An important moment in the history of the Americas is remembered in the United States every year on the second Monday in October: the time "Native Americans discover Christopher Columbus, a European, lost on their shores".
That’s how one brewery mischievously referred to next week’s annual public holiday.
The brewery's bar is in Lawrence, a hip college town near Kansas City.
This town, home to Kansas University, shares a liberal ethos with Seattle, Washington, in the Pacific north west.
Columbus Day, celebrating the Italian-born explorer who mistook the Caribbean for India in 1492, is no laughing matter for some residents of Washington state.
Columbus Day has been an official public holiday in the US since president Franklin D Roosevelt named October 12th a federal day off in 1937 in memory of the Genoese explorer. The holiday was fixed to the second Monday in October in 1970 and two years later Richard Nixon sealed the holiday with a presidential proclamation.
Italian Americans have great pride in the holiday, taking to the streets of New York City with a parade to celebrate their famous son and the country’s adventurous spirit in a golden age of exploration.
When Seattle’s city council voted unanimously last Monday to recognise “Indigenous People’s Day” on the same day as Columbus Day, the city’s 25,000 Italian American residents were not happy.
“Just as St Patrick’s Day is a celebration of all things Irish, Columbus Day is, at its core, about celebrating Italian heritage, and the some 200,000 Italian Americans in Washington state have a long proud history,” Italian American groups said in a statement before the vote.
Native American activists wanted their holiday marked on the same day to remember how the arrival of Columbus in the New World led to centuries of exploitation, disease and genocide.
“Nobody discovered Seattle, Washington,” Fawn Sharp, president of the Native American tribe, the Quinault Indian Nation, said in an address to the council before the vote.
“This action will allow us to bring into future and present a day honouring our rich history.”
The tensions between Italian Americans and Native Americans over the holiday have been simmering for years.
They were memorably portrayed in a 2002 episode of The Sopranos, the HBO drama about a New Jersey Italian mafia family.
In real life, the stand-off in Seattle also has plenty of drama. Italian Americans say that the council has disrespected their heritage.
The Italian ambassador to the US even wrote to Seattle mayor Ed Murray (a proud Irish American with four Irish-born grandparents and a recent visitor to Ireland) to express concern about the development.
“The critical issue at stake is that, while trying to valorise – and rightly so – the dignity of indigenous peoples, the city is poised to strip the Italian community of a celebration that has become, over time, a heartfelt expression of its identity and pride,” the ambassador, Claudio Bisogniero, told Murray in his letter.
Regardless, the mayor is planning to sign Indigenous People's Day into law on Monday. Italian Americans in the city argue that the Native Americans have had a federal holiday since 2008 when president George W Bush set the day after Thanksgiving, the last Friday in November, as Native American Heritage Day.
"We empathise with the death and destruction of the Native Americans but we think right now this is almost going too far in terms of political correctness," activist Ralph Fascitelli said at a news conference on Thursday in an Italian restaurant in the city, according to a report in the Seattle Times.
The city is not the first to respond to Native American sensitivities.
The idea of replacing Columbus Day with a holiday commemorating the native people of the Americas arose in 1977 at a United Nations conference on discrimination against indigenous populations.
In 1992, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus landing in what is now the Bahamas (not the US), the city of Berkeley in California declared October 12th a "Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People".
At least four American states do not mark Columbus Day including South Dakota which celebrates Native American Day instead.
In April Minneapolis legally renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous People’s Day and Seattle voted to follow suit this week.
All of this comes against the backdrop of increased sensitivities over the title of the American football team based in the US capital city, the Washington Redskins, a name that Native American tribes find deeply offensive and which they have been pushing hard to have changed.
Columbus is commemorated with statues and other works of public art in cities across the country, from the US Capitol building in Washington DC to the California State Capitol in Sacramento, so his role in the history of the Americas is far more deeply ingrained in US culture and heritage than an offensively named sports franchise.
Local tribes will have taken what little comfort they can from seeing the Seattle Seahawks, reigning Superbowl champions, beat the Washington Redskins last Monday on their home ground in Maryland.