Daily Dose of English 197
Columbus Day
Daily Dose of English 197
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day. Uh, why? Oh, yeah, to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about Columbus Day. Um, I think I made that joke before, by the way, about the, uh, why is it, what's this podcast good for? I don't know. Um, and, but yeah, anyways. So today in the U S is a Columbus day. Um, which is actually a bit of an interesting holiday. There's a lot more to talk about here than a lot of the other ones. Um, because it is. A lot of people don't really see it as a reason to celebrate because of the things that Columbus coming to America means. And so we'll talk a little bit about that. So Columbus Day is pretty old, right? Columbus came to the Americas, so all of the American consonants quite a long time ago. Like what, like the 1400s? I don't actually remember. There's a whole thing about it. It's like in something, something, something, two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. But I only remember that it ends in a two. I don't actually remember what year it was. But I think it's a long time ago. It's like 14 something. It was forever ago. Um, and Columbus day is a, an official American holiday. Um, in the U S there is, it's always on the second Monday in October, which a fun fact is the, is Canadian Thanksgiving. Um, which is not, they're not related. They're not connected. They just are on the same day, which is the second Monday of October. Um, and so also welcome to October, by the way, I don't know where November or September went. It was so fast. Um, we are just already in several weeks into October. I don't even know how this happened. Um, and it is, it's, it's, I don't know if it's an official state holiday everywhere, but it is a day off from, is it a day off from school? I feel like it's a day off from school. I actually don't know. I'm not really sure. I don't know a ton about the actual original holiday. What I know more about is how it stopped being celebrated because of the, sort of like celebrating the arrival of people who were going to take over this place, which already had people living in the Americas. And so the idea is that it's like, okay, well, we celebrated for this for a very long time, but maybe we shouldn't be celebrating this day for this thing. But in order to not change the day from being a holiday and be like, You now get less holidays. The day was changed to be a day more celebrating the people that were already here when Columbus arrived. So Native Americans or indigenous people or whatever it might be called where you're from. And that actually started in mostly in Western cities in the US where things are more open to that kind of celebration. But something else has also happened. For example, in Ohio, they celebrate veterans instead of Columbus. And I don't actually know what it's called, but it's like, okay, we can use this day to celebrate. That's fine. But let's just celebrate something a little bit different than people coming into conquer the the american continents um and so that is a pretty common thing to to see lots and lots of western cities um and i think a lot of people know it as indigenous people's day or or a native american day especially if you're from one of those cities and you're still fairly young it is not that Old of a change, I guess I would say like a when when was that I'm trying to find here on the Wikipedia page At the end of the 20th century so like somewhere in the 90s it looks like But yeah, it is still some Americans do see it as a holiday, even though it's also not really a big like nothing happens So it's like you don't don't really know what to do To celebrate Christopher Columbus. It's like okay sure I'm also reading here that in another part of Ohio, they wanted to replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day, but there's a ton of Italian-Americans in the city, and so they split it. And so it's both Italian-American Heritage and Culture Day. The first, wait, the first Monday is now the Indigenous Peoples Day, or North American's First Peoples Day, which is the same general name. So that's generally what I have to say about that holiday. There's not really much more interesting to it, but I do think it's an interesting time to talk about being somebody from a country where my direct ancestors were not originally from the United States. My family specifically has been in the US for many, many years, but my great, great, great, great grandmother was from Germany. She was from Europe or whatever. I don't know much about my other family. I know that I'm German-Irish, like a lot of Americans are German-Irish, X, Y, Z, bunch of things like that. But that means that if you go back far enough, my family was not originally in any part of the Americas. And so it's a bit of an interesting thing to know, like I am from the US, right? I can't change that, that's where I grew up. I spent the first many years of my life, 99% in Portland, Oregon, which is a state in the US. And my parents did, their parents did as well, and their parents also did. When you go one generation back, which is I don't even know how many years at this point, 100, 200 years or whatever, then that's where it's like, okay, they might have been from some part of Europe or whatever. For the most part, my entire family is from the US or the United States, but we're not from like, uh, whatever you might, whatever the, actually, I don't even know the name of, of the continent or in like a native language, which is not probably not America. I don't know. It might be. I actually don't know what America means, because we have North and South America. It sounds like a name, though. I feel like it's got to be a name of somebody. Somebody named the countries after themselves. Let's see. Let's figure this out. America etymology. Where does that word come from? from the lovely site Etymology Online, which has tons of stuff. It's traditionally after Amerigo Vespucci, who made two trips to the New World as a navigator and claimed to have discovered it, apparently. So, an Italian guy named it after himself, I think. America, yeah, I think that's right. And then like the name changed, the spelling changed over time, but like the original source apparently is just an Italian guy that named it after himself, which is an example of like, yeah, He wasn't here first, he just discovered it and then wrote it in European books and things, which then became to be the dominant knowledge. So, it is a bit strange to be from somewhere where you can't trace your family back that far. when that's the dominant thing. Plenty of people grow up somewhere that their parents weren't from, that is, but their parents are like one person in a larger group. But in the U.S., the dominant people that live there and are from there, aren't originally from there, they're all settlers, which is where the name also comes from, like the country of immigrants is what the U.S. is often called, a melting pot. And so that is part of the reason that I see it as so important to make it easier for anybody that wants to immigrate and come live in the country legally and work there and make their life there should be able to since that's how most people got there. And it's just the people that have been really marginalized and put into places where they can, they're not given much support or help at all. And said like, okay, you can just do your own thing. Right. Which are like a lot of the Native Americans in the U S is if you don't know, a lot of Native Americans have, um, or live on what are called the reservations, which, um, is basically I'm paraphrasing. They're more complicated than this, but basically it's some land that the U S government was like, okay, you can have this land to do whatever you want with. Um, there you go. And they don't get a ton of support or help or funding or anything like that, or even being listened to very much, which means that it's just like, okay, here's all this space, so then you can just do whatever you want with it, right? You know what you should do. And so what ends up happening is that a lot of people are very poor, they don't have a lot of support, they can't really... leave their where they're from if they want to be part of like the United States of America, but they kind of have to because that's what the jobs are. And it's this really pretty on not very nice way of connecting with the people that were originally here. So it's Yeah, it's just not it's not a great system and it can definitely be done better. But I highly doubt that the people in power in the US are going to really pay a lot of attention to that since it is a fairly small population now compared to everybody else. Native American, um, population 2024. Let's see how many, uh, people. Okay. I only see by population by state here. Um, so I actually don't know exactly if this is gonna be very helpful. Um, But yeah, California is the most, it's the biggest state as well, with 800,000, which is not that many for a, ah, I can't speak. California is a very large state. California population of some like 50 freaking million or more. Okay. Now it's only almost 40 million. So 30, 39 million people with not even, um, 1 million native Americans. So there's a very, an uneven mix in the, or not uneven, very small amount, which means that they're not a really huge voter base, which means that they don't really get very much stuff, even though their families were here first. It's a strange place to be in. There's not a really good solution for anybody at this point, which it just makes it messed up. And so the people that already have power are going to get more power and just get the benefit out of everything. So yeah, anyways. I'm rambling now, but I hope that I kind of explained this holiday and the holidays that have replaced it that are definitely better. I think just hands down, why celebrate somebody who came here and did bad things when you can just not. But anyways, I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I'd be curious to hear your comments down in the description below. But other than that, that is everything for today. I will see you again very soon. Have a fantastic rest of your day and I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
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