Vote on Indigenous Peoples Day

Vote on Indigenous Peoples Day - 1/26/2021 School Committe Meeting
Grace Donohue
January 27, 2021

School Committee Meeting on January 26th

At the Melrose School Committee meeting on January 26th, the board voted unanimously to end the school district’s recognition of Columbus Day on all school calendars, instead recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the second Monday of each October, beginning in 2021. While Columbus Day remains a federal holiday that neither the Melrose School Committee nor the City Council has any ability to change, all seven elected members of the committee (including Mayor Brodeur) voted to end its recognition. The holiday celebrates a man who our schools teach children was responsible for the genocide of entire populations of indigenous peoples when he made his expedition across the Atlantic in search of Asia. This move was made in coordination with other elected officials in Melrose, and the effort to bring the issue to a vote in front of the school committee was led by Jen McAndrew. The day following this vote, Mayor Paul Brodeur released a statement saying that the city of Melrose will similarly replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which included a list of elected officials who supported the measure. Two notable names missing from that list were city council members Cory Thomas and John Tramontozzi. According to an article from the Patch, Thomas said in a Facebook post that the reason he left his name off the list is not because he is “‘pro-Columbus, or anti-Indigenous People, but because [he] felt this issue, amidst the ongoing pandemic, was not our community's top priority.’" Tramantozzi cited other reasons, namely that he feels taking Columbus day off the calendar “unnecessarily minimizes the historic mistreatment suffered by Italian-Americans” and he “‘would have preferred that we choose not to reallocate a day in which a marginalized and stigmatized group of Americans celebrate their culture and their history of overcoming these challenges.’"

Replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day might seem to be a no-brainer to anyone who has learned of the atrocities committed by Columbus when he reached the New World and who cares about reconciliation with Native Americans today, but Columbus Day itself also has a rocky history in the US. It was first observed in 1792 to celebrate 300 years since Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas, and then was turned into a holiday in San Francisco in 1869 to celebrate Italian-American heritage. Under FDR and because of requests from the Knights of Columbus and NYC’s Italian-American community, the first national observance of Columbus Day was in 1934, and it became a federal holiday three years later. Italian immigrants to America faced discrimination and even violence, particularly in Boston, when waves of Italian immigrants were docking at Ellis Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Italians were not classified as “white” and therefore did not benefit from the same privileges given Anglo-Saxon immigrants who fit more neatly into the racial caste system that perpetrated throughout the American culture and society. Italians’ categorization as non-white and non-Protestant lead to their targeting by violence by prejudiced Americans and hate groups like the KKK.

The worst of violence includes fifty documented lynchings of Italian Americans in the period of 189--1920, including a particularly horrible occasion on which eleven Italian men were “hung or shot to death by a mob seeking ‘justice’ for a murdered policeman,” according to an article from The World. Waves of immigration in American have always been parallel by increasing nativism, and Italian immigrants were no exception. In the late 19th century, Italian immigrants were often scapegoated for “stealing American jobs” (sound familiar?), and signs saying “Italians Need Not Apply” were often hung in store windows below “Help Wanted” signs. In the early 20th century, at the height of the first Red Scare, the growing fear of communism in America led to the criminalization of European immigrants for suspected involvement in the communist movement, which was largely fueled by anti-immigrant sentiment. The height of this anti-communist, anti-immigrant hysteria was the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1920, which took place in our own backyard in South Braintree. Two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were accused and arrested for an armed robbery that resulted in two deaths. The defendants were convicted of the crime on shoddy evidence, even though they argued that the conviction was politically-motivated because of identification as anarchists and bias of the jury against Italians. The nation’s nativist sentiment eventually culminated in the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants from each nationality that could gain citizenship in America every year. However, over time, Italians became more integrated into American society and began being seen as white, and were afforded the same privileges as their pale-complexioned neighbors of English or French descent. Columbus Day is seen by many Italian Americans as a way to recognize the history of Italian immigrants. have made America’s history as rich as it is. However, using Columbus as the figure to recognize that legacy may not be the best way to appreciate that history because it diminishes the violence that he inflicted on the native populations he encountered when reaching the New World. America prides itself on being a melting pot of immigrants of all nationalities, but the fact of the matter is that the very first migrants to America came at the cost of the lives of millions of Indigenous Peoples who lived here first. Melrose City Councilor John Tramantozzi and others in the Italian-American community support the renaming of Columbus Day as Italian American Heritage Day, and the adoption of a separate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

In the past few years, ceasing to recognize Columbus Day and instead celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day has been a move made by hundreds of cities, towns, and counties, as well as Washington DC, Washington state, and Oregon. While this change has only come about recently, Native peoples have been advocating for it for generations, saying that it is wrongful for America to celebrate a man who was responsible for the death of millions of Indigenous Peoples and to incorrectly portray him as having “discovered” a continent already inhabited by millions, not to mention that he did not even touch land in what we now call the United States. Among the many members of the Melrose community who spoke in favor of the measure in Melrose was Sagamore Fairies Gray, a current member of a Native American tribe who spoke to advocate for the recognition of his community’s history and the importance of facing the ugly parts of America’s past in order to reconcile the harm that has been done. Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a way to appreciate and celebrate the first people to live on the land that we now call America and to recognize the centuries of colonial oppression, forced migration, manipulative land treaties and disenfranchisement that Indigenous Americans have faced as a result of European colonization.

While the oppression and violence faced by Indigenous Peoples started when Columbus reached land all the way back in 1492, much like the legacy that slavery and Jim Crow has had on Black Americans, Native Peoples are still facing staggering challenges in their communities today. According to the organization Native American Aid, “four to eight out of ten adults on reservations are unemployed,” and as of 2008, 28.2% of all Native Americans live below the poverty line. The lack of jobs, resources, and government support on reservations has created conditions of immense poverty with dismal health and housing. Data from the CDC show that Native Americans are 3.5 times more likely to contract COVID-19 than non-Hispanic white Americans. The disparities in wealth, poverty levels, and access to safe and affordable housing, food, and healthcare experienced by native communities in America is a result of their treatment by state and federal governments over hundreds of years, which has forced them off their land, robbed them of tribal sovereignty, and desolated their access to clean water and food by destroying their land with oil drilling and pipelines. While simply changing the words that appear on the calendar on the second Monday of October does not erase that history or solve the many challenges facing Native Americans, it is a step in the right direction to take responsibility for the American government’s centuries of mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples’ and to appreciate their culture and significance in American history.