Indigenous Peoples’ Day honors and celebrates the Indigenous American people and their culture and heritage.
“It’s a day that we honor the fact that we are on their land, and not just celebrate but also reflect