I would be interested in the opinion of the evolved poster on this board (Amused, Heretosays, Caring, etc) mostly those of you who are American: How do you deal, in your own mind, with the fact that America, which has taken millions of needy immigrants (nobody is trying to trivialize "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me") but used black slaves to prosper, after having stolen the land of the Native Indians and systematically killed almost all of them.

The Los Angeles City Council is considering joining a movement to replace Columbus Day with an official holiday called Indigenous Peoples Day, to recognize the contributions, as well as the suffering, of the nation’s original inhabitants.

Of course, giving city workers a day off would not begin to make amends for centuries of discrimination, enslavement and government-sanctioned genocide of Native Americans. Nor would wiping Columbus Day off the calendar reverse the destruction of indigenous peoples’ sacred spaces or the attacks on their cultural heritage.

Without question, Los Angeles, along with California and the nation as a whole, must do a far better job recognizing the violent history of oppression that decimated the country’s indigenous people. California’s political leaders in the 1850s made no secret of their desire to exterminate the area’s native inhabitants. State legislators funded anti-Indian militias. Native people were massacred. Villages were destroyed and tribes forcibly relocated. Yet few Californians know the details of this terrible history.

[Proponents say] The government also has to remove Columbus Day from the official calendar because, in these observers’ view, it honors a cruel slave trader whose arrival in the “New World” set into motion the mass killing of native peoples.

The debate over Columbus and his legacy reflects ongoing confusion in the United States about how the country’s history of racism and oppression fits into a proud national identity. The U.S. is a nation that has taken in millions of needy immigrants — but also grew through a colonization process that devastated native people. It’s a country that was founded by individuals fleeing oppression — but who then prospered on the labor of slaves.

Sorry LA Times if I quoted a little too much of this most excellent article, but I would like more people to be aware of it.