Indigenous Peoples’ Day is recognized the same day as Columbus Day each year, the second Monday in October. This year, Indigenous Peoples Day falls today Oct. 14, 2024 .It is a day to recognize indigenous people and the contributions they’ve made to history, as well as to mourn those lost to genocide and Western colonization—and to remember that Native Americans were actually here long before European settlers showed up on these shores.
Indigenous Peoples' Day, dates back to 1977, when the United Nations International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas proposed that Indigenous Peoples Day replace Columbus Day.
Then in 1992 on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival to the Americas. Indigenous organizers convinced the city of Berkeley, California, to declare October 12th as Indigenous Peoples Day. Many cities began following suit and on Friday, 8th of October 2021 President Biden issued the first-ever presidential
proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day,
"Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities," Biden wrote. "It is a measure of our greatness as a nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past — that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them."
However, we’ve since faced right-wing attempts to reinforce a racist narrative about the history of the United States. In response to President Biden’s proclamation, Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential pick JD Vance wrote: “Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a fake holiday created to sow division” and praised Christopher Columbus for “discover[ing] a new continent.” As Senator, JD Vance has also opposed Tribal leaders’ attempts to change the names of historic sites. Trump and Vance also want to seize federal land in another attempt to steal Indigenous homelands. While Trump was in office, he worked with corporate polluters to try to block climate progress and dismantle crucial environmental laws that safeguard not just Native communities but the future of every community.
Often glorified by Western historians as a daring explorer, Columbus left a dark legacy in the Americas, beginning with his first encounter with the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean Sea on 12 October 1492 which would mark the process of colonization and genocide against Native people, which represents one of the darkest chapters in the history of this continent, that unleashed unimaginable brutality against the indigenous people of this continent.that killed tens of millions of Native people across the hemisphere. From the very beginning, Columbus was not on a mission of discovery but of conquest and exploitation—he called his expedition la empresa, the enterprise.
Columbus's disdain for the Arawak people of the Bahamas is palpable in his journal entries. He observed their openness and generosity with a mix of condescension and opportunism, noting how easily they shared their possessions and hospitality. Columbus frequently mocked the natives' simplicity and lack of guile. He described them as 'naïve' and 'artless,' incapable of understanding European notions of property and possession. This demeaning attitude famously appears in his 12 October 1492 entry, where he marvelled at their willingness to trade valuable items for trinkets. To Columbus, their openness was not a sign of an advanced, communal society but rather that of their potential to be dominated and exploited.
Columbus's Eurocentric worldview made it impossible for him to recognise the Arawaks' sophisticated social system. Consequently, his reports back to Spain helped build a narrative of European superiority that fuelled slavery and colonisation.
He and his men enslaved the Indigenous population, bringing some back to Spain and forcing thousands of others to search for gold. Those who could not bring back enough gold had their hands chopped off. The Spaniards took women and children for sex and labour. Columbus' regime was so brutal that many of the Indigenous people committed suicide or infanticide to spare a life of suffering. On the island of Hispaniola (now occupied by the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the Spaniards forced the Indigenous people to work at a ferocious pace, with only 15,000 people remaining by 1515, a sharp decline from the 250,000 people who are said to have lived there two years before when Columbus first arrived. By 1550, only 500 people reportedly remained. By 1650, no Arawak people remained on the island.
Even during his day, Christopher Columbus was viewed as controversial. While his arrival in the Americas, specifically in Ayiti, (Modern Haiti) allowed for the initiation of the colonialization and settlement of the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic slave trade and the amassing of massive wealth for many European countries, many of his contemporaries thought he was unnecessarily brutal.
Columbus deserves to be remembered as the first terrorist in the Americas. When resistance mounted to the Spaniards’ violence, Columbus sent an armed force to “spread terror among the Indians to show them how strong and powerful the Christians were,” according to the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas. In his book Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale describes what happened when Columbus’s men encountered a force of Taínos in March of 1495 in a valley on the island of Hispañiola: " The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and [according to Columbus’s biographer, his son Fernando] “with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed.”
All this and much more has long been known and documented. As early as 1942 in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that Columbus’s policies in the Caribbean led to “complete genocide”—and Morison was a writer who admired Columbus.
Many countries are now acknowledging this devastating history by rejecting the federal holiday of Columbus Day which is marked on October 12 and celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead to honor centuries of indigenous resistance.If Indigenous peoples’ lives mattered in our society, and if Black people’s lives mattered in our society, it would be inconceivable that we would honor the father of the slave trade with a national holiday. Let alone allow our history books to laud Columbus as some kind of hero. Because this so-called “discovery” of the America caused the worst demographic catastrophe of human history, with around 95 percent of the indigenous population annihilated in the first 130 years of colonization, without mentioning the victims from the African continent, with about 60 million people sent to the Americas as slaves, with only 12 percent of them arriving alive.Therefore, Native American groups consider Columbus a European colonizer responsible for the genocide of millions of indigenous people. Not an individual worthy of celebration because he helped contribute to the Europeans Colonization of the Americas which resulted in slavery, killings, and other atrocities against the native Americans.
