Columbus Day / Indigenous Peoples' Day

Monday is a holiday for a lot of people.

Columbus Day is celebrated by a lot of schools, and it represents the day Columbus supposedly "discovered" America. Since we Americans love our country and our land, it makes a lot of sense to celebrate that day. Personally, I only ever worked for one company that closed for Columbus Day, and it was widely known that the owner just preferred to close rather than have half his people schedule time off or call in "sick" because their kids were out of school. That was a weird company. We weren’t allowed to celebrate our birthdays in the office, either, because it was too much of a distraction. Instead, we were to go home after lunch.

Monday is also Indigenous Peoples' Day. What happened after Columbus landed was nothing short of genocide. We infected the people who were already here with our diseases. We thanked them for their generosity and wisdom about how to grow food and survive here by slaughtering them and then, largely, by stealing their land and shipping them across the country to be penned up into "reservations" that did not look like home in most cases. I live in Georgia, so when I try to find Native things in my part of the country I can only find supposedly-native plants; there is virtually nothing left of the culture that used to reside here.

I could make a solid argument for celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day by visiting the Etowah Indian Mounds, or finding a local Native American art studio or gift shop and making a purchase to support a Native American somewhere, but to be honest, Indigenous Peoples' Day just wants to make me cry for the loss of culture over which my ancestors presided. The thought of celebrating Columbus Day make me scream about those same atrocities, as if I could impress my mindset on people in the past and change their minds about the atrocities they’ve already committed.

So, primarily because I don't know what else to do, I do plan to work on Monday, as usual.