remain essential to our national identity. Or perhaps the day is a chance to explore the many inherent conflicts that, to this day, remain challenging to reconcile.

Why limit any of those options? The holiday works just fine — arguably better — with that dynamic tension in place. Let’s honor and celebrate both, and reflect on the lessons we still need to learn from both.