Columbus' voyage has even less meaning for North Americans than for South Americans because Columbus never actually set foot on this continent, nor did he open it to European trade.
During large waves of Italian immigration between 1880 and the start of World War I in 1914, newly arrived Italians faced ethnic and religious discriminations. In New Orleans in 1891, 11 Sicilian immigrants were lynched. A year later, President Benjamin Harrison became the first president to call for a national observance of Columbus Day, in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival,
Italian Americans viewed celebrations of Columbus as a way to become accepted into the mainstream American culture and, throughout the country, they began to advocate for his recognition.
Though it wasn't recognized as a federal holiday until 1971 Italian immigrants had celebrated Columbus Day for centuries, Mariano A. Lucca, of Buffalo led the campaign for the national holiday. Colorado was the first state to formally recognize Columbus Day, doing so in 1905,
However Native Americans have been a part of the American tradition even before the United States began, but due to hundreds of years of persecution, much isn’t left of the neighboring tribes and many have integrated into modern society.
In the last several years, with growing awareness of Columbus' brutal legacy and what the European arrival meant for America's first inhabitants, at least 14 states and more than 130 local governments have chosen to not celebrate the the second Monday in October as Columbus Day or have chosen to celebrate it as Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead. Indigenous Peoples have spearheaded the cultural shift in understanding about how to mark this day.
The idea of replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day was first proposed in 1977 by a delegation of Native nations to the United Nations-sponsored International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, held in Geneva, which passed that resolution.
In July 1990, representatives from 120 Indian nations from every part of the Americas met in Quito, Ecuador in the First Continental Conference (Encuentro) on 500 Years of Indian Resistance. The conference was also attended by many human rights, peace, social justice, and environmental organizations. This was in preparation for the 500th anniversary of Native resistance to the European invasion of the Americas, 1492-1992. The Encuentro saw itself as fulfilling a prophesy that the Native nations would rise again
“when the eagle of the north joined with the condor of the south.” At the suggestion of the Indigenous spiritual elders, the conference unanimously passed a resolution to transform Columbus Day, 1992, "
into an occasion to strengthen our process of continental unity and struggle towards our liberation." Upon return, all the conference participants agreed to organize in their communities. While the U.S. and other governments were apparently trying to make it into a celebration of colonialism, Native peoples wanted to use the occasion to reveal the historical truths about the invasion and the consequent genocide and environmental destruction, to organize against its continuation today, and to celebrate Indigenous resistance. (
Indigenous Peoples' Pow Wow Website)
In the past twenty years the celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day has become a counter narrative to Columbus Day as way of correcting historical wrongs in acts of reconciliation and the roots of this rethinking go back several decades.
On October 6, 2000, t
he American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council wrote in a statement that "
Columbus was the beginning of the American holocaust, ethnic cleansing characterized by murder, torture, raping, pillaging, robbery, slavery, kidnapping, and forced removals of Indian people from their homelands." The organization called for the federal abolition of the holiday.
Centuries after Columbus Native peoples are still fighting to protect their lands and their rights to exist as distinct political communities and individuals.Because of historical traumas inflicted on indigenous peoples that include land dispossession, death of the majority of the populations through warfare and disease, forced removal and relocation, assimilative boarding school experiences, and prohibiting religious practices, among others, indigenous peoples have experienced historical losses, which include the loss of land, traditional and spiritual ways, self-respect from poor treatment from government officials, language, family ties, trust from broken treaties, culture, and people (through early death); .
These losses have been associated with sadness and depression, anger, intrusive thoughts, discomfort, shame, fear, and distrust around white people. Experiencing massive traumas and losses is thought to lead to cumulative and unresolved grief, which can result in the historical trauma response, which includes suicidal thoughts and acts, IPV, depression, alcoholism, self-destructive behavior, low self-esteem, anxiety, anger, and lowered emotional expression and recognition .These symptoms run parallel to the extant health disparities that are documented among indigenous peoples.
Today is about acknowledging all this whilst honoring the rich history of resistance that Native communities across the world have contributed to and it is also about sharing a deep commitment to intergenerational justice. Celebrating Indigenous People’s Day is a step towards recognizing that colonization still exists. We can do more to end that colonization and respect the sovereignty of indigenous nations.
