30th Anniversary of Indigenous Peoples' Day

Today is the 30th anniversary of Indigenous Peoples' Day, which was instituted in Berkeley, California, in 1992, to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas on October 12, 1492. Two years later, Santa Cruz, California, instituted the holiday, and other cities have been following suit ever since.

On October 8, 2021, Pres. Biden became the first U.S. President to formally recognize the holiday when he signed a presidential proclamation declaring October 11, 2021, to be a national holiday.

Indigenous People's Day celebrates and honors Native American peoples and commemorates their histories and cultures.

Previously, Columbus Day celebrated the "discovery" of the Americas, which, through more ethical lenses, is now viewed as the start of a violent colonization of a land which was already occupied.

Five hundred years later, the violence is still going on, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes writes, today:

On this Indigenous Peoples' Day, we must acknowledge our country's ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Since 2016, over 5,700 Indigenous women and girls have gone missing.
Angel Charley, Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, testified during a House hearing earlier this year about the dangerous link between missing and murdered Indigenous women and fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel industries bring non-local workers into what are known as 'man camps' or temporary settlements that often exist right outside the borderlands of Native communities. When these man camps are created, there is an increase in violence, and particularly sexual violence, against Native women.

In February, two people working on the Line 3 Pipeline in Minnesota were arrested in a sex trafficking sting.

But, many Indigenous nations do not have tribal jurisdiction over non-Native offenders, which includes the majority of these fossil fuel workers.

That's why Alexandria and our movement fought to urgently pass the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022. The reauthorized version of the Violence Against Women Act finally allows Tribal courts to exercise jurisdiction over non-Native perpetrators of sexual assault and sex trafficking.

Charley said that the root of inaction to protect Native women "is the devaluation of Indigenous lives since the onset of colonization."

By expanding special criminal jurisdiction of Tribal courts to cover non-Native perpetrators, Congress has taken an actionable step toward better protecting Indigenous women and girls-- but more still needs to be done.

Today and always, our movement stands with our country's Indigenous communities, and we will not stop fighting until we are all liberated.