Following the Student Senate’s motion to remove Columbus Day from the university’s calendars, it is now on the shoulders of the university’s officials to stand by the long overdue motion to honor the indigenous culture that is too often pushed to the side.

Columbus Day has become an obsolete holiday, dragged into calendars only because it has yet to be challenged by the popular majority. Its defense that it is a celebration of the discovery of the Americas by Europeans is weak to say the least. Not only is it irrational to hail the conquistadors for discovering something that had existed for centuries, it is dishonest and hurtful to conclude that the only part worth celebrating is the European arrival, excluding the pre-existing indigenous people from any praise. 

Columbus Day has come to serve as nothing more than a day for grade-schoolers to make macaroni art. Its only useful purpose is to display the apathy with which themes like racism and cultural genocide can be overlooked for the sake of tradition.

If NC State chooses not to stand with the Student Senate’s decision to get rid of Columbus Day, the university will thereby also be choosing to mask the atrocities committed by the European newcomers, to look past the destruction of a culture for the sake of another and to idolize the individuals responsible for the death and ill-treatment of hundreds of thousands. 

To side with those that weigh the importance of Columbus’ so-called discovery as more important than the sentiment of respect for the indigenous peoples of the Americas is to perpetuate the closed-mindedness that denies the U.S. has ever done anything wrong.

If the U.S. wishes to move forward as a nation, it must admit its wrongdoings. The decades of slavery endured by African people, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the overtaking of the indigenous peoples — these, among others, must be kept at the surface to remind the nation of its downfalls so as to keep the country true and humble.

The significance of the European newcomers cannot by any means be overlooked, but it can be reshaped to be more representative of the truth.

Rather than celebrating Columbus and his fellow colonizers, it is time to celebrate the people upon whose foundation the U.S. has built, the people whose culture was trampled upon and is now only brought up in reference to those who stepped on it.

The step to replace Columbus Day with the Indigenous Peoples’ Day is the first of many in recognizing the importance of paying dues to those living in the Americas long before Columbus and in apologizing for centuries of negligence.