Columbus Day Research Paper

Words: 692
Pages: 3

Since 1892 when the first Columbus Day was celebrated, controversies behind the national holiday have been recurring through conversions and debates. When President Benjamin Harris proclaimed Columbus Day as a national holiday, many things in the previous years made the formation of this national holiday come to be. Although Columbus was able to start the first recorded history in the Americas, Columbus bought many cultural, spiritual, and economic differences from Europe. These differences affected the Indian peoples by starting a slave trade based on racism, imposing European culture and faith in the Americas, and resulting in stereotypes against Indians. For these reasons, Columbus himself should not be honored with a national holiday.
When looking at Columbus’s voyage to the Americas which was intended to find a route to Asia, Columbus was in search of luxury items such as gold and spices instead of the exploration of a new land. In a National Public Radio (NPR) interview, Wilma Mankiller the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation stated that “it certainly wasn't a new world to the
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As Howard Zinn states foreign cultures can often be taken for inferior because they are different from the cultures of the people who have been not been acclimated to them(Zinn). This cultural gap between Columbus and the Americas was a way for the conquerors to implement their own teachings of culture and faith onto the native peoples. When looking at the concepts presented in Laurence Bergreen Columbus: The Four Voyages missionaries were introduced to the Indian people to show and teach them the ways of the European countries. The conditions in the missions were so detrimental to the Indians’ faith and culture that they in turn lost their beliefs