Maine says goodbye to Columbus Day

Maine has become the latest US state to replace Columbus Day with "Indigenous Peoples' Day" to honor the country's original inhabitants — Native Americans — and not the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus who has been given credit for discovering America in 1492.

Governor Janet T. Mills of Maine signed the bill into law on April 26 after receiving bipartisan support.

She said in a statement: "Today, we take another step in healing the divisions of the past, in fostering inclusiveness, in telling a fuller, deeper history, and in bringing the state and Maine's tribal communities together to build a future shaped by mutual trust and respect." 

Maine joins six other states — Alaska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Oregon, Minnesota and New Mexico — that have renamed the holiday in honor of Native Americans. Vermont has a bill waiting to be signed into law that would replace the name with Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Dozens of cities have chosen to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day in recent years, including Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco.

Columbus Day has been a federal holiday in the US since 1934, and is usually celebrated on the second Monday of October.

Those renaming the day argue that while Columbus is credited with discovering America on one of his four transatlantic voyages from Spain on Oct 12, 1492, the explorer made landfall in the Bahamas, not in what later became the United States, which was already inhabited by Native Americans.

Activists and Native Americans also say that Columbus Day celebrates the genocide that he and other European explorers carried out in the Caribbean, South America and North America.

Kevin Caira, the national president for the Order Sons and Daughters of Italy in America, which says it represents the 26 million Americans of Italian heritage, told China Daily that the Italian-American community is not opposed to an Indigenous Peoples' Day.

"I don't think that Columbus [opened up the door for abuse towards the indigenous people],'' he said. "It shouldn't be Columbus came over and brought all of the ills of the world … he also brought over a lot of things as well, maybe we should credit him for the medicine, the literature, the art, the science, the math, everything else that was brought over from Europe.

"What comes next? Does Thanksgiving come next because pilgrims came over from Europe and brought diseases and had fights with the Native Americans? Slippery slope when you start to do things like this without really studying the whole history of Columbus."

The National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) in Washington said in a statement that it's not opposed to Indigenous Peoples' Day, but it said "to repeal Columbus Day as a federal holiday, which is celebrated by over 20 million Italian Americans, only to replace it by another holiday celebrated by another ethnic group, would be culturally insensitive''.

USA President Donald Trump is also a supporter of Columbus Day. Last year he said: "On Columbus Day, we commemorate the achievements of this skilled Italian explorer and recognize his courage, will power, and ambition — all values we cherish as Americans."