What Will We Hand Down to Our Children on Columbus Day?

 

Monday is Columbus Day.

It is still a federal holiday, still observed by many Americans, and still celebrated with affection and ceremony in Italian-American communities across the country. In Genoa, Columbus’s birthplace, the remembrance is woven into the city’s streets, harbor, archives, and public life.

Yet many of our children may know the day chiefly as an argument.

Should it be Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples’ Day? Should Columbus be remembered as a courageous navigator, condemned as the originator of every injustice that followed European arrival, or quietly removed from the calendar altogether?

I have come to think that this question is about something larger than Columbus. It is about what we do with an inheritance.

An essay I read recently used the image of the “family silver”—the objects once handed down because they carried the memory of a family across generations. Their worth was not merely in the silver itself, but in the stories, loyalties, celebrations, and obligations they represented.

When those stories are forgotten, the silver becomes nothing more than old metal. It can be sold or melted down without much regret.

A cultural inheritance can be lost in the same way.

Names, feast days, monuments, poems, heroes, and national observances are never flawless things. They come to us marked by the limitations of the people and times that produced them. But if every inheritance must first pass the judgment of the present age—and if nothing may be preserved unless it is spotless—we will eventually leave our children very little except the present age itself.

Christopher Columbus was not a plaster saint. His actions should not be protected from honest scrutiny. Some of his decisions brought real suffering to the Taíno people, and the consequences of European colonization for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were often devastating.

Our children should know this.

But they should also know that Columbus did not personally commit every wrong that occurred during the five centuries after his first voyage. He did not create the later policies of every Spanish, British, French, or American government. He cannot truthfully be made to carry the entire history of conquest, disease, displacement, warfare, and broken treaties in the Americas.

History becomes distorted when one man is made the vessel for all the sins of an age.

Something world-changing happened in 1492. Columbus crossed an ocean that many Europeans believed could not be crossed by his proposed western route. His voyages brought two long-separated worlds into sustained contact and permanently altered the course of human history. Our own nation—and the lives we live here—cannot be understood apart from that turning point.

We would not even be having our present argument about what America means had that encounter between worlds never occurred.

Columbus Day also carries an inheritance that is easily overlooked. For generations of Italian Americans, Columbus became a sign that they, too, belonged in the American story. The holiday grew in importance when Italian immigrants endured deep prejudice and sometimes violence in their adopted country. Parades, Masses, wreath-layings, family gatherings, and neighborhood celebrations were not merely tributes to a fifteenth-century navigator. They were public declarations of identity, gratitude, courage, and belonging.

A recent account of Columbus celebrations in Genoa and the United States put it beautifully: “the calendar is doing the quiet work of identity.”

That is precisely what holidays do. They tell us what a people has chosen to remember together.

I gladly welcome a day that teaches children about the history, cultures, suffering, endurance, and living presence of Indigenous peoples. That story deserves far more than a passing mention in October. It deserves attentive books, living voices, particular names, and its own full place in our children’s education.

What troubles me is placing Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Columbus Day chiefly as a correction or repudiation. When one remembrance is established by erasing another, the result is not genuine enlargement. It turns two rich and complicated histories into opposing political symbols.

Surely our calendar—and our historical imagination—is spacious enough to honor both.

As parents and teachers, we need not hand our children either a spotless hero or a monster. We can give them something better: the human being in his time, the courage of the voyage, the momentous consequences of the encounter, the suffering that followed, and the many peoples whose histories became intertwined.

That is not evasion. It is the difficult work of telling the truth whole.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet responsibilities of homeschooling. We are custodians of an inheritance. We bring out the family silver, not because every person who once used it was perfect, but because it connects our children with lives that came before their own. We polish it, tell its stories, correct falsehoods where we find them, and place it into their hands.

Then one day, they will decide what is worth carrying forward.

One book that does this especially well is Columbus by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire. Their Columbus is neither a flawless hero nor a one-dimensional villain. He is a man beset by uncertainty, disappointment, long years of waiting, and the possibility of failure—yet capable of courage, perseverance, and astonishing achievement. The d’Aulaires allow children to encounter him within his own story before asking them to pass judgment upon his life. That is one of the gifts of a living book.

For Columbus Day, I invite you to enjoy our free Columbus Day Holiday Helper…
It contains history, traditional poems and stories, art, and copywork to help you approach the day thoughtfully with your children.

For a beautiful introduction to Indigenous life and tradition, I recommend We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga by Traci Sorell. Written by a member of the Cherokee Nation, it follows the Cherokee practice of gratitude through the seasons.

We do not preserve an inheritance by refusing to examine it. Neither do we understand it by melting it down. We preserve it by telling the truth—and by remembering that we are not the first people in the story, nor will we be the last.

Thank you for your commitment to home education and preserving the rich cultural inheritance we have in America.

With gratitude,
Sheila Carroll

P. S. Have you seen our 2027 calendar A Year with Landseer-2027 Charlotte Mason Picture Study Calendar