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Columbus Day has been on American calendars since 1937, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared October 12 a federal holiday to honor the Italian explorer who “discovered” the Americas in 1492. However, the holiday has always been controversial. Many people believe that Christopher Columbus should not be given credit for “discovering” the continent, since native Americans had already been living there for generations.

Besides, the explorer’s mission was not a scientific “voyage of discovery”, but one intended to conquer the new land. Critics maintain that the Spanish army Columbus brought on his second voyage, caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of indigenous(土著的) people. Those that survived the massacre became slaves, working in mines. Many, therefore, believe that the explorer’s arrival should not be celebrated.

In 1977, a delegation of Native nations at the International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, proposed renaming the holiday to “Indigenous People’s Day”. The proposal passed with a majority.

However, convincing the rest of the country to do the same was not that easy. It took 15 years before the city of Berkeley in California adopted the name in 1992 and then 22 more years before Minneapolis, MN and Seattle, WA did the same in 2014. The following year, eight more cities including Albuquerque, NM and Portland, OR, began celebrating the second Monday of October as “Indigenous People’s Day”. The movement really started to gain momentum in 2016 when 19 cities, including Boulder, CO and Phoenix, AZ, as well as the states of Minnesota and Vermont, all decided to rename the day to honor Native Americans. In 2017, 21 more cities, including Austin, TX and Los Angeles, CA have made the shift.

With the increasingly larger number of cities moving away from Columbus Day each year, it will be interesting to see if “Indigenous People’s Day” gets federal recognition. Meanwhile, it will continue to be the focal point of debates throughout the Americas.