Columbus Day is a holiday that aims to celebrate the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus, a Spanish explorer, in many nations within the Americas. Within the U.S., the holiday was first celebrated in 1792 in New York to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival, but it was not until 1971, nearly 500 years after his arrival to the Americas, that Columbus Day would become a federal holiday in the U.S. However, since the 1990s, nonobservance of the holiday has increased throughout the U.S., and 26 states do not recognize Columbus Day at all. Places such as South Dakota, New Mexico, Vermont, and D.C. have opted instead to recognize the holiday as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The shift in recognition of the holiday has stemmed from calls from indigenous groups across America, many of whom believe that the holiday celebrates the beginning of a disturbing history between indigenous populations and European colonizers.
After Christopher Columbus’s arrival in what is now the Bahamas, the Spanish utilized his discovery to expand into much of the Americas. Motivated by a desire to find riches, establish Spain as a global superpower, and spread the Catholic religion, the Spanish stumbled upon various indigenous American peoples during their colonization of the Americas. To continue furthering their goals in the Americas despite conflict with the indigenous people who had lived in America for millennia, the Spanish monarchy and papacy conceptualized our modern idea of race, a socially constructed category of people based on real or perceived physical differences. This new social category was used by Spanish colonizers to justify discrimination, or unfair or differential treatment of individuals and groups based on race and ethnicity, toward indigenous Americans, treating them as inferior. 
Based on the idea of race the Spanish had constructed, indigenous Americans were subject to innumerable acts of oppression, first by Spanish colonizers and later by English colonization, which began on the northeastern coast of North America in the early 17th century. The number of Indigenous Americans experienced a rapid and steady decline in the centuries after European contact, both from the transmission of disease and a deliberate genocide, the systematic killing of one group based on differences in race, ethnicity, religion, or other characteristics. Indigenous Americans experienced several direct population transfers, which is when a dominant group makes a minority population leave a space by force, such as the Trail of Tears. Indigenous people experienced segregation, the separation of groups based on differences such as ethnicity, gender, race, social class, or religion, and were forcibly moved to reservations to allow European Americans to exploit their sacred lands.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, a move toward assimilation, the process in which minority groups lose their distinct cultural characteristics and are absorbed into the dominant group, became the favored method of erasing the culture of indigenous Americans, and to do so, residential schools that tore indigenous children from their families and forced them to adopt European American culture sprung up across the nation. Many indigenous children were also adopted out to white families, even if their families had not consented to having their children removed from them. This was supported by institutional discrimination, the use of social institutions to deny minority group members access to the benefits of society, which allowed indigenous parents to be overlooked for the sake of the adoption of their children by another family.
