It looks like Columbus Day is here to stay in Wyoming. While the state of Minnesota just changed the name of the holiday to “Indigenous People’s Day,” it doesn’t look like Wyoming is going to follow the trend.
The day is not popular among students at UW.
Dakota Friesth, a fourth year criminal justice major said, “I think it’s an offensive holiday and Christopher Columbus shouldn’t be recognized as a national hero.”
It took Harriet E. Byrd, a former state representative of Wyoming, several years to get the Wyoming legislature to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day/Equality Day a holiday. She said even if it were of interest to current representatives, it would take a while for the name change to be taken seriously. State Representative James W. Byrd, who holds the same seat his mother once did, said he does not agree with the idea of “Indigenous People’s Day” replacing Columbus Day.
“To take away from one group of people to satisfy another, that’s not progress. That’s not moving forward,” Byrd said.
Byrd said he thinks changing the name would be placating people by trying to be too politically correct.
“They are trying to do the homogenous thing, not offend anyone and look for politically correct terms until you find one that is totally meaningless like ‘indigenous,’” he said.
“Even if they did get a holiday, it would come down to which holiday would come off the calendar for it to replace,” Byrd continued. “To have winners and losers based on your cultural make-up and your celebration of this make-up is awful.” Advocates for changing the name, particularly Native Americans, take the issue personally. In an NPR story from April 27, Peoples Day supporter and Lakota activist Bill Means told Minnesota Public Radio the story of Christopher Columbus is a lie children are told in public education.
“We discovered Columbus, lost on our shores, sick, destitute and wrapped in rags. We nourished him to health, and the rest is history,” Means told MPR. “He represents the mascot of American colonialism in the Western hemisphere. And so it is time that we change a myth of history.”
The name is another problem Byrd sees in the new holiday. “Indigenous” Byrd said is “grey, it’s bland, it’s neutral. It’s lumping the minorities in one category.”
Byrd said he thinks the name does not honor Native American culture; it honors indigenous people’s culture and generalizes all of the different tribes of America together.
While Minnesota is not the first state to not recognize Columbus Day, it has become one of the most scrutinized. South Dakota and the city of Berkeley, Calif. do not recognize the either.
The American Indian Studies Alliance (AISA) is an RSO at Wyoming that supports Native cultural events and Native cultural exploration, but there have been no public moves toward “Indigenous People’s Day” mentioned at UW.
Daniel Antell, Vice President of the AISA explains, “As an RSO, we don’t have a ‘Political’ agenda.”
Antell describes his feelings toward the holiday as “outdated” but “I’m not going to say I hate it…People do what they do. Doesn’t really offend me or make me angry. Just indifferent.”
