Students support call for Indigenous Peoples' Day

By Jen Cowart
Posted 5/18/16

The fifth-grade students in Jim Gemma's class at Rhodes Elementary School are rallying behind a major change as part of their Project Citizen civics project for this year - renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples' Day. We had"

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Students support call for Indigenous Peoples' Day

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The fifth-grade students in Jim Gemma’s class at Rhodes Elementary School are rallying behind a major change as part of their Project Citizen civics project for this year – renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

“We had substantial discussions where I challenged the kids to go out and do their own research and decide what they believe when comparing the information provided in the text books and that they discover in other literature and historical resources,” Gemma said. “The class could not believe how much information was excluded from the textbooks … and how the story chose to exclude the horrific acts that were done to the Native Americans.”

Research in hand, the students voted to make the name change their Project Citizen Class Policy for 2016. As an alternative police, the students would keep Columbus Day in place but add Indigenous Peoples’ Day as an additional holiday.

Over the past weeks, in addition to doing their research, the students have been reaching out to local lawmakers and community partners to come in and speak to their class about the issue. Recently, Bob DeSimone and Joseph Rendine visited from the Italo-American Club, as did Brown University professor Linford Fisher, whose research and studies focus primarily on the “cultural and religious history of Colonial America, and the Atlantic world, including Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indian and African slavery and servitude,” according to the university’s website.

Also visiting the class was Loren Spears of the Tomaquag Museum, a member of the Narragansett tribe.

DeSimone and Rendine gave the students an overview of Christopher Columbus’s life and his various trips, but countered the theory they’d found that stated that Columbus might not have even been Italian, but rather may have been of Jewish or Greek descent.

“Everything I have read indicates that he was definitely born in Genoa, Italy,” DeSimone said. “In those days, Italy was broken up into many, many kingdoms, but later they all came together. Columbus’s parents were both Italian and his four siblings were also Italian. There is a school of thought though, that he did not actually discover America first, that Leif Erikson came around the year 1000.”

Anika Poshkus argued that no matter where Columbus descended from, he didn’t actually discover America, as is normally taught in textbooks and as is celebrated.

“Even if Leif Erikson did not discover America first, it was still the Native Americans who were here first, not Columbus,” Poshkus said.

DeSimone and Rendine described the travel conditions that Columbus and his crew endured throughout their voyages, which spanned many weeks and had only small quarters and harsh weather conditions. It was the bravery and perseverance through it all that both agreed made Columbus worthy of his own holiday.

When asked why other explorers of that historical period did not have their own holiday as Columbus does, there wasn’t an easy answer.

“We can’t really answer why,” DeSimone said. “No one pushed for celebrating them. None of them were the first to cross the Atlantic, to what is now America, as Columbus did. We are thinking now from today’s values, but we need to go back to his century and think about the way they thought then in order to understand this. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but I’m saying that the thinking was different then.”

DeSimone asked the students why they felt that changing the holiday was such a good idea, to which Poshkus had a firm reply.

“The horrific genocidal behavior is not something worth celebrating,” Poshkus said. “He did nothing for the United States and the way he treated the Native Americans is nothing worth celebrating.”

According to Gemma, both state Rep. Arthur Handy and state Sen. Joshua Miller are writing resolutions calling for the renaming of Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day this year in support of the students’ efforts.

The students will spend the next several weeks preparing their portfolio and presentation boards, readying them for the June presentation before a panel of judges.

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