10/15/2026
Hello and welcome to another Fun Fact with Finch Thursday! The alliteration could be better but that’s alright. This week I want to talk about a holiday we had earlier this week called indigenous peoples day. This holiday, broadly, is celebrated to honor the cultures, histories, and contributions of Native Americans, Native Alaskans, and Native Hawaiians. While this holiday is not currently federally recognized, it is still observed by numerous states and hundreds of cities and we here at the Sullivan County History Museum find it particularly impactful.
The origins of Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a holiday began only in 1977 but the history of Native discrimination runs much deeper than this and is important context needed to understand why this holiday is even necessary. Keeping this brief for the sake of a social media post though, this holiday started as a counter-celebration of Columbus Day due to the lasting harm that was brought to Native populations by both Columbus himself and later European colonization of the Americas (as inspired by Columbus). The history of the harm of American colonization itself is a long and ongoing story that I could most certainly go into in another post if you guys would like to see it, but as far as context is needed in this moment, the colonization of the Americas and of Native American peoples was incredibly cruel, even being classified by some major institutions as a genocide due to the incredibly high fatality count (approximately 9.7 million people or a 90 to 96% drop in population)
With this much needed context, we can start to look at the more modern history of the holiday. In 1977, the United Nations began discussions of replacing Columbus day in the Americas with a celebration of indigenous heritage and perseverance. While overall not immediately coming to fruition, many Native American civil rights groups continued to push for their cruel histories to be recognized by the nations that perpetrated it. As groups continued to argue against Columbus’s supposed ‘discovery’ of the Americas, progress was slowly being made. Finally, in 1992, a group of Indigenous activists convinced the council of Berkeley, California, to declare October 12th as a “Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People”. Following this, several other California cities followed suit. More recently, the movement has spread even further, becoming an increasingly popular replacement for Columbus day across the country, including here in Sullivan County.
I hope you guys enjoyed this week’s fun fact, even though it was more serious than some others I’ve done in the past. If nothing else, I hope it was an enlightening experience! Let me know what you guys want to see next and as always, have an amazing weekend!
Links:
https://www.ala.org/aasl/advocacy/promo/indigenous-peoples-day
https://hmh.org/library/research/genocide-of-indigenous-peoples-guide/
https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2017/04/17/indian-removal-act-genocide-native-americans/
