Is Columbus Day Going Extinct?

On the second Monday of October, many businesses in the United States will be closed for a federal holiday officially known as Columbus Day. 

Businesses in the entire state of Alaska, however, will be closed for Indigenous Peoples Day, after Gov. Bill Walker renamed the holiday last year. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, will also celebrate its first Indigenous Peoples’ Day, after the City Council voted unanimously in June to change the name of a holiday whose namesake, they decided, was not worthy of celebrating. 

Most recently, a student petition at nearby Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts has called on the administration to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, as a growing number of local governments and universities have done in the past few years.