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As Minneapolis and Seattle mark their cities’ first-ever Indigenous Peoples’ Day, activists are calling for a nationwide revocation of Columbus Day in favor of a holiday that honors the more complicated past of this land’s original inhabitants.

In an interview with Democracy Now!, Seattle city councilmember Kshama Sawant, one of the sponsors of that city’s recently passed resolution, explained the importance of such efforts.

By rejecting Columbus Day, “we’re making sure that we acknowledge the absolute horrors of colonization and conquering that happened in the Americas at the hands of the European so-called ‘explorers,'” Sawant said. Columbus, she noted, was a “prolific slave owner” who was responsible for “mass enslavement and a genocide” that decimated the Native American population.

“Columbus did not discover America,” Sawant added. “He plundered it and he brutalized its people.”

It’s well past time for the U.S. to realize that “Columbus Day is a metaphor and painful symbol of that traumatic past,” historian and writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argued in an open letter to President Barack Obama published last week:

Native American nations and communities are involved in decolonization projects, including the development of international human rights law to gain their rights as Indigenous Peoples, having gained the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which your administration endorsed. It’s time for the United States government to make a gesture toward acknowledgement of its colonial past and a commitment to decolonization. Doing away with the celebration of Columbus, the very face of European colonialism, could be that gesture. In its place proclaim that fateful date of the onset of colonialism as a Day of Solidarity and Mourning with the Indigenous Peoples.