Happy Columbus Never Met An Indigenous Person He Didn’t Kill or Enslave Day! I can’t even imagine how many more indigenous persons Columbus may have murdered if he didn’t have the day off.
Columbus Day originated as a celebration of Italian-American heritage and was first held in San Francisco in 1869. The first state-wide celebration was held in Colorado in 1907. Franklin Delano Roosevelt pronounced Columbus Day in 1937, a celebration of the “promise which Columbus’s discovery gave to the world.” Since 1971, it has been celebrated on the second Monday in October. The date on which Columbus arrived in the Americas is also celebrated as the Dia de la Raza (Day of the Race) in Latin America and some Latino communities in the USA. However, it is a controversial holiday in some countries and has been re-named in others. A growing number of people in the US are pushing to change the date into a celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
All of this has nothing to do with the fact that it’s Canadian Thanksgiving.
And yet perhaps we should be celebrating Leif Ericson day today:
October 9, 1000 –
Leif Ericson discovered Vinland and became the first known European to walk in North America, on this date (or not). In 1964, the United States Congress authorized and requested the President to proclaim October 9 of each year as Leif Erikson Day.
The day after Leif Ericson Day in 1965, Yale University astonished the world with its Vinland Map, a 1440 transcription of a map believed to have been originally drawn by Ericson himself (or possibly Eriksson, but certainly not Eiriksson) around 1000 A.D., and which appeared to depict parts of Canada. Just a few years ago, more evidence supporting the authenticity of the map was revealed, lending further support to the conclusion that there were Vikings in North America five centuries before Columbus soiled his first diaper.
This is an exciting development, because it will almost certainly necessitate the development of Viking reservations and the establishment of Viking-run casinos.
Still more exciting are recent scientific findings that suggest Caucasians may have existed in North America prior to being displaced by the so-called native-Americans who were later visited by Vikings prior to being utterly displaced by still more Caucasians.
But this is also deeply troubling, because there was probably someone here before those original Caucasians.
In the interests of fairness, I enthusiastically endorses the endowment of every American with their own casino.
And so it goes
The Haus of Dcaligari 