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On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas that the Indigenous Lucayan people called Guanahani. He continued on to Cuba and Hispaniola and, on later voyages, to other parts of the Caribbean, but he never set foot in what is now the continental United States. It makes little sense for a country to honor a man who never reached it, and even less to credit him with discovering a place that millions of people already called home. And it makes even less given what Columbus actually did in the places where he stepped foot: He rounded up Indigenous people in the Caribbean, chained them, and sent them as slaves to Spain. And when Indigenous communities rose up in resistance, he ordered his soldiers to “spread terror,” maiming and slaughtering civilians en masse using firearms, dogs, swords, and pikes.

But despite all this, in 1937, the United States established a federal holiday in his name anyway.

Native people have been fighting the sanitization of Columbus’s story for decades. The idea of replacing Columbus Day arose as early as 1977, when Indigenous representatives raised it at a United Nations conference in Geneva.

In 1990, South Dakota renamed the day Native Americans’ Day. The change began with Oglala Lakota newspaper publisher Tim Giago, whose columns challenged Governor George Mickelson to mark the centennial of the Wounded Knee massacre with a “Year of Reconciliation” and to give the October holiday to Native people, proposals Mickelson took to tribal leaders and then to the legislature.

Two years later, as the country marked 500 years since Columbus landed, the city of Berkeley, California, adopted Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Bay Area Native organizers and their allies, returning from a 1990 gathering of Indigenous nations in Quito, Ecuador, formed a coalition called Resistance 500 and won official taskforce status from the City Council, which then unanimously adopted their recommendation to replace Columbus Day. Today at least 17 states and more than 100 cities recognize it, and in 2021, Joe Biden became the first president to formally proclaim it.

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Then, the next White House reversed course. In October 2025, President Trump moved to “reclaim” Columbus’s legacy from those he termed “left-wing arsonists,” though he never mentioned Indigenous Peoples’ Day by name.

Native people have been fighting the sanitization of Columbus’s story for decades.

Native people have been fighting the sanitization of Columbus’s story for decades.

Columbus Day tells a story that skips what came before 1492 and what came after. Before the United States existed, Indigenous nations governed and cared for these lands. Colonization brought land theft, forced removal, and government policies designed to break those nations and sever Native people from their languages, cultures, communities, and homelands.

The people carrying out those policies often stated their intentions openly. In 1851, California’s first governor, Peter Burnett, told state legislators that a war of extermination would continue “until the Indian race becomes extinct.” In 1892, Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, described the purpose of federal boarding schools in one line: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Indigenous Peoples’ Day marks that failure. It also arrives during a new wave of attempted erasure across Indian Country. The methods are different,........

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