By Johnnie Jae
This article was originally published by Truthout
Joining the fight against our erasure helps Native communities defend our right to be seen, heard, and counted.
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas that the Indigenous Lucayan people called Guanahani. He continued on to Cuba and Hispaniola and, on later voyages, to other parts of the Caribbean, but he never set foot in what is now the continental United States. It makes little sense for a country to honor a man who never reached it, and even less to credit him with discovering a place that millions of people already called home. And it makes even less given what Columbus actually did in the places where he stepped foot: He rounded up Indigenous people in the Caribbean, chained them, and sent them as slaves to Spain. And when Indigenous communities rose up in resistance, he ordered his soldiers to “spread terror,” maiming and slaughtering civilians en masse using firearms, dogs, swords, and pikes.
But despite all this, in 1937, the United States established a federal holiday in his name anyway.
Native people have been fighting the sanitization of Columbus’s story for decades. The idea of replacing Columbus Day arose as early as 1977, when Indigenous representatives raised it at a United Nations conference in Geneva.
In 1990, South Dakota renamed the day Native Americans’ Day. The change began with Oglala Lakota newspaper publisher Tim Giago, whose columns challenged Governor George Mickelson to mark the centennial of the Wounded Knee massacre with a “Year of Reconciliation” and to give the October holiday to Native people, proposals Mickelson took to tribal leaders and then to the legislature.
Two years later, as the country marked 500 years since Columbus landed, the city of Berkeley, California, adopted Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Bay Area Native organizers and their allies, returning from a 1990 gathering of Indigenous nations in Quito, Ecuador, formed a coalition called Resistance 500 and won official taskforce status from the City Council, which then unanimously adopted their recommendation to replace Columbus Day. Today at least 17 states and more than 100 cities recognize it, and in 2021, Joe Biden became the first president to formally proclaim it.
Then, the next White House reversed course. In October 2025, President Trump moved to “reclaim” Columbus’s legacy from those he termed “left-wing arsonists,” though he never mentioned Indigenous Peoples’ Day by name.
Columbus Day tells a story that skips what came before 1492 and what came after. Before the United States existed, Indigenous nations governed and cared for these lands. Colonization brought land theft, forced removal, and government policies designed to break those nations and sever Native people from their languages, cultures, communities, and homelands.
The people carrying out those policies often stated their intentions openly. In 1851, California’s first governor, Peter Burnett, told state legislators that a war of extermination would continue “until the Indian race becomes extinct.” In 1892, Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, described the purpose of federal boarding schools in one line: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
They failed.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day marks that failure. It also arrives during a new wave of attempted erasure across Indian Country. The methods are different, but the questions are familiar. Who gets counted? Who gets to tell our history? Who gets to speak for Native people? Who decides what happens to Indigenous land, water, and culture?
Erased From the Count
When this country attempts to count Native people, it always seems to fall short. Pollsters ostensibly skip us because oursample size is too small to report. On election night in 2020, a national network put Native voters on screen as “something else.”
The U.S. census, for all its flaws, at least asks. It lets us check a box and write in the name of our tribe.
Now the federal government wants to stop asking altogether. On September 10, 2026, the Census Bureau proposed dropping the race and ethnicity questions from the 2030 census. Race has been on the form since the first count in 1790, though for much of that time we were left out. Until 1940, the government excluded “Indians not taxed” (meaning Natives living in the jurisdiction of their sovereign nations) from the census, which is used to decide where federal money goes and how voting districts are drawn.
Even with the question on the form, the census can’t get us right. In 2020, it missed an estimated 5.64 percent of Native people living on reservations, a higher undercount than any other racial or ethnic group.
Taking the question off the form won’t change who we are or how our nations determine citizenship. But census numbers help determine what the federal government owes us — and it does. Native nations signed hundreds of treaties with the United States and were dispossessed of nearly all of the land the country now sits on. In return, the government promised to protect tribal lands and to provide health care, education, and housing.
The courts have long held that the United States has a “trust responsibility” to tribal nations — a permanent government-to-government obligation bound by the U.S. Constitution, treaties, federal statutes, and Supreme Court rulings. Without a count, our tribal governments have a harder time holding Washington to its word, and Washington has an easier time breaking it.
Erased From the Classroom
Our history is getting the same treatment. A treaty is easier to break when nobody is taught that it exists. After years of lobbying by tribal educators, states including Connecticut, North Dakota, and Oregon began requiring Native history be taught in schools. Then came the backlash. Laws against so-called “divisive concepts” began to spread through statehouses in 2021, and tribal educators say some teachers now skip Native history for fear of breaking them. In August 2021, South Dakota state officials cut much of the Native history and culture from draft social studies standards.
