Oneida opened the day with a tobacco ceremony while Trump called Columbus one of history's greatest heroes. The record from Hispaniola, and Wisconsin's own split calendar, explain why the fight never settles.
Oneida Nation members opened Indigenous Peoples' Day Monday with a tobacco-burning ceremony at the Norbert Hill Center, NBC 26 reported, and Wisconsin marked the holiday for the eighth straight year under Gov. Tony Evers. In Washington, the second Monday in October carries a different name. President Donald Trump's Columbus Day proclamation, signed Oct. 7, calls Columbus "one of history's greatest heroes" and never mentions Indigenous Peoples' Day. On Friday he hosted a Columbus celebration in the East Room, after earlier promising to bring the holiday "back from the ashes."
The argument between the two names keeps coming back to one island. Hispaniola, now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is where Columbus governed Spain's first colony in the Americas, and it's where the paper trail on his rule begins.
In 2006, Spanish historians publicized a report long believed lost, written by Francisco de Bobadilla, the royal official who arrived in 1500 to investigate Columbus. The 48-page document collects testimony from 23 witnesses, including people who liked Columbus and people who didn't. Among its cases, a man caught stealing corn had his nose and ears cut off and was then sold into slavery. A woman who said Columbus came from humble stock was paraded through the streets, and his brother Bartolomé had her tongue cut out.
Consuelo Varela, a Seville historian who studied the report, told journalists that Columbus's government was characterized by "a form of tyranny." Critics have pointed out that some of the witnesses were Columbus's enemies with reasons to damage him. Varela said the testimony still described atrocities and a government that ruled without trials, the Independent reported.
Many of the people in Bobadilla's report were Spanish colonists. The Taíno, who lived on the island before the Spanish arrived, had it worse. On his second voyage, Columbus ordered every adult to hand over enough gold dust to fill a small hawk's bell every three months, on an island with very little gold. Bartolomé de las Casas, who spent a decade on Hispaniola as a slaveholder before turning against the conquest, wrote that the first mutilation of a Taíno prisoner began what would become "a river of blood."
A Library of Congress country study notes that Columbus tried to curb some of the settlers' worst raids on Taíno villages. Under pressure from those same settlers, he then devised the repartimiento, which could grant a colonist a large tract of land along with the labor of the Taíno living on it. The crown replaced it with the encomienda in 1503, and the Native population kept dying off from exhaustion, starvation and disease, the study says.
Nobody disputes that the Taíno population collapsed. The size of the collapse is another matter. The same Library of Congress study estimates the island held about 1 million Taíno in 1492 and roughly 500 by 1548. A 2020 ancient DNA study published in Nature put the population before contact far lower, in the tens of thousands. Florida Museum archaeologist William Keegan said the smaller number doesn't make the erasure any less significant.
The holiday's own origin is grim in a different way. In 1891, a New Orleans mob lynched 11 Italian Americans. The next year, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed a one-time national celebration for the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing, and Britannica calls the lynching the direct impetus for the holiday. Franklin Roosevelt later made it an annual federal holiday. Britannica dates that to 1937, while NPR's Code Switch puts it at 1934. Since 1971 it has fallen on the second Monday in October.
That history is why the day has long doubled as a celebration of Italian American pride. In 2021, Joe Biden became the first president to formally recognize Indigenous Peoples' Day on the same date. As of last year's count, 17 states and Washington, D.C., used the day to honor Indigenous people.
Wisconsin hasn't fully picked a side. Evers signed Executive Order #50 in 2019 at Indian Community School in Franklin, setting aside the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples' Day. State law hasn't changed to match. Wisconsin's list of special observance days for schools still names Oct. 12 as Christopher Columbus' birthday, and this year the calendar put both on the same Monday.
The governor has used the day for policy since. In 2021 he signed an order formally apologizing for Wisconsin's role in Indian boarding schools. Thousands of Native children attended at least 10 day and boarding schools in Wisconsin. Last year's Executive Order #277 created a Wild Rice Stewardship Council and focused on treaty rights education, according to this year's announcement.
Wisconsin's classrooms carry part of that history. The state's 1989 law known as Act 31 requires public schools to teach the history, culture and sovereignty of the state's 11 federally recognized tribal nations. The state Department of Public Instruction ties the law to the backlash that followed a 1983 federal appeals ruling upholding Ojibwe rights to hunt, fish and gather, which exposed how little many residents understood about tribal sovereignty.
Monday's Oneida program included a reading of the nation's resolution, remarks on the boarding school order and a performance by the Oneida Nation School Singers, according to WBAY. Oneida Vice Chair Jameson Wilson said, "We're still able to practice and live our way of life," pointing to generations of pressure to assimilate. The nation followed the ceremony with a "Get Out the Rally Vote" event at the Oneida Hotel featuring actor and comedian Dallas Goldtooth, three weeks before the Nov. 3 election. Lawrence University in Appleton held its own evening celebration with Oneida dancers.
Green Bay signed on to the holiday in 2019, when Mayor Eric Genrich read a proclamation at City Hall alongside leaders of the Oneida, Menominee and Ho-Chunk nations. Then-Oneida Vice Chairman Brandon Stevens tied the renaming to boarding schools, removal from traditional land and the trauma that followed the story of "discovery."
Columbus didn't get the last word on his own record either. Bobadilla sent him back to Spain in irons in 1500, and Queen Isabella soon ordered him released. More than five centuries later, Washington and Madison still don't agree on what to call his day.
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