Dear Friends,

[Please come to the trial for Emma Schmit and Mahmud Fitil, pipeline fighters arrested last fall for blocking construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline during Bold Iowa‘s Farmers Defense Camp. For more detail, check out this excellent video by Rodger Routh. We’ve been asked not to wear pipeline shirts in the courtroom.]

I’ve never understood why Christopher Columbus was given a holiday. [Listen to Donnielle Wanatee on this week’s Forum.] I get why we celebrate the impressive lives of men (yeah, they’re all men, but let’s change that) like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These men actually accomplished great things.

Statue of Columbus splattered with “blood.”

But a holiday for a guy who “discovered” America? I mean, really, you sail west from Spain and how could you miss it?

Columbus didn’t “discover” America. He pillaged it and opened the door to one of the most despicable genocides in human history. Such an “accomplishment” doesn’t warrant a national holiday. It warrants a national apology to the descendants of the Indigenous people Columbus and other European invaders slaughtered.

So I’m all kinds of excited about the movement to declare the first Monday of October “Indigenous Peoples Day,” which already has been approved in 55 cities.

Let’s keep that going. My prediction is by the middle of the next decade, Columbus Day will no longer be a national holiday and we’ll celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day in its place. But in the interest of reconciliation, I suggest we give Columbus Day an honorable, merciful death by sending a flaming replica of Columbus’ ship, the Santa Maria, down the Potomac River and out to sea. Leif Erikson would be proud.

And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of Groundhog Day. America’s most overrated rodent is wrong half the time anyhow.