By Laura Yuen/MPR
From protests to parades, Native Americans on October 8th celebrated Indigenous Peoples’ Day – a reclaiming of a holiday once dedicated to Christopher Columbus.
Some recalled how as children, their parents offered a narrative of Columbus that was far different from what they learned in school.
“He was lost. He never really discovered America because we were already here,” said John Bobolink, who helped organize a parade in St. Paul. “Some of the atrocities he performed on our people – it’s not a pretty story.”
The marchers, many of them schoolchildren, walked through the rain from the American Indian Magnet School to the Indian Mounds Regional Park on the city’s east side. The weather caused several schools to withdraw from the parade, but at least 150 people showed up to march. The festivities continued in Minneapolis throughout the afternoon.
The parade has been held on the second Monday of October for the past several years, following the 2014 decision of Minneapolis to change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Bobolink said. St. Paul followed suit the following year. San Francisco, Cincinnati, Denver and a host of other cities continued the trend.
Nina Berglund, 19, got a head start on the day with an act of protest. On Sunday evening, she and some friends headed to the Minnesota State Capitol and threw a sheet over the statue of Christopher Columbus, so it looked like he was wearing a red dress. Berglund said it was in honor of missing and murdered indigenous women.
“Every single native family I know has a story like that,” she said. “They have a family member who was assaulted, they have a family member who was raped, they have a family member who they don’t even know what happened to them.”
But the day was also about simply celebrating a culture that for centuries had been repressed, she said.
“It’s just beyond beautiful to see these young people so proud of who they are,” she said.
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