Opinion of replacing Columbus Day with Native American Day

[TDAS04]

South Dakota has done so.

Support. 

[TDAS04]

No don't do it. Things don't need to change.

This thread is pretty out of touch with South Dakota.

Who is out of touch with South Dakota now?

South Dakota has like 3 Italian people and a decent Native American population so it's no surprise.  

But, in my opinion, either keep it Columbus Day or get rid of the holiday entirely.  Replacing it with Native American day seems to place the blame for American mistreatment of Native Americans on the feet of Christopher Columbus.  And then, why don't we have a day for every race of people?  It just gets silly at a certain point.

Columbus Day makes little sense considering that not only was he not the first person set to foot in the Americas, he was not even the first European; the Vikings were.

Anyway, Martin Luther King Day (which I support) honors the fight for African American rights.  The Native Americans were the first Americans.  They are the ones who have a the strongest case against "illegal aliens".  To this day, they are still persecuted.  On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, poverty is horrendous, and the life expectancy is similar to that of an African country.  In the wealthy US, that is downright shameful.  

Also, Congress must apologize for their destruction.  Congress has apologized for slavery, for Japanese internment, and for the overthrow of the Hawaiian queen.  It must apologize for the worst atrocity in US history, which is of course, what was done against the Native Americans.

Surely, the original people of our "free land, the greatest nation on Earth" are entitled to our respect.

[TDAS04]

Leif Erikson Day makes no less sense than Columbus Day, but why is celebrating any of these explorers more important than respecting the first Americans?

From what I can recall, the US Government has never apologized for it's draft policies during the Civil War, has never apologized for the treatment of the native population of the Philippines after McKinley took it over, never apologized for inaction during the flooding of the Mississippi in the 1920's (the most untalked about natural calamity in American history that was that era's Katrina), has only given a very minimum apology for the behavior of abusive military in the Vietnam War (to which their initial reaction was disgusting), and has come nowhere near (though Fox News pundits claim differently) to apologizing to the world for the World Policeman status that the US now has.

So yes, the US Government doesn't have exactly that great of a record of "apologizing".

Sure, the US Government has done plenty of bad things, but the destruction of and continuing persecution of the Native American population tops them all.

[TDAS04]

Leif Erikson Day makes no less sense than Columbus Day, but why is celebrating any of these explorers more important than respecting the first Americans?

Vikings are cool, bro. Also, they're the source of more than one History Channel conspiracy theory about the Knights Templar and the Masons as well. Though we should probably have a Chief Pontiac Day, I'll give you that. I may or may not have visited his burial site twice this weekend. Legend shall be the judge of that.

Absolutely.  I'm part Norwegian and the college that I attended has Ole the Viking as its mascot.  Even with that aside, Vikings are worth celebrating more than Columbus.  I said that they were no less great; perhaps I should have just said more.

Unfortunately, the conquest of the natives was inevitable. You had conquistadors pumped up on religion and violence running against a primitive, indigenous culture; that's a real bad mix. The best case scenario for the natives was to simply face assimilation, but the differences were probably too great to allow even that.

Why honor explorers? Because they found new lands, defied odds and tradition, and built roads.

There may be reasons to honor explorers in general, but my question was:  Why are they worth celebrating more than the very first people of our country, and their cultural contributions?  If we love this nation and its history, there must some respect for the first inhabitants of the our territory.  

[TDAS04]

Congress actually did make an apology in a Brownback amendment to the Defense authorization bill in 2009.

Stand corrected.

That's good to know.  Good things can even come from Sam Brownback.