Indigenous people’s day, also known as National indigenous people’s day or First people’s day, nowadays is a federal holiday, celebrated on the 11th of October in direct opposition to Columbus day. This commemorative day was born as a city holiday in Berkley, California in 1992 which was the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. After 2014 many other cities and states adopted this holiday until it became a federal holiday in 2021, thanks to president Joe Biden formally recognizing it. Indigenous people’s day offers us a precious chance to look in depth to the fabric of American society. Being born as a counter to a pre-existing holiday , it makes really clear the intention of the American people to be more considerate about their controversial past. But how far being considerate about your past is acceptable? When the desire of acknowledging and be aware of one’s past results in the urge to cleanse the past? The atrocities committed by many figures with significant historical relevance are undeniable but still this fact doesn’t mean that they have to be erased from History. Surely no one would say that the choice of not teaching in schools about many atrocities committed by the Japanese empire in the first half of the 20th century is a good one, then why this year have so many people been going down the streets of US cities , destroying and vandalizing monuments and statues? Genuine and healthy things and ideals, such as indigenous people’s day and the desire to be better than who was on this earth before us, get very often twisted by the minds of the people that, most of the time, only search an opportunity to unleash their anger through the newest right cause. This isn’t surely a new issue in our history and it demonstrates how much the human way of thinking actually changes through time. It is interesting to see that the subjects of historical suppression have switched place in time. Winston Churchill’s quote “history is written by victors” isn’t quite applicable nowadays and although it is still valid , its meaning has shifted more from “history is written by the strong” to “history is written by the likable”. In our time it is far more important to be likable than to be right. This could be an effect of social media or the effects of a new awareness about the past or both things combined. What isn’t debatable is the fact that the world is changing and we don’t know whether it is going for the good or the bad and the only thing we can effectively do is trying to stay afloat and trying to give an helping hand to the person next to us. What we can do as a society is embrace our history and teach it take the good as examples and the bad as lessons not to be repeated in the future because by purging history from the bad events and people you destroy the tools to avoid the same mistakes in the future. And in a future where there will be, hopefully, equality for everyone there must be room for bad history because we, as human beings, learn through mistakes and errors.
