Los Angeles City Council votes to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day

A Christopher Columbus monument in Washington, D.C.
(Image credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

On the second Monday in October, Los Angeles will no longer celebrate Columbus Day — it's now Indigenous Peoples Day.

The Los Angeles City Council voted 14-1 to remove Columbus Day from its city calendar, following debate between Native American activists who say the holiday honors a man who committed atrocities against natives and Italian-American civic groups who argued that getting rid of the holiday is an affront to their heritage. Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937, pushed by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization. Los Angeles city employees will still have the day off as a paid holiday, only now it will commemorate "indigenous, aboriginal, and native people." Several major cities, like Seattle, Denver, and Albuquerque, have already replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.