The city of Cambridge, home to Harvard University, is following in the footsteps of its progressively minded peers by rebranding Columbus Day as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
The Cambridge city council on Tuesday voted unanimously to rename the holiday, which takes places each year on the second Monday in October to commemorate Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer who (sort of) discovered America.
A number of other cities across the country have already adopted the change, including Albuquerque, N.M., Portland, Ore., and St. Paul, Minn., in response to critics who argue that celebrating Christopher Columbus is problematic due to his brutal treatment of the Native American population upon his arrival in the New World more than five centuries ago.
Under the resolution, the new holiday in Cambridge will celebrate the indigenous peoples of America and recognize “the suffering they faced following European conquest of their land.”
Marc McGovern, the half-Italian vice mayor of Cambridge, said that from his “Italian perspective,” the change was necessary to make the holiday “a day I can actually be proud of, as opposed to a day that we get off of school for someone who committed, even by those standards, some of the worst atrocities and genocide in world history.”
The controversy surrounding Columbus Day was the subject of a well-known episode of The Sopranos. Tony, it’s safe to say, would not have approved of Cambridge’s decision.
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