Indigenous Peoples’ Day

In 2026, Indigenous Peoples' Day—which celebrates the history and culture of Native Americans—falls on Monday, October 12.

While it's not an official federal holiday, dozens of states observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day in some way, either in place of—or in addition to—Columbus Day. Many cities and school systems also observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

There has been an ongoing effort to formally designate Indigenous Peoples’ Day a federal holiday. “Our country has long failed to recognize and acknowledge its dark history of erasure and harm brought upon the first inhabitants of the Americas,” said California Congresswoman Norma Torres in a 2023 statement.

“By designating Indigenous Peoples’ Day a federal holiday, we take a small but important step toward recognizing the injustices in our nation’s history and uplifting the vibrant traditions, history, and culture of all Indigenous communities—an integral part of the cultural fabric of the United States," the statement added.

In 2021, President Joe Biden became the first president to officially recognize Indigenous Peoples' Day on the same date as Columbus Day. Several states recognize both Indigenous Peoples' Day and Columbus Day on the same day.

Among the places where Indigenous Peoples' Day—or another, similar holiday such as American Indian Heritage Day—is observed or honored include:

Additionally, dozens of cities large and small celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day, including New York City, Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, Seattle, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Boston.

In 2025, President Donald Trump pushed to refocus the October holiday on Christopher Columbus when he signed a proclamation declaring the holiday to be Columbus Day to honor the 15th-century explorer's "extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue."

The proclamation added, "Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage. Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces."

Activists, however, have long argued that holidays, statues and other memorials to Columbus sanitize his actions—which include the enslavement of Native Americans—while giving him credit for “discovering” a place where communities had lived for thousands of years.

“Columbus Day is not just a holiday; it represents the violent history of colonization in the Western hemisphere,” says Leo Killsback, author and Indigenous rights advocate. For Indigenous peoples, that traumatic history played out over centuries.

Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937, in part because of efforts by Italian-American Catholics. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, members of that stigmatized group successfully campaigned to establish a Columbus Day in order to place Italian Catholics (like Christopher Columbus) into American history. In doing so, they edged out people of Anglo-Saxon descent who wanted a federal holiday honoring Leif Erikson as the first European to reach the Americas.

Killsback argues that the question of which European got here first is beside the point. “Indigenous Peoples' Day represents a much more honest and fair representation of American values,” writes Killsback, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation in southeastern Montana.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day also offers schools an opportunity to highlight Native American history. In a 2015 op-ed, Shannon Speed, director of the American Indian Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Chickasaw tribal citizen, wrote that “virtually none of my university students has had any education whatsoever in the history of this country’s treatment of the 10 million or so people who lived here before Europeans arrived.”

In her column, Speed wrote of her students’ common belief in the “vanishing Indian,” a term meaning that her students often think of Native Americans as people who lived in the past, rather than people with a dynamic culture today.