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Indigenous People’s Day
October 14
Is Indigenous People’s Day a Public Holiday?
Indigenous People’s Day 2024 is a state observance in 30 states and a state holiday in 3 states and 1 federal district.
Where Is Indigenous Peoples’ Day Celebrated?
As of 2023, some 29 states do not celebrate Columbus Day and have renamed it or replaced it with Indigenous Peoples Day. Some states recognize Indigenous Peoples Day via proclamation, while others treat it as an official holiday.
Among the states where the holiday is observed or honored are Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, Iowa, North Carolina, California, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Virginia, Oregon, Texas, as well as South Dakota, which celebrates Native Americans’ Day, Hawaii, which celebrates Discoverers’ Day, and Alabama, which celebrates American Indian Heritage Day. Washington, D.C. also recognizes the holiday.
President Biden became the first U.S. president to issue a proclamation recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2021, writing, “Today, we recognize Indigenous peoples’ resilience and strength as well as the immeasurable positive impact that they have made on every aspect of American society.”
Why Replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day?
Activists have long argued that holidays, statues and other memorials to Columbus sanitize his actions—which include the enslavement of Native Americans—while giving him credit for “discovering” a place where communities had lived for thousands of years.
“Columbus Day is not just a holiday, it represents the violent history of colonization in the Western hemisphere,” says Leo Killsback, a professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University.
Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937, in part because of efforts by Roman Catholic Italian Americans. During the late 19th and early 20th century, members of the stigmatized ethnic and religious group successfully campaigned to establish a Columbus Day in order to place Catholic Italians, like Christopher Columbus, into American history. In doing so, they edged out people of Anglo-Saxon descent who wanted a federal holiday honoring Leif Erikson as the first European to reach the Americas.
But decades later, the question of which European got here “first” is beside the point. “Indigenous Peoples’ Day represents a much more honest and fair representation of American values,” writes Killsback, who is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation of southeastern Montana.