Indigenous Peoples day
Why Do We Celebrate CoLumbus Day Anyway?
My district doesn’t take this day off, it just rolls into Tuesday and kids wonder why Columbus mattered once but doesn’t anymore. If you say it’s Indigenous People’s Day, they wonder what that means and if it’s a holiday, where is the parade? We are straddling a strange in between place in this country between reckoning and ignorance. In California, the government is finally recognizing the devastation caused by colonization on the people and the land. And new ethnic studies requirements at the college and high school level will eventually help alleviate some of the ignorance in the next generation of graduates. But for the rest of us, unless we are Indigenous or have a personal relationship to Indigenous people or history, we know next to nothing of what came before European dominance in California or North America. For teachers, check out these classroom resources from Learning for Justice and Redbud Resource Group.