Columbus Day vs. Indigenous People’s Day
ANGLO AMERICA, 20 Oct 2025
Daniel Horgan - TRANSCEND Media Service
More Profound and Irrelevant Than Presently Understood
13 Oct 2025 – There are over 25 US states with names that have roots in Indigenous People’s Language and meaning. Nine states are directly named after Original Indigenous Nations and include the following:
- Alabama (Alibamon/Alabama Nation)
- Illinois (Illini Nation)
- Iowa (Ioway Nation)
- Kansas (Kanza Nation)
- Massachusetts (Massachusett Nation)
- Missouri (Missouria Nation)
- North and South Dakota (Dakota, Lakota, Nakota: Oceti Sakowin Nations)
- Utah (Ute Nation)
More to the point of this writing would be the fact that the Columbus Day debate misses the mark completely in many different ways.
Naming Columbus as public enemy number one to the Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island is a misguided endeavor. On some level it serves to individualize and assign blame to any number of genocides in all of the Americas to one man. This individualization serves at least one means to an end of the colonial settler nations that were established from the tip of South America up to the Arctic Circle. As Columbus, the main culprit of these genocides, passed away in the 1500’s so too did public enemy number one. Now it’s easy to at least symbolically pin all evils on him and absolve ourselves from the sins of his successors.
We might also say in examination of Columbus’s murders, slave taking and entrepreneurial ways that he enriched himself with, that he was worse than the system, country, and religion he represented.
In the modern context he represented the system of capitalism to which we know the imperfections. One of them being the main driver for the continued and thriving slave trade of over 50 million persons that exists in present day on this planet.
Most people understand that Spain was certainly not innocent or benign when it came to Columbus’s conquests. They were enriched, as was all of Europe. In fact the gold, and then ultimately silver that was taken, in the likely combined amount, of over 20 billion from the earth with Indian slave labor created an entire middle class in Europe and served to challenge the monarch’s power in all of the lands there. This marked extreme human and political progress in the Old Nations. It marked destruction and termination for the Nations of Turtle Island. In the end it was a transfer of wealth. A theft. A bank robbery of two continents, that caused massive environmental damage and human suffering on one end, and remarkable financial and political progress on the other end. A cruel but predictable irony in retrospect.
We also know that Spain was just one colonizing country, so could Columbus be responsible or be symbolic for all the colonizing nations misdeeds and genocides? On some level he is and of course on some level he is not, but what is almost and hardly never mentioned in the Columbus debate is the source culprit which rises above the Nations of Europe. It was their boss and co-conspirator: The Vatican and Catholic religious establishment. The Pope was ultimately the King of Europe.
Pope Alexander VI issued the “Inter Caetera,” the Papal Bull. It demarcated Columbus ‘discovered lands’ for Spain. The Bull also stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be “discovered,” claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and declared that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown…”
This became known as the Doctrine of Discovery to European Nations and the Doctrine of Domination to the Nations of Turtle Island. Additionally, this doctrine became the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion, and in the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion held “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” Furthermore, to this day nine US states still have as founding documents a Papal Bull that claims their right to the land.
So finally we might ask ourselves why this holiday debate, the left side of which strives to honor them, might be important to the Original Nations such as the Lakota or Penobscot? While no one can speak for them but them, one answer might be that even the left of this debate is not at all important to Original Nations. If that’s true the main reason could or would be that they have their own important ceremonial and sacred days, so why would they care about one created (or transformed) by white people to honor them?
In many ways keeping Columbus Day as Columbus Day is more just and fair to our own identity as a Nation as well as to the Original Nations of this land, because creating a holiday that reverses the sentiment strived for will not return any gold, silver, persons, or land to even one of the 550 plus federally recognized Original Nations of the US land base. Nor will it mark an important date on their respective religious or cultural calendars.
After all the federally recognized Original Nations are sovereign nations, not due to being federally recognized, nor due to sovereignty granted by International Law. They are Original Nations due to their own Inherent Sovereignty.
It is that sovereignty and identity that has held a connection to the earth that Western culture, society, and religions could not in history or present ever claim to have. While Western institutions of all kinds view the earth as something to be domained, Original Nations the world over view the earth as their mother. As mother earth gives to Original Nations, Original Nations have historically looked to take care of the earth and its animal beings as one may take care of an aging mother.
Still today, a growing body of evidence supports Indigenous land return and custodianship. A recent report on the State of Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ (IPLC) Lands found that 91 percent of lands owned and governed by IPLCs — regardless of legal status — are in good or moderate ecological condition. IPLC lands also contain 36 percent of the globe’s Key Biodiversity Areas. This is not coincidence — it’s the result of Indigenous guardianship rooted in relational, spiritual, and ecological responsibility.
Preservation and restoration of Original Nation Sovereignty and power hold the key to fighting a better world and society, including the actual saving of the planet by fighting climate change.
They had what the world has lost. They have it now. What the world has lost, the world must have again, lest it die.
Not many years are left to have or have not, to recapture the lost ingredient… What, in our human world, is this power to live? It is the ancient, lost reverence and passion for human personality, joined with the ancient, lost reverence and passion for the earth and its web of life.
This invisible reverence and passion is what the American Indians almost universally had; and representative groups of them have it still…They had and have this power for living, which our modern world has lost—as world-view and self-view, as tradition and institution.
By virtue of this power, the densely populated Inca state, by universal agreement among its people, made the conservation and increase of the earth’s resources its foundational national policy. Never before, never since has a nation done what the Inca state did.
If our modern world should be able to recapture this power, the earth’s natural resources and web of life would not be irrevocably wasted within the twentieth century, which is the prospect now. True democracy, founded in neighborhoods and reaching over the world, would become the realized heaven on earth. And living peace—not just an interlude between wars—would be born and would last through the ages.” – John Collier, U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs; 1933 to 1945
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Daniel Horgan is a graduate of the European Center for Peace Studies. He is the founder of the Indigenous Connection project that connected Indigenous Rights Organizations with foreign Embassies in Kenya from 2017-19. He is an occasional contributor to Transcend Media Service. He is a friend and troubleshooter of the Oceti Sakowin Treaty Council: Indigenous Empowerment | Peta Omniciye – United States
Tags: Christopher Columbus, First Nations, Indigenous Culture, Indigenous Rights, Native Americans
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Oct 2025.
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