Monday, October 9th is Columbus Day. This year marks 80 years since President Franklin D. Roosevelt first sanctioned the holiday in 1937 to honor Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, who has been historically credited with "discovering" America despite the fact that indigenous people already occupied the land and Columbus never actually set foot on North American soil (he actually landed in the Bahamas). On Wednesday, the L.A. City Council approved a motion to rectify this historical fiction by replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day in the city of Los Angeles. Introduced by Councilman Mitch O'Farrell, the motion makes Indigenous Peoples Day an official city holiday by 2019 according to LAist.

While controversy over the holiday has been brewing for years, many argue that Columbus Day is less about the namesake of the man and more about honoring a long history of Italian heritage in the United States. Started after a Catholic service organization called the Knights of Columbus, consisting largely of Italian Americans, lobbied for the holiday, several notable Italian Americans, including former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, have opposed prior attempts to have the holiday nullified. In addition to the newly formed Indigenous Peoples Day, Wednesday's vote will also install an Italian American Heritage Day to be observed on October 12 of each year.

Native American advocates have long argued the invalidity of Columbus Day. "We should question why we as Americans continue to celebrate him without knowing the true history of his legacy, and why a holiday was created in the first place. He never landed in the USA," Dr. Leo Killsback, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and assistant professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University, told CNN in 2016.

As debates around offensive historical narratives continue to mount across the country, the city of Los Angeles has taken a huge step in advocating for historical accuracy over romanticized fictional accounts.