Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day…
For many Indigenous peoples, Columbus Day is a controversial holiday. This is because Columbus is viewed not as a discoverer, but rather as a colonizer. His arrival led to the forceful taking of land and set the stage for widespread death and loss of Indigenous ways of life.
In 1990, South Dakota currently the state with the third-largest population of Native Americans in the U.S. became the first state to officially recognize Native Americans Day, commonly referred to as Indigenous Peoples Day in other parts of the country.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day offers an opportunity for educators to rethink how they teach what some have characterized as a sanitized story of the arrival of Columbus. This version omits or downplays the devastating impact of Columbus arrival on Indigenous peoples. Indigenous Peoples’ Day is an opportunity to reconcile tensions between these two perspectives.
If you are looking to learn more or relearn a more accurate history than you were taught growing up, I would love if you joined my Read to Learn group in November.
Summary - In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them.
Let me know if you’d like to join the group, all are welcome. We chat at our own pace throughout the month and then have an end-of-the-month chat in a DM group.
Toni Rocchetti is a copy editor helping authors strengthen their narratives, deepen character arcs, and find the story that is already in the draft. She reads 80+ books a year across literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction — and writes about what she is learning along the way. Work with Toni →
