Over eighty local activists joined together to double last year's turn-out for the annual Indigenous People's Day demonstration at the city's Columbus Day Parade today. Rallying at Buckingham Fountain on Columbus Drive, directly across the street from the viewing stand, the People's Indigenous Day celebration centered around its Azteca dance troupe.

While most participants were indigenous or were mobilized by Youth Struggling for Survival and related groups, some Italian-Americans passed out literature and held signs proposing new focuses for Italian-American festivities. The reception recieved was significantly better than last year, as even more parade spectators acknowledged their agreement with the protesters, some promising not to return next year. Meanwhile, the speakers on the viewing platform and the parade participants struggled to be heard over the loud demonstration, which itself didn't have any loudspeaker devices.

Somewhat less eventful than last year, a few mild altercations were spotted. One older spectator requested a flier, then tore it up and swore as loudly as anyone had the year before. He was later seen giving the unmistakable fascist hand signal to some friends on a float who responded in kind.

Later, YSS and the Azteca Dancers held an in-door cultural celebration at Cafe Mestizo in Pilsen.

Columbus was one of the perpetrator's of an enslavement and holocaust that cost some 80-100 million lives of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, and later caused the Atlantic Slave Trade which compounded that number. In Chicago, as in other cities, his holiday has been taken up by Italian-American communities as the day to celebrate their heritage, while in some countries like Venezuela they celebrate Indigenous Resistance Day instead. Protesters contended that there are many other days and heroes of Italian history that make better sense than a genocidal imperialist that died of syphilis believing he had gone to India.