City of Seattle Unanimously Votes To Replace Columbus Day With Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Every year on Columbus Day, the calls for a holiday honoring the indigenous peoples who originally settled America grow louder. And now, another city has listened.

In a unanimous vote by the city council, Seattle made Indigenous People’s Day a reality, following Minneapolis, which passed a similar resolution earlier this year. Instead of celebrating Columbus Day on the second Monday in October, the city will be honoring Native Americans and their culture.

Columbus Day has increasingly been criticized as a holiday that is honoring a man who perpetuated the extermination of indigenous populations after landing in the New World in 1492. Indigenous peoples faced large scale exploitation, rape, brutality, disease, slavery, and death on a daily basis after Europeans began settling in the Americas.

Even after American colonists declared their independence from Great Britain and other European powers, the genocide continued as Americans forced Native Americans out of their traditional lands, killed them, or tried to force them to assimilate.

For centuries, indigenous populations declined as millions died and they were nearly wiped out. Celebrating Columbus Day is like celebrating the near extinction of native peoples in North and South America. An entire culture could have been lost to us forever. So replacing Columbus Day with a holiday celebrating indigenous peoples is a way to honor those who died and those who are still living to share their culture with us today.

“This action will allow us to bring into current present day our valuable and rich history, and it’s there for future generations to learn,” president of the Quinault Nation tribe declared of the occasion. “Nobody discovered Seattle, Washington.”

For too long, Native Americans and other indigenous peoples around the world have suffered at the hands of Europeans and their descendants. It’s time to recognize their contributions to the history of this world and take responsibility for the evil actions of our ancestors. We’ll never be able to truly move forward together until we do and replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a great start for a new beginning.