Board of Aldermen 10-13-2020 Page 36
for, but | can’t support putting this on the ballot. And it is going to sound weird but to me it almost is, let me
preface this. | understand the Italian Heritage; | get it and | get the Knights of Columbus. Although | am not
Italian | come from a Catholic background and | understand. I’ve worked in Boston heavily Italian areas and
don’t go to the north end on Columbus Day to try to go to eat without a reservation it’s a bad idea, you
know, stuff like that. | get it. However, | think that you know we have in this country we have done some
terrible things to our Native Peoples. And you know to have a Holiday that celebrates basically a person a
conquistador in all truth who didn’t even know where he was going and just ended up in Santa Domingo, |
think is just, you couldn’t have come up with a better person to represent the Italian Americans.
Alderman Lopez
Marco Polo.
Alderman Clemons
He wasn’t even an American. So the thing is that | felt very similar a few years ago. In fact, on Facebook if
you were to go back into my Facebook profile you will find that about 4 or 5 years ago | put a post that was
very similar to what Alderman Klee said and that is why would we recycle a Holiday. In other words, why
would we want to give a holiday in the name of Indigenous People and sort of replace that with a day of
somebody who savaged indigenous people? Why would we want to do that? We should give them their
own day that is not associated with that.
However, as was mentioned earlier, 12 States have already done this. We are down the road now where
this is going to eventually become the standard. And so we might as well get on board and we may as well
do it effectively through our leadership here. | do not believe it is appropriate to put on the ballot a question
of pitting one group of people against another and basically saying, duke it out. That is what southern
democrats wanted to do through voter suppression and things like that in the 1950’s. They would say, well
why don’t we let the voters decide if we are going to give people Civil Rights? Well if half the population
wasn’t eligible to vote, then that’s an unfair election. And this is similar to that; | have to imagine that there’s
more Italian Americans in Nashua than there are indigenous people. And that’s not to say that people can’t
choose to do something different, but | just don’t think that it’s, in my opinion, that it is an ethical choice.
| think, again, we were here we were elected to make hard decisions. We are not here to divide the
community on such topics like this. And | really hope that my colleagues can understand that and we can
move forward with simply changing the name of the Holiday without having to have the public weigh in, in
what will become a battle royal over a man that doesn’t deserve the attention. Thank you.
President Wilshire
Alderman Schmidt?
Alderman Schmidt
Thank you, Madam President. | don’t this is recycling a date. | think this is overriding a date. | think this is
saying, that one was wrong, we are going to do it right this time. Imagine right now, around the country
statues are being taken down. Why are they being taken down? Because they have the wrong side of
history behind them. This also does, this needs to come down and it needs to have the name changed.
That’s what | think and | really would like everybody to agree with that. Thank you.
Alderman Klee
Thank you so much. First let me make it very clear that | am definitely for an Indigenous Peoples’ Day. |
think its longtime coming and it’s something that we need to do. | also have no problem taking down
statues of Columbus, Christopher Columbus for the reasons as | stated earlier. | also have no problem with
getting rid of Christopher Columbus Day as a federal holiday. If we wanted to rename it, | have no
