PORTSMOUTH – After a passionate Please from high school students To make a change, the city council narrowly voted on Monday to permanently add Indigenous Peoples Day to the city calendar alongside Columbus Day.
Councilor Cliff Lazenby moved that the city recognize Indigenous Peoples Day “instead of the day typically referred to as Columbus Day by the state of New Hampshire”.
Councilor Petra Huda moved to amend the motion to give residents the choice of recognizing either Indigenous Peoples Day or Columbus Day “until state and federal laws recognize the need to change or remove the current name.” That was later changed to recognize both holidays permanently side by side. It failed with 5: 4 votes.
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How they voted
Mayor Rick Becksted together with councilors Huda, Esther Kennedy, Paige Trace and Peter Whelan voted against the introduction of Indigenous Peoples Day.
Lazenby voted to celebrate both holidays together, as did City Councilors Deaglan McEachern and John Tabor, and Deputy Mayor Jim Splaine.
After Portsmouth passed a resolution to become a “Parish for Racial Justice” last June, just weeks after the police murder of George Floyd, Portsmouth voted to mark Indigenous Peoples Day with Columbus Day in 2020 to celebrate – only for one year.
Indigenous Peoples Day was added to the 2020 city calendar after We Speak, Portsmouth High School’s social justice club, reached out to the council. By recognizing Columbus Day, the group argued, the city overlooked the violent and sometimes fatal displacement of the indigenous people from their lands as a result of white colonization that stemmed from exploration by Columbus and others.
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We Speak submitted a petition to the city council last fall asking it to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day in Portsmouth instead of Columbus Day. Since its inception, the students are petition has collected over 1,000 signatures.
If Portsmouth had replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day, it would have joined several communities across New Hampshire that have already done so, according to the Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative Collective. In 2017, Durham was the first parish in the state to remove Columbus Day from its calendar, followed by Dover in August 2020.
The Concord School Board, Oyster River Cooperative School District, Hopkinton and Keene have also voted in the past to recognize Indigenous Peoples Day.
Columbus Day has been a federal holiday since 1937 and that year is Monday October 11th.
Public commentators divided over the replacement of Columbus Day
The public hearing on Monday evening on Indigenous Peoples Day was a Continuation of the council meeting on Monday 17th May. Lazenby had tabled the motion last month, but Becksted ruled a vote was not clearly outlined in their meeting agenda and feared that some Italians and other Columbus Day supporters would be left in the dark about a possible pivot in the city calendar.
Harini Subramanian, a PHS junior and We Speak member, spoke out against Huda’s amendment on Monday evening, which would have given residents the option of choosing which day to recognize. She said that it was only recently that the unfiltered history of colonization was taught in schools and the script reversed, which many former students had kept in their history classes.
“The holiday openly celebrates the colonial oppression that the indigenous people have fled since Columbus’ arrival in the late 14th,” she said.
She continued, “Many people, including us, have been taught: ‘In 1492 Columbus sailed the blue ocean’ as an entire lesson commending him for his discovery, omitting entirely any harm he caused. What we are taught as children stays with us. “
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Lilia Potter-Schwartz, a We Speak member and PHS junior, said calendar recognition was city-only and locals could still choose to recognize Columbus Day if they so wished because of its state and federal status.
Maya McKinnon, another PHS junior and We Speak member, said Portsmouth was not going to rewrite history and Italians and others could “keep honoring” Columbus Day.
“And I want to focus on why we really want to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day. In celebrating Columbus Day, we are celebrating something that is extremely harmful and painful for a whole segment of our population, given what we have now learned about history, ”she said.
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Several students began their comments by recognizing Portsmouth’s homeland, which included groups such as the Abenaki who once inhabited the Portsmouth countryside.
Sue Polidura, a Portsmouth resident who ran for the New Hampshire Senate in 2020 Republican, said there was a “wrong concept” and that there was a difference between land being stolen and conquered.
“And I am very saddened that someone taught our young people that this was somehow taken over (and) people were made slaves,” Polidura said of the Portsmouth land. “And if you look at the whole of world history, it happened everywhere. I … can’t imagine a single country that hasn’t been overwhelmed by another country at some point. “
Portsmouth School Committee Chair Kristin Jeffrey said she continues to support students’ desire to have Indigenous Peoples Day at the center of the city calendar and also opposed Huda’s change.
She said she would be “deeply saddened” if Portsmouth stopped thinking about history lessons in the city schools.
“And if we go back to the idea of waiting for federal or state changes … it seems to go against the ethos I know of New Hampshire, where places and individual communities can define and act about what’s right for their people is, ”she said.
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When city councils discussed the issue ahead of a final vote, Kennedy said she was grateful for the emails the council received from people of Italian descent and what Columbus Day means to them. She added that for many locals, Columbus Day is a tribute to the city’s Italian people.
“And I think any teacher or board chairman can use this as a great learning experience where generations work together because it’s very clear that we have different generations who have different views on the matter,” she said.
While Kennedy stated that she hopes Indigenous Peoples Day will eventually be recognized by the city, she would hope it has a day of its own like Martin Luther King Jr. Day, if not at someone else’s expense.
“But I’m not ready (at) this point when I heard from many of our residents who really see this as a celebration of their history and culture, namely Italian culture,” she said of Columbus Day.
Had the Council accepted Huda’s amended proposal or the eventual proposal to recognize both side by side, Portsmouth would have joined over 130 cities across the country to recognize Indigenous Peoples Day “in place of or in addition to” Columbus Day. according to a USA Today report last October.
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