Day for Discovery Urged

To some, the national celebration of Columbus Day is an insulting reminder of the persecution and genocide that Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of America brought to its native peoples. Others, including many Italian Americans, view the holiday honoring one of the world’s most accomplished explorers as a point of pride.

For Sandra Robbie, a Mexican American mother from Santa Ana, the holiday has been the launching point for a journey of personal discovery. Today, Robbie hopes to launch yet another journey for hundreds of children as she celebrates for the first time a new holiday of her own making: Discovery Day.

“I want to get communities to hear what the controversy over Columbus Day is about, and learn something from it,” Robbie said. “I’m hoping to encourage people now to put Columbus aside . . . and learn about all the other significant contributions from Italian Americans and Native Americans, and so many others.”

Encouraging children to discover America for themselves, Robbie will bring her message of diversity, curiosity and acceptance to the Pegasus School in Huntington Beach today, and to as many others as she can reach throughout the year. The idea, Robbie said, is to “go out on your own journey and learn about others to help reduce prejudice.”

Robbie’s own journey began a few years ago, when she became engrossed by the passionate arguments for and against Columbus Day and began researching the holiday.

What Robbie found, in accounts of the first large-scale Columbus Day celebration in 1892 in New York, was what she believes was “America’s first multicultural celebration.”

With flags flying from around the world, festivals and a parade of ships, the party lasted four days.

“This was a hundred years before ‘multiculturalism’ was even a word in the dictionary,” Robbie marvels.

Armed with teddy bear mascots Otis and Olivia, Robbie plans to visit a different school each week to promote Discovery Day. She is booked until February.

During Robbie’s visits, students will be given journals and cameras to record their own weeklong discovery lessons. The teddy bears will take those mementos along with them to the next school.

Her efforts have won praise from officials at groups including 100 Black Men and the Anti-Defamation League.

“I think what Sandra’s trying to do speaks loud and clear for us to seize every opportunity to work with our young children and students and explore the diversity around us and the diversity that makes America what it is,” said Melissa Carr, of the Anti-Defamation League’s World of Difference program.

It remains to be seen how Discovery Day will be received by Columbus loyalists.