Indigenous Peoples Day

Every map I grew up with told the same quiet lie: that the story of this continent starts when a European ship arrives on its shore. Everything before that moment gets compressed into a kind of prehistory — vague, undated, waiting to be discovered into relevance. It’s such a natural way to tell the story that it takes real effort to notice it’s a choice, and a self-serving one. Nobody discovers a place that’s already inhabited. You only get to call it discovery if you’ve first decided the people living there don’t fully count.

Indigenous Peoples Day exists to interrupt that habit, one October Monday at a time. Berkeley, California was the first city to formally observe it, in 1992, on the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage — a deliberate act of counter-commemoration, not a spontaneous holiday.¹ South Dakota had already made a similar move three years earlier, renaming the same date “Native American Day.”² It took until 2021 for a U.S. president to say anything about it in an official capacity: Joe Biden’s proclamation that October was the first time the federal government had marked the day at all, more than five centuries after the date it was answering.³ That gap — three decades between a city council in California and a president acknowledging the holiday even existed — tells you something about how slowly this particular reckoning moves, and how recent it actually is.

What the day asks us to reckon with isn’t abstract. Between 1819 and 1969, the federal government operated or funded 408 boarding schools across 37 states and territories, built for exactly one purpose: to strip Native, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children of their languages, their names, and their families, and reassemble them as something the government found more convenient. Children had their hair cut, their names replaced, their languages punished out of them. A federal investigation completed in 2024 — the first the government had ever conducted into a system it ran for a century and a half — identified at least 973 children who died in these schools and marked or unmarked burial sites at 53 of them, with more expected to be found.⁴ Roughly half the schools had backing from religious institutions, which is its own uncomfortable fact for anyone, myself included, who wants to believe faith and cruelty rarely share an address.

None of that fits comfortably into “discovery.” It isn’t supposed to. The word was doing a job — it still is, every time we reach for it instead of something more accurate — and the job was to make a five-century project of dispossession sound like an accident of geography rather than a series of specific, documented choices, made by specific people, with specific and knowable consequences for the people already living here.

I don’t think the point of a day like this is guilt, and I don’t think guilt is even useful — it’s a feeling that resolves itself, quietly, back into inaction. The harder and more useful thing is just accuracy: telling the story the way it actually happened instead of the way that lets everyone else off the hook. That includes remembering that this isn’t a story that ended. There are 574 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States today, each with its own government, its own legal standing, its own claim on the future rather than only the past.⁵ Treating Native history as something that concluded — tragic, distant, safely over — is its own quiet form of erasure, just a gentler one than boarding schools.

What I keep coming back to is how ordinary the original mistake was, and how ordinary its correction has to be. Nobody in 1492 sat down and decided to be a villain in a story historians would tell five hundred years later. They believed, sincerely, that what they were doing had a name — discovery — that made it something other than what it was. Every erasure I can think of, in history or in my own life, has worn a flattering name like that at the time. The discipline isn’t some heroic act of moral clarity. It’s smaller and more available than that: noticing when the word we’re using is doing our thinking for us, and being willing to reach for a truer one, even on a Monday that used to belong to someone else’s version of the story.

Notes