Universities and schools across the country are also observing the new commemoration. This year the nation’s capital passed a resolution to change the holiday to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The demonstration’s success and the worldwide media attention it attracted planted the seeds for creating an Indigenous Peoples’ Day in New York City. In 2015 an estimated 6,000 Native people and their supporters gathered at Randall’s Island, New York, to recognize the survival of the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

Berkeley, California, became the first city to make the change in 1992, when the city council renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Hawai’i has also changed the name of its October 12 holiday to Discovers’ Day, in honor of the Polynesian navigators who peopled the islands. The first state to rename Columbus Day was South Dakota in 1990. The movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day or Native American Day has gained momentum and spread to states, cities, and towns across the United States. And it urges Americans to rethink history.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day recognizes that Native people are the first inhabitants of the Americas, including the lands that later became the United States of America. In 1977 participants at the United Nations International Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas proposed that Indigenous Peoples’ Day replace Columbus Day. In the forefront of their minds is the fact the colonial takeovers of the Americas, starting with Columbus, led to the deaths of millions of Native people and the forced assimilation of survivors. Generations of Native people, however, throughout the Western Hemisphere have protested Columbus Day. In 1972 President Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making the official date of the holiday the second Monday in October. Congress made October 12 a national holiday three years later. In 1934, at the request of the Knights of Columbus and New York City’s Italian community, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared the first national observance of Columbus Day. The holiday originated as an annual celebration of Italian–American heritage in San Francisco in 1869. T he first documented observance of Columbus Day in the United States took place in New York City in 1792, on the 300th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the Western Hemisphere. “The most American thing about America is American Indians.” - Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) October 14, 2019, Los Angeles, California. California Natives gather in front of City Hall to celebrate Los Angeles's second annual Indigenous Peoples Day.

October 10 national post day