The White House correctly celebrates the courage, entrepreneurial ambition, religious zeal, and daring that impelled figures like Columbus.

W e applaud the Trump White House for its resounding proclamation on the occasion of Columbus Day, a full-throated endorsement of the holiday and a “pledge to reclaim [Columbus’s] extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”

The White House correctly celebrates the noble courage, entrepreneurial ambition, religious zeal, and daring that impelled figures like Christopher Columbus to take on treacherous global journeys in the Age of Exploration. These early settlements ensured the triumph of Western civilization in the Western hemisphere, bringing the legacy of ancient Greece, Rome, and Jerusalem to the lands from Ivujivik, Quebec, to Tierra del Fuego, from Manhattan Island to the Aleutians.

Columbus Day was founded as a conscious way of integrating a great wave of Italian immigrants and their American descendants into the American story. It acknowledged that in many ways the settlement of these lands was not only a product of the English genius and the Enlightenment but also a whole-of-civilization effort from Europe.

The Biden White House justified the conflation of Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day as an attempt at “healing the wrongs of the past” while also still acknowledging the courage of Italians. This was boneheaded and wrong for several reasons. The great tragedy that befell native peoples in the Americas after the Columbian exchange was largely accidental, and biologically inevitable. An advanced civilization brought its germs to these shores. It was primarily plague and illness, not the politics or malice of settler colonialism that put native culture and society in peril. The technological superiority of the European cultures also immediately sent the surviving natives into a period of great cultural crisis and adaptation.

While there is much to lament in the history that passed between Americans and the native population of the American continent, and much also to celebrate, paving over Columbus Day with an Indigenous People’s Day sent a specific message against European exploration, settlement, and missionary work. It is part and parcel of a view that ultimately regrets the founding of the first European settlements in America, and even the government of America itself. It also reduces the complex and sometimes inspiring stories of America’s native peoples into one flattened tale of oppression and victimhood, which is insulting. Native peoples deserve better.

We celebrate Columbus Day because we are grateful for what has been built here, and what could only have been built here by the waves of European settlers who came to this land to spread the Gospel, practice religion freely, find trading routes, and start great commercial endeavors. This great inheritance is what caused G. K. Chesterton to recognize America as having the “soul of a church,” while the rest of the world marvels at our enterprising ambition. “I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent which was hitherto unknown,” Columbus recorded in his journal. In those words was not just the truth of the day but a prophecy.