Happy IDP!

Aka Indigenous Peoples Day, aka Columbus Day. CNN tries to explain How Indigenous Peoples’ Day came about and why it matters today

For centuries, the US celebrated Christopher Columbus as the intrepid explorer who discovered the Americas — a symbol of the American ideals of entrepreneurship and innovation.

The story of the Italian navigator taught to generations of schoolchildren is shrouded in mythology. But for the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the Americas long before Columbus ever arrived, Columbus and his namesake holiday represent something much more sinister: the violent colonization of their lands and the brutal treatment of their people.

The movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day has been decades in the making. As a result of advocacy by Native American activists, many states and localities now observe the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of — or in addition to — Columbus Day. That shift has since reached the federal level — in 2021, President Joe Biden became the first president to formally acknowledge Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

“It’s long overdue,” David Weeden, tribal historic preservation officer for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, told CNN. “When you look back on all that we’ve endured and sacrificed, all the systemic oppression at the hands of various levels of governments and agencies and programs and everything else, the fact that we are still here is amazing.”

Here’s the history behind Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and what some Native Americans say the holiday means for them.

To understand the history of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, it’s important to understand how Columbus Day came about.

Columbus had been celebrated unofficially around the US since the late 1700s. In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation commemorating the 400th anniversary of his landing. As waves of Italian immigrants arrived in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they faced prejudice and discrimination. To combat negative perceptions, a group of Italian American elites took up the cause of Columbus Day, arguing that the contributions of Italian immigrants had helped make America the nation it was. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Columbus Day a national holiday.

The narrative around Columbus Day helped uphold “the new racial order that would emerge in the US in the 20th century, one in which the descendants of diverse ethnic European immigrants became ‘White’ Americans,” historian Malinda Maynor Lowery wrote in a 2019 article for The Conversation.

Eventually, Native Americans began to challenge the history behind it.

Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, Native American activists in the late 1960s formed the Red Power Movement, built on principles of self-determination and cultural pride. At a 1977 United Nations conference in Geneva, Indigenous delegates from around the world resolved “to observe October 12, the day of so-called ‘discovery’ of America, as an International Day of Solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.”

It would be longer before their calls were adopted. South Dakota became the first to officially celebrate the day (calling it Native American Day) in 1990. The city of Berkeley, California, embraced Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 1992 as a protest to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival. Now, numerous states and more than 130 cities observe the holiday.

Regardless of what they call it, the mail didn't come today.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Monday: Rule 5 Blues ready for digital pleasure at The Other McCain.