With Rev. Jeanne Elodie
Indigenous People’s Day arose out of opposition of Native Americans to Columbus Day, who opened the door to centuries of European aggression that brutally crushed the native people of North and South America and their diverse cultures.
Columbus Day was made a federal holiday in 1934. By 1977 opposition had strengthened so that Native Americans participating in the United Nations International Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas proposed that Indigenous Peoples’ Day replace Columbus Day.
They asked that the holiday acknowledge that Native people are the first inhabitants of the Americas, and encourage Americans to rethink the history we’ve taken for granted since grade school. The idea has gathered steam in recent years as many states and municipalities make the switch.
Currently, there are over 600 Native Nations in the United States, and 6.8 million Americans identify as Native American. That’s about 2% of the country’s total population.
Leo Killsback, a professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University, said, “Columbus Day is not just a holiday, it represents the violent history of colonization in the Western hemisphere.”
In 1990, South Dakota became the first state to rename Columbus Day. Berkeley, Calif., became the first city to make the change in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus. And in 2015, an estimated 6,000 Native people and their supporters gathered at Randall’s Island, N.Y., to recognize the survival of the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. In 2019, Washington, D.C. passed a resolution to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
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