Boston, however, has no dearth of Columbus Day celebrations. Mayor Thomas M. Menino presented the 10th Annual Christopher Columbus Community Spirit Awards at City Hall on Thursday to recognize Italian-Americans who have contributed to the community.

Dinner dances are also being held this weekend by local organizations in the North End and a parade will wind through Boston on Sunday beginning at 1 p.m.

The parade, sponsored annually by the Special Events and Tourism Department, is the biggest celebration by far, with a budget of $50,000.

Keohane, the parade's marshal, calls East Boston a "real diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-racial neighborhood" and says that the parade will share the same characteristics.

The parade will encompass a range and variety unmatched in the past, Keohane says.

"I have a big delegation from Colombia with the ambassador of Colombia, a steel band..., a mariachi group and a salsa group," he says. "There will [also] be lots of Spanish organizations and Portuguese [ones]."

With the different groups, Keohane says this is a parade of inclusion. No Native American groups will be participating, but the presence of protest groups will be felt.

"The Indian Council [was] invited and [other such] individual groups, and they chose not to come," Keohane says. "[However, there will be] many protest groups--father's rights groups and two unions from the MBTA, demonstrating not to privatize the T. Everyone has a right to express themselves and the parade is an expression of that."

Columbus' Legacy

Conflicts about Columbus Day have led to the rise of alternative celebrations. But the view of Columbus the man has also evolved throughout the years.

"As a human being, he was a man of his time," Kilpatrick says. "Europeans were very caught up in the ideology of domination. I would say that Christopher Columbus and the European explorers are perpetrators of genocide, people who had an attitude of white supremacy and Christian supremacy and who had a mentality that it was alright to dominate and kill and take from people who were different."

Kilpatrick refers to this attitude as a "Columbus Syndrome" which still dominates America today. However, he doesn't place blame fully upon the Italian explorer.

"It's not so much Christopher Columbus," Kilpatrick concedes. "He was in charge of a lot of what happened, but even after he was replaced, the Spanish and European [explorers] continued to enslave, kill and dominate the native people."

In response to the view of Columbus as cruel enslaver, Keohane says, "[Columbus Day] is an American holiday and that's the way it should be. Columbus discovered the country [and] we wouldn't be here if it weren't for him."