Demand Change - Sign the petition to remove Columbus Day

Sponsored by Joshua Arce, President & CEO of Partnership With Native Americans.

While we applaud President Biden’s proclamation of October 11 last year as Indigenous Peoples’ Day we must demand a permanent change to this day each year.

Columbus Day was signed into law in 1934 to honor a man who was no hero. Columbus Day must be abolished and replaced with Indigenous Peoples’ Day on a National level permanently. Here’s why:

• Columbus did not discover America, the Indigenous tribes inhabited these shores before Columbus and other explorers who preceded him.
• Columbus landed in what he thought was the East Indies and mistakenly called the inhabitants ‘Indians’.
• In his own journals, Columbus cites how easily Native people could be enslaved and exploited — and he quickly proceeded to do so.
• Columbus opened the door to many ills that forever harmed the tribes, including a mass migration of settlers into the ‘new world’, massacres, policies of genocide, the introduction of diseases, killing millions of Indigenous people to take their homelands, and disrupting a centuries-old way of life — all in the name of God and manifest destiny.
• Columbus also opened the door to more than 500 treaties made and broken by the U.S., millions of acres of reservation lands allotted and then taken back, and the creation of the hardships and realities we see on the reservations today.
• Indigenous peoples have made countless contributions to western agriculture, the environment, the U.S. military, and even the U.S. Constitution — this is true and worthy of celebration.

Columbus Day should be immediately revoked as a Federal holiday and replaced with a National Indigenous Peoples’ Day. This moves us closer to a true U.S. history and acknowledging the wrongs done to the tribes.

Sign this petition, in support of H. R. 5473 and S. 2919 before the 117th Congress, to be shared with Speaker Of The House.

Share this movement to help us get 10,000 signatures by October 13th.