N.O. Council votes to rename Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day
29th November 2021 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
A week before Thanksgiving – the national holiday that to some represents the planting of the seed of American culture, but to others symbolizes the beginning of a continent-wide genocide of millions of Native Americans – the New Orleans City Council adopted an official city holiday for Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
At its regular Nov. 18 meeting, the City Council unanimously voted to make Oct. 10, 2022 – the next Columbus Day – a city holiday honoring the history, culture and people of the Native populations of the Americas.
The action was proposed by City Council President Helena Moreno, who thanked the citizens who provided public comments and the community organizers, especially Our Voice Nuestra Voz, for supporting the Council’s action.
“Indigenous Peoples’ Day recognizes the immense contributions of Indigenous peoples to our society, honors their place as the first inhabitants, underscores their role in protecting and nurturing their languages and traditions comprising their vibrant and diverse cultures, and acknowledges the wrongs inflicted upon them including systematic assimilation, genocide, displacement, and eradication of their culture over the course of generations,” Moreno said in a statement to The Louisiana Weekly.
Our Voice Nuestra Voz, a local community organization established in 2015 to organize New Orleans parents in support of equitable and inclusive educational systems and curricula, rallied its supporters to submit comments to the City Council about the Indigenous Peoples’ Day proposal. About two dozen OVNV supporters also attended the Nov. 18 Council meeting.
Mary Moran, the founder and executive director of OVNV, told The Louisiana Weekly that official recognition of Indigenous people by various area governmental agencies is long overdue, and she’s glad the City Council adopted its own Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
“It’s something that we’ve needed forever,” said Moran, whom Moreno specifically lauded for her involvement in the effort. “It’s important to acknowledge the people who were originally on this land.”
The timing of the vote – coming exactly a week before Thanksgiving – wasn’t lost on supporters of the move. Moran also noted that efforts to recognize, protect and honor Indigenous people, their culture and their sufferings will hopefully soon become much more entwined with the recent, countywide pushes for racial and social justice, such as Black Lives Matter and, locally, Take ’Em Down NOLA, the grassroots effort to remove the various statues of Confederate figures that existed in New Orleans.
Moran said in modern times, Native Americans and their culture are often invisible or non-existent to the general public because they were the victims of murder and genocide, or because they’ve been forced to live on small reservations.
“Native people have been fighting for their land for centuries,” she said, “but over the last few years, as we’ve seen with the different [social] uprisings, there is a growing need to acknowledge the dignity and humanity of all people. That means not just the people we see, but also the Indigenous people who aren’t seen.”
Oct. 10, 2022, will mark the next Columbus Day, a long-held national holiday honoring one of the first Europeans to set foot on land in the Western Hemisphere. The establishment of Columbus Day in 1907 was meant to commemorate the historically false, Eurocentric falsehood that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America and allegedly set in motion the flourishing of the greatest civilization – a distinctly white-dominated one – the Western Hemisphere had ever seen.
However, that long-held, white-supremacist viewpoint has been contradicted by historical facts – such as the advanced, pre-existing great civilizations of Indigenous peoples in the Americas; and the reality that Columbus was a brutal, genocidal murderer and enslaver of Native peoples – and challenged by a movement pressing for the repeal of Columbus Day and the acknowledgement of both the greatness of earlier Indigenous societies, and the horrific precedence set by Columbus and his atrocities.
It’s for those stark realities – and the centuries-long suffering of Indigenous populations they caused – that some area Native-American activists view the City Council’s recent action as merely a symbolic beginning to a much more substantial and significant movement toward the return and remediation of what has been taken, by force and deceit, from Indigenous peoples.
Anne White Hat, a local activist and Sicangu Lakota, said that anything short of the return to Indigenous populations of the land stolen from them is just a token gesture.
“The phrase ‘LANDBACK’ refers to the Indigenous-based #LANDBACK movement,” White Hat said. “Every year this is the season to tokenize the Indigenous nations of Turtle Island, the so-called Americas. This declaration is meaningless and worth as much as the paper it’s written on. We want our LANDBACK.”
Virginia Richard, a member of the MOWA Band of Choctaw, put it even more bluntly: “Landback now.”
Alison McCrary, an enrolled member of Ani-Yun-Wiya Cherokee Nation, noted that Thanksgiving – or “Thankskilling,” as she calls it – is for many Indigenous people a national day of mourning. She also supports the Landback movement, and she added that she and other Native people in Bvlbancha (the Indigenous name for the New Orleans area) have other demands for local government and power structures, including:
• A return of the thousands of children’s bodies to their families or Nations for proper burial who were killed in church-run boarding schools;
• The removal of all monuments and statues of colonizers, slave holders and perpetuators of genocide, slavery, imprisonment, torture and oppression including the Bienville and Jackson statues;
• For local Catholic leadership, as the largest landowner in Bvlbancha, to dialogue with the New Orleans Indigenous community around resources available as a form of repair for harm done by the institution and returning land for an intertribal center; and
• Christian and other people of faith hold their institutions’ leadership accountable for harms done.
Regardless of what additional, more substantive remediation actions might take place, the New Orleans City Council’s declaration of an Indigenous Peoples’ Day to replace Columbus Day does represent a significant step toward that greater effort.
OVNV’s Moran said she and her organization have now set their sights on persuading the Louisiana state government to establish an Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
“We want this to go statewide,” she said. “We want the state to recognize Indigenous people, not just the city of New Orleans.”
She also stressed the importance of merging larger, society-wide, social-justice efforts – such as better protecting the environment, creating more affordable housing and establishing more inclusive historically accurate school curricula – with addressing the plight of Indigenous populations.
“We need to put some work behind it,” she said. “We must make sure we’re learning from Native people, and make sure we’re taking care of our land, and making sure that our children and our elders are taken care of.”
She added: “People are coming from different viewpoints to help inform people and talk about how we grow this movement.”
This article originally published in the November 29, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
