Indigenous People's Day Flag Raising at Philadelphia City Hall

Trinity Norwood was one of the speakers during the Indigenous People's Day Flag Raising Event at Philadelphia City Hall on October 7, 2021.  Her comments, and those she shared from her father, are below... 

Columbus Day: A Celebration of Genocide, Colonialism, and Fake News

by Trinity Norwood (Op-Ed from the Philadelphia Inquirer, October 9, 2020)https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/columbus-day-philadelphia-indigenous-peoples-day-parade-20201009.html  

Columbus Day idealizes a murderer who was lost and minimizes the negative effects of colonialism on America’s Indigenous Peoples. In the same way Germany does not have a national holiday or statues to memorialize Hitler because of his deplorable actions against humanity; Christopher Columbus should not be celebrated either. The actions of Columbus and the colonizers who followed him sparked the two greatest crimes in the history of the Americas: The Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the systematic genocide of Indigenous Peoples. 

Re-Thinking the Meaning of Christopher Columbus

 This audio recording* is from the American Myths Symposium held at the Arch Street United Methodist Church in Philadelphia, PA on October 7, 2015. The moderator and second speaker is Dr. David M. Krueger who invited Dr. John Norwood to also speak at the event.  Why are so many in the U.S. preoccupied with the notion that America was discovered? Columbus’s exploration of the Caribbean is often understand as discovering a “New World.”