A main point brought up to defend Columbus day is that it instills a sense of national pride. This is true but as historian William Connell brings up in his article “What Columbus Day Really Means”, Columbus Day was originally created to honor the Native Americans and immigrants. It was meant to be about all the other American history before “discovery” by the Europeans. It seems that today the focus has shifted away from that and Columbus Day is more about Columbus as an individual and his accomplishments. In order to rework this holiday into what it originally was, it is best to take advice Wilma Mankiller and “make sure that Americans have some sort of historical and cultural context for understanding our [Native Americas’] contemporary
