{"id":22469,"date":"2025-04-28T10:23:38","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T16:23:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/trump-says-columbus-day-will-now-just-be-columbus-day\/"},"modified":"2025-04-28T16:23:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T16:23:38","slug":"trump-says-columbus-day-will-now-just-be-columbus-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/trump-says-columbus-day-will-now-just-be-columbus-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump says Columbus Day will now just be Columbus Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Native
Native American and Indigenous dancers pack an arena during a grand entry procession at the annual Gathering of Nations powwow in Albuquerque on Friday. (Susan Montoya Bryan\/Associated Press)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump made clear Sunday that he would not follow his predecessor\u2019s practice of recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day alongside Columbus Day in October, accusing Democrats of denigrating the explorer\u2019s legacy as he pressed his campaign to restore what he argues are traditional American icons.<\/p>\n

Democrat Joe Biden was the first president to mark Indigenous Peoples Day, issuing a proclamation in 2021 that celebrated \u201cthe invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples\u201d and recognize \u201ctheir inherent sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"President
President Joe Biden hands a pen to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland as he signs a proclamation on the North Lawn at the White House in Washington, D.D., on Oct. 8, 2021. (Susan Walsh\/Associated Press file)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The proclamation noted that America \u201cwas conceived on a promise of equality and opportunity for all people\u201d but that promise \u201cwe have never fully lived up to. That is especially true when it comes to upholding the rights and dignity of the Indigenous people who were here long before colonization of the Americas began.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump on Sunday used a social media post to declare, \u201cI\u2019m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes.\u201d He said on his Truth Social site that \u201cthe Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

The federal holiday, the second Monday in October, was still known as Columbus Day during Biden\u2019s term, but also as Indigenous Peoples Day. That\u2019s been a longtime goal of activists who wanted to shift the focus from commemorating Columbus\u2019 navigation to the Americas to his and his successors\u2019 exploitation of the Indigenous people he encountered there.<\/p>\n

Though Trump has long objected to telling the country\u2019s history through a lens of diversity and oppression, the holiday he seeks to restore to its primacy was added to the calendar as a nod to the country\u2019s growing diversity.<\/p>\n

Columbus\u2019 expeditions never landed on the North American mainland, let alone any of the places that would become the 50 states. But the native of Genoa became increasingly commemorated in the United States as Italian immigrants flocked to the country and politicians sought to win their support.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it was the lynching of 11 Italian-American immigrants in New Orleans in 1891 that led to the first Columbus Day celebration in the United States, led the next year by President Benjamin Harrison. President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Columbus Day as a national holiday in 1934.<\/p>\n

Trump has long complained about Democrats tearing down statues of Columbus, a complaint he made again in Sunday\u2019s post. In 2017, he spoke out against a review of the 76-foot-tall statue of the explorer in New York\u2019s Columbus Circle that then-Mayor Bill de Blasio had ordered. It remains in place today, but other statues have been defaced or torn down.<\/p>\n

In 2020, Trump\u2019s administration paid to restore a Columbus statue in Baltimore that was dumped in the harbor during protests against the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n

\"The
The grand entry of hundreds of Native American and Indigenous dancers begins with the staff procession during the annual Gathering of Nations powwow in Albuquerque on Friday. (Susan Montoya Bryan\/Associated Press)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President won\u2019t recognize Indigenous Peoples Day<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22470,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,1097,561,138,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-22469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-indigenous-people","tag-native-american","tag-new-mexico","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22469"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=22469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}