On Sunday, as he continued his campaign to restore what he claims are traditional American icons, President Trump made it clear that he would not recognize Indigenous Peoples Day alongside Columbus Day in October, as his predecessor had done. Trump accused Democrats of demeaning the explorer’s legacy.
Joe Biden, a Democrat, was the first president to proclaim Indigenous Peoples Day; his 2021 proclamation acknowledged “their inherent sovereignty” and honored “the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples.”
America “was conceived on a promise of equality and opportunity for all people,” the declaration said, adding that the country has never completely fulfilled this promise. That is particularly the case when it comes to respecting the inherent worth and freedoms of the indigenous peoples who lived in these lands long before Europeans arrived.
Trump made the announcement, “I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes,” in a social media post on Sunday. “The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much,” he said on his Truth Social blog.
During Biden’s administration, the official holiday, which falls on the second Monday in October, was recognized as Indigenous Peoples Day in addition to Columbus Day. Activists’ long-term objective has been to change the conversation around Columbus’s arrival in the Americas from a celebration of his navigation to one that highlights the exploitation of the indigenous peoples he encountered.
Despite Trump’s long-standing opposition to seeing American history through a prism of oppression and diversity, the holiday he wants to see reinstated was introduced to the calendar in recognition of the increasing diversity in the country.
Even excluding the territories that are now part of the United States of America, Columbus’s explorations never set foot on the North American mainland. The native of Genoa, nevertheless, became more and more celebrated in America as politicians campaigned for the support of the country’s growing Italian immigrant population.
Indeed, the first Columbus Day celebration in the United States was spearheaded the following year by President Benjamin Harrison in response to the killing of eleven Italian-American immigrants in New Orleans in 1891. A national holiday was established in 1934 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in honor of Christopher Columbus.
Trump reiterated his longstanding gripe in Sunday’s post about Democrats demolishing statues of Christopher Columbus. Then-Mayor Bill de Blasio had ordered a study of the 76-foot-tall monument of the explorer in New York’s Columbus Circle in 2017, and he came out against it in 2017. Although other monuments have been vandalized or destroyed, this one has survived to the present day.
Protesters in Minneapolis threw a monument of Christopher Columbus into the water in 2020, but the Trump government paid to have it restored. The statue had been damaged during demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
