 Our society and community is growing increasingly aware of the need to remember the history and celebrate the survival of indigenous peoples and their cultural heritage today. The purpose of this article is to encourage town meeting to voice their support for the select board's proclamation on January 25 replacing Columbus Day with indigenous peoples day. Christopher Columbus is a controversial figure in history. As a sailor, he was brave. As a businessman, he was exploitative of the new people he met and the new resources he was introduced to. As a governor, he was despotic and cruel, even to his Spanish subjects. This is documented in firsthand reports, some discovered as recently as 2005 by Spanish historians exploring Queen Isabella's archives. Most importantly, his rule was detrimental to the indigenous peoples and led to near genocide in the Caribbean where he landed and across North America. Celebrating indigenous peoples day on the second Monday in October will be new for Arlington this year, and we want to make sure we do it with as much support and awareness as possible. AHRC will be working with Native American residents and representatives, as well as allies, schools and other bodies to develop an informed celebration. Thank you for your support. I mean, I would love for people to have a greater understanding of the indigenous population here and what our ancestors went through and what we go through, what our children have to go through here. Tonight I'm asking you, sorry, in our community, to think about what it means to be Native American, to fight to be seen in a world that has been trying to erase you for more than 500 years, to live in a society that thinks it's honoring you with sports mascots, instead of giving you basic respect, to have to seek recognition and validation for your very existence. We introduced that bill in the last session and we'll be reintroducing it in this session on both the House and Senate side. We're very fortunate that Representative Jack Lewis will be the lead sponsor and we have several other sponsors on the House side and Senator Cumberford will be the lead sponsor on the Senate side with other sponsors as well. So yes, we are trying to do it on a state level too, but meantime there are many towns that are interested in doing this. I think more and more people have come to realize that it's a problem to continue to celebrate Columbus Day, a very clear problem. And, you know, luckily, thanks to the work of Black Lives Matter and many other people, I think there's more consciousness of these types of issues right now in addition to the work that we're doing.