The federal government under Trump has gone further under the banner of fighting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies. In January 2025, the president signed an order ending federal DEI programs. In the purge that followed, the Pentagon deleted web pages honoring the Navajo Code Talkers — veterans who helped win World War II — and restored some only after tribes objected. Later that month, the Smithsonian closed its diversity office, and a second order in March 2025 directed it to remove what the president called “improper ideology.” The National Museum of the American Indian is among the museums under review.
Native history shouldn’t be treated as optional or controversial; it is foundational to American history. Students who are never taught about our nations, our governments, or our sovereignty will grow up with ideas about us that someone else gave them. Eventually, some of those students become the people making decisions about Indian Country.
Erased From the Feed
Tech companies control how much of us the youth can learn about online. In 2015, Facebook locked Native users out of their accounts after flagging names like Lone Hill and Creepingbear as fake. On May 5, 2021, a national day of awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women, Instagram stories marking it were wiped from the app, which the company blamed on a technical bug. Later that year, Native creators who livestreamed arrests at the Line 3 pipeline protests in Minnesota told the Daily Dot that TikTok suspended their accounts and their views dropped from tens of thousands to a few thousand. In Canada, Meta’s 2023 news block left Indigenous outlets unable to reach their own communities.
While real Native people and news outlets get buried, fake ones are filling the space. Nunatsiaq News found a site called We-News running 121 AI “correspondents,” including a fabricated Inuk reporter named Leah Qammaniq. She doesn’t exist. CBC turned up two more fake AI correspondents presented as Dene and Yukon First Nation “journalists.” Every story under their names had been taken from real newsrooms in Canada’s northern territories. The frightening reality is that anyone with a phone can make a “Native elder” in seconds, and Native technologists say social media is now full of AI images that come from no real community, reversing decades of work by advocates to combat racist stereotypes promoted by old movies and TV shows.
Erased From the Land
Colonization was always about land, and it never stopped at removing the people. Colonizers also went after the plants and animals that knew us, the ones that carried the memory of who belonged to a place and who had looked after it for thousands of years. On the plains, hunters cut the bison from tens of millions to a few thousand by the early 1880s, with Army generals cheering them on. The tallgrass prairie our nations once tended across roughly 25 percent of the North American continent now survives on about 1 percent of its former range. Plowing it up released carbon the grasses had stored deep in the soil for centuries, and that loss fed the climate crisis we live in now.
We are living with the worst of it. Native nations in the United States have lost nearly 99 percent of their historical lands,according to a study in the journal Science, and the lands we were forced onto face more extreme heat, less rain, and, for nearly half of tribes, greater wildfire danger. We are paying the most for a crisis we did the least to cause.
We still don’t get the final say over our land. Western Apache people have prayed and held ceremonies at Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, also called Oak Flat, for longer than the United States has been a country. In March 2026, the Forest Service handed it over to a mining company, Resolution Copper, even though the government’s own initial environmental reviewfound the mine would destroy the site’s sacred springs, oak groves, and burial grounds.
Big Tech is next in line. Companies are actively scouting reservations for data centers, and a single large one can use more than a million gallons of water a day on land where water is already an endangered resource. A few tribes are receptive to deals.
Meanwhile, other tribes want nothing to do with data centers, and they’re fighting back. Muscogee Nation leaders said no to a facility on their Looped Square Ranch in November 2025. Four months later, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma became the first tribe to impose a moratorium on AI data centers, and by August 2026 the Cherokee Nation had banned data centers outright on its lands. The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation have taken the fight to federal court to keep a project for powering a data center off a sacred site.
Why Indigenous People’s Day Still Counts
Indigenous Peoples’ Day exists because Native people organized for decades to be acknowledged and to honor the authentic history of this land. Honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day requires picking up some of that work.
Anyone can call their school district to ask what students are learning about nearby tribes, and be in the room when the curriculum comes up for a vote. The Census Bureau is taking public comments on its proposed rule to drop race and ethnicity questions from the 2030 census until October 13, 2026, and the bureau must consider those comments before the rule is final. Leaving a comment in support of Native communities helps us defend our right to be seen, heard, and counted.
Find out whose land you’re on and what issues they may be up against, whether it’s a pipeline or data center. Then follow their lead.
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