How do you teach about Indigenous Peoples Day and Columbus Day? Thoughtfully, experts say.

Today is a holiday, but which holiday depends on where you are.

Several cities, including Boston, have named the second Monday of October Indigenous Peoples Day. For Massachusetts as a whole, it’s Columbus Day. But there’s a push for lawmakers to change that.

“What happened in 1492 is not a matter of interpretation,” United American Indians of New England co-founder Mahtowin Munro said in a hearing on Beacon Hill last week. “Our painful reality as Indigenous people is that the genocide that began more than 500 years ago continues to reverberate today.”

And for teachers, it’s a thorny subject to navigate, especially with the patchwork of holiday designations.

“The evolution of Indigenous Peoples Day, I think, is a great example of a movement and shift forward facing our history as a nation and really moving away from a narrow Eurocentric perspective of the history of the U.S. and moving towards a perspective that includes all of the people who were involved in the founding of our country,” said Elizabeth "Lizzy" Carroll, program director at the nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves, which teaches history lessons with the goal of having students challenge bigotry.

“Recognizing and honoring Indigenous Peoples Day really helps us to face the historical fact that Columbus did not actually 'discover America,'” Carroll said. “And facing ourselves really means recognizing that Indigenous people in this country still experience widespread discrimination and systemic injustice.”

The day gives students an opportunity to learn about how the particular events of history affect larger issues, she said. Topics can include what first encounters between Indigenous people of North American and the Caribbean really looked like, or the more recent history of government-sponsored residential schools. The same themes can tie into what they’ve seen other groups experience through Jim Crow segregation or the Holocaust, she said.

“Facing History teachers can teach their students about the particulars of a given moment in history to really examine a universal problem, which is how we as humans naturally tend to divide ourselves into ‘we’ and ‘they,’” she said. “We want teachers to be able to open up those conversations with their students rather than just necessarily tell students what to think or, you know, not have the conversations at all just because they may be a little bit difficult or uncomfortable.”

Eric Soto-Shed, now a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said he remembered teaching predominantly Puerto Rican high school students in New York City in the early 2000s and hearing what they already knew about Taíno people, the Indigenous people of the Caribbean.

“Students already came with sort of a wealth of knowledge about Indigenous culture and sort of a critical perspective on Columbus,” he said.

Soto-Shed said he would aim to teach the subject through both contemporary critiques and through studying the ways in which colonialism affected North America and Europe.

“I would get students who were absolutely critical of Columbus for very well-founded reasons, but they would then dismiss and say he didn't do anything and there was no sort of significance,” Soto-Shed said. “And so with those students, I would say, 'Well, let's look at this critique. Let's be able to substantiate them with evidence. Also, let's look at this idea of significance and impact.' And I talk a little bit about how we can be critical, but also identify impact as well.”

It’s less common for students to learn history by getting a multiple choice test that explicitly calls someone a great figure, he said. Students are instead being asked to analyze source materials and make their own arguments with evidence-based claims.

“What's really promising, and what gives me hope, is that what we've seen in the past 20 years is really an explicit focus on analytical, argumentative skills,” he said.

Now, as an educator of future teachers, he said he tells his students to deal with difficult subjects directly — while still being mindful of their students.

“Don't shy away from controversy,” he said. “That's where really rich learning happens. And more importantly, I think the significant learning that we need for a really functioning democracy.”

But before they get into topics students may disagree on, he said, they have to build an environment in which they know how to disagree without dehumanizing.

“You want to have already kind of built up passion culture so students can feel comfortable expressing themselves and feel comfortable and skilled at disagreeing with each other,” he said. “It's not about sort of winning a debate, but really trying to understand the underlying positions of each perspective.”

That might mean encouraging activities that let students exercise their analytical skills.

“Really think about the students in your classroom and then choose goals for the discussion that really mitigate harm, particularly for marginalized communities,” he said. “So what that might mean is you might want to often avoid a role play or even a debate if it's really a charged issue that implicates certain students in your classroom. But you certainly can still get into the controversy and explore through other more reflective activities or analytical activities.”