On Monday, residents of cities and states around the country celebrated Indigenous Peoples’ Day. New Yorkers, meanwhile, observed a holiday with what, for many, is an offensive and outdated name: Columbus Day.
Cities like Seattle, Denver and Phoenix have all renamed the civic holiday in honor of the indigenous people on whose land America was founded, rather than the colonial conqueror who claimed it in the name of Europeans. But New York City has yet to make such a move. For indigenous activists and their allies, this failure is part of a long chain of white supremacist actions, aggressions and traumas, the symbols of which are visible throughout the city.
One such symbol is a 10-foot tall statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History. The statue features Theodore Roosevelt on a horse, flanked on one side by an African man and on the other, an indigenous man: a starkly racist image of a colonialist history. This past Monday, hundreds of activists came together to cover the statue with a parachute and “Decolonize This Place,” demanding both the removal of the statue and the renaming of the holiday.
Nick Pinto writes in the Village Voice:
The statue “is an affront to all who pass it on entering the museum, but especially to African and Native Americans,” Kandia Crazy Horse, a musician and activist (and former Village Voice writer) told onlookers. “A monument that appears to glorify racial hierarchies should be retired from public view. We demand that City Council members vote to remove this monument to racial conquest.”
Along with the removal of the statue, protesters also demanded that the museum reconsider “the bogus racial classification that assigned colonized peoples to the domain of Nature here and Europeans to the realm of Culture, across the park in the Met,” and asked that human remains and sacred objects in the museum’s collection be returned to indigenous people. They also demanded that the Mayor and City Council rename Columbus Day as Indigenous People’s Day.