Amnesty International on Indigenous Peoples' Day have renewed calls for President Joe Biden to grant clemency to jailed Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who many say is America's longest-serving political prisoner. With the international human rights watchdog once more urging the outgoing Democratic president to commute the sentence of the decades-long jailed Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who turned 80 last month on Sept. 12, and release him. Peltier, who was a member of the indigenous American Indian Movement, had been convicted in 1975 of allegedly murdering two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a territory of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota, in a trial many say was riddled with fraud. Peltier has since maintained his innocence. Peltier has been jailed for nearly 50 years despite legitimate and ongoing concern over the fairness of his trial decades ago, Amnesty and many others have long since argued.
Joining with Amnesty in its plea for Biden to show mercy has been American tribal nations and its leaders, members of both chambers of Congress including the Senate's Indian Affairs Committee chairman, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, ex-FBI agents, noted Nobel Peace Prize winners and former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, the very same federal prosecutor who handled Peltier's conviction and later appeals.
In early July, Peltier was denied his most recent parole request after a previous rejection in 2009. But on Saturday in an open letter to Biden, liberal activist Michael Moore wrote that among 13 actions he feels Biden should take in the few remaining months of his "lame duck" presidency through Jan. 20 is to give Peltier his freedom. "Mr. President, Leonard Peltier is two years younger than you," Moore opened his letter. Moore's letter went on to state how Peltier was allegedly "pursued and surveilled by the FBI because of his political engagement. The evidence at his trial included conveniently altered details and a key witness who was coerced into testifying," Moore says. And many agree with his sentiments.
Currently housed in a Florida maximum security prison in regular lockdown, Peltier reportedly requires a walker to move and is blind in one eye from a previous stroke.But Moore's is only one in a long line of other influential names, which he pointed out included the Rev. Jesse Jackson, members of Congress such as Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, as well as actor Robert Redford, the Dali Lama and the late leaders Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela.
Amnesty International has long been part of the Peltier case. Officials observers to Peltier's 1977 trial were sent by Amnesty and, "along with its millions of members and supporters around the globe," has been campaigning on Peltier's behalf for his release.
Peltier in 2004 asked a judge to release certain files that he believed would grant a new trial, contending that he was framed by the U.S. government and would be exonerated if those documents could be publicly released. In September, an official with Amnesty's U.S. arm went so far as to say the possible grant of presidential clemency for Peltier "could be one step to help mend the fractured relationship" and deep-seated generational mistrust the Native American population has for the U.S. government and "would forever be part of Biden's legacy," among other historical achievements.
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On this Indigenous Peoples Day, let’s recognize the incredible resilience, strength, and resistance of Indigenous Peoples who have faced hundreds of years of colonization. May we spend this day, honoring Native Peoples’ commitment to making the world a better place for all. Reflect on their ancestral past , the ongoing struggles of indigenous peoples in protecting their lands and freedoms,celebrate their sacrifices.
Let's celebrate life whilst.recognizing the people, traditions and cultures that were wiped out because of Columbus’ colonization and acknowledge the. bloodshed and elimination of those that were massacred, whilst transforming this day into a celebration of indigenous people and a celebration of social justice that allows us to make a connection between painful history and the ongoing marginalization, discrimination and poverty that indigenous communities face to this day.
By honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we must continue to confront the “whitewashed” version of American history many are familiar with. This history often dignifies Europeans who perpetuated colonization, intolerance, violence, and committed atrocities against Indigenous communities and Native Americans. Indigenous People, Native Americans, and sovereign Tribal Nations have long endured, and continue to experience, some of the highest rates of discrimination and oppression in our society.
We cannot dedicate just one day to acknowledging Indigenous People's, each and every day should be an act of solidarity, by us honouring and advocating for Indigenous rights. From Turtle Island to Palestine, together, we must demand an end to occupation and fight for Land Back and climate and environmental justice for all oppressed peoples.
A reminder on this Indigenous People’s Day: Palestinians are an indigenous people and have been struggling for their freedom and right to live safely on their own land. Israel has colonized Palestinian land and attacked Palestinians since day 1. A free Palestine is an indigenous struggle. I'm saying this over and over again as clear as I can because I don't believe people are contending with this enough, and you need to.
So today we should also be acknowledging the cynical “celebration” of Indigenous Peoples Day by a settler state backing another settler state’s genocide against Palestinians and Lebanese shows us that nothing is sacred, until we bury colonialism once and for all. While crimes against humanity and all life continue unabated, those on frontlines are criminalized, brutalized, disappeared, killed, this Indigenous Peoples Day we must stop the genocide in Gaza and drop the charges against land defenders everywhere.
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