What You Didn't Know About Columbus Day

Today is Columbus Day but apparently not everyone is happy about that. Wikipedia has an interesting section in their Columbus Day entry about opposition to the widely celebrated holiday.

Since the later part of the 20th century groups have voiced opposition to Columbus celebrations. Indigenous groups in particular have opposed the holidays as celebrating the man who initiated the European colonization of the new world. Opposition often focuses on the cruel treatment indigenous peoples faced at the hands of Columbus and later European settlers and the fact that the European conquest directly and indirectly caused a massive decline in population among the indigenous peoples.
In the summer of 1990, 350 Native Americans, representatives from all over the hemisphere, met in Quito, Ecuador, at the first Intercontinental Gathering of Indigenous People in the Americas, to mobilize against the quincentennial celebration of Columbus Day. The following summer, in Davis, California, more than a hundred Native Americans gathered for a follow-up meeting to the Quito conference. They declared October 12, 1992, International Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People. The largest ecumenical body in the United States, the National Council of Churches, called on Christians to refrain from celebrating the Columbus quincentennial, saying, "What represented newness of freedom, hope, and opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation and genocide for others."[15]
Venezuela responded to opposition by renaming the Día de la Raza holiday the Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance) (see above).
Some groups and individuals have in turn defended Columbus celebrations. Michael Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute said Western civilization brought “reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, and productive achievement” to a people who were based in “primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism”, and to a land that was “sparsely inhabited, unused, and underdeveloped.”

Read the whole article here