Indigenous Peoples’ Day was first observed by the City of Berkeley, California in 1992, when a group of Bay Area citizens organized to protest the planned national celebration of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas.
“The plan was for replicas of Columbus’s three ships to sail along the East Coast and then over to California.
“They were going to go into the Panama Canal, and sail into the San Francisco Bay as part of this national hoopla,” says John Curl, Berkeley resident and one of the original organizers of the first Indigenous Peoples Day.
Curl says, this idea of having the Bay Area as the centerpiece of Columbus Day celebrations did not sit well with him and a lot of other native people. So they formed a group to counter-protest the jubilee. They called themselves ‘Resistance 500.’”
(“How Berkeley dumped Columbus Day for Indigenous Peoples Day,” Berkeleyside.com)
“Resistance 500” successfully lobbied the Berkeley City Council to dismiss the plan for the national celebration (which never occurred) and, instead, celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the second Monday in October in 1992 – the date that had formerly been recognized as Columbus Day nationally.
The campaign for Indigenous Peoples’ Day actually started in 1977 at a United Nations conference on discrimination against Indigenous peoples. While the day did not gain recognition at that time, in 1990, the state of South Dakota celebrated Native Americans Day in place of Columbus Day for the first time. (“Columbus Day Or Indigenous Peoples' Day?,” Morning Edition, npr.org) Many years later, in September 2007, the work of the Indigenous leaders was recognized with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), though the U.S. would not indicate support for the declaration until January 2011.
Both the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors (BOS) voted in 2017 to declare the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Supervisors Hilda Solis and Sheila Keuhl introduced the BOS motion, stating it was “about understanding that for centuries, America’s ancestors oppressed certain groups of people. And while we can’t change the past, we can acknowledge and make that history right...” (Indigenous Peoples Day to replace Columbus Day in L.A. County, latimes.com)
According to Smithsonian Magazine online, 14 states, the District of Columbia, 130 cities and a growing number of school districts currently celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Online magazine Thrillist.com offers suggestions of 11 ways to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2020, such as exploring the indigenous LA map and visiting the Tongva Exhibit in Santa Fe Springs. Other ways to learn more about Indigenous people in Southern California include:
- The L.A. Times worked with three local educators to develop a study guide to teach about Tongva in classrooms, as well as an interactive map that shows Tongva villages.
- Several sites also highlight the Serrano tribe, exploring their territory, providing a cultural overview of the tribe and offering additional facts about the tribe.
Today, Indigenous Peoples’ Day serves as an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the communities of Indigenous people who inhabit and care for the lands we now occupy. For Pomona College, the Tongva and Serrano peoples are an important part of the history and the present of the land, having settled the area in 1500 BCE and continuing to be a presence in their ancestral homelands today.
Pomona College proudly educates the most ethnically diverse student body of any elite liberal arts college in the country. Beyond demographic diversity alone, we strive for full inclusion of all the voices represented by our faculty, staff and students. To foreground this commitment to diversity and inclusion, the College has adapted the Know YOUR History programming series to include email content to highlight important historical events that may have previously been excluded from the dominant narrative. To leave a comment, share a story on this topic or suggest new topics, visit the Know Your History feedback form.