Cincinnati celebrates its first Indigenous Peoples’ Day after Cincinnati City Council voted last Wednesday to replace Columbus Day with the holiday commemorating the first inhabitants of our region.
Council considered changing the day twice in the past two years, but declined to do so until last week’s 6-0 vote. Council members Amy Murray and David Mann abstained from that vote, and Vice Mayor Christopher Smitherman was not at the meeting.
Columbus Day celebrates Christopher Columbus’ journeys from Europe to the Americas beginning in 1492. Critics of the holiday argue that it ignores the oppression experienced by Native Americans by European colonists and the continued vibrancy of first peoples’ cultures and traditions.
A delegation of Native American groups first proposed the idea of an Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Geneva in 1977 during the International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, which was sponsored by the United Nations.
Berkeley, California’s City Council in 1992 was the first to declare Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day, and since that time a number of other municipalities have followed suit, including Columbus, Ohio.
Proponents of the change have planned celebrations at noon outside Cincinnati City Hall, where a short bicycle tour of former native earthworks will begin, and at a 6 p.m. potluck in Northside.
Cathina Hourani, a member of the Cherokee Nation who lives in Liberty Township, told council in 2016 that the motion meant a lot to her. Her ancestors were removed from Georgia and forced to march the Trail of Tears in the late 1830s.
“By passing this, it will not only include Native Americans in this very diverse city, but it also means that what my family endured will not be forgotten,” she said.
Last year, Mann said he supports a day for indigenous peoples, but not at the expense of Columbus Day or by “demonizing” the Italian sailor who landed in the Bahamas in 1492 while looking for a passage to Asia. Mann said he heard from constituents with Italian heritage who were upset by the prospect.
“Nothing changes by saying, ‘OK, a day that Italians find important is going to be eliminated,’ ” Mann said after last year’s vote. “Why does it have to be a zero-sum game? That’s the thing I don’t understand.”
Scientific studies suggest that indigenous peoples in the new world lost as much as half their population to disease, warfare and harsh treatment in the years immediately following the European arrivals kicked off by Columbus’ four voyages. That doesn’t count later deaths in battles with the U.S. government. All told, historians estimate between 75 and 90 percent of the Americas’ indigenous population perished due to European colonization.
Locally, traces of native inhabitants of the Cincinnati area were unceremoniously removed in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Area residents at the time — including General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who fought native peoples for U.S. control of Ohio and has a Northside street named after him — demolished a series of earthworks that covered much of the basin the city lies in. Today, only Mound Street in the West End commemorates them.
This article appears in Oct 3-10, 2018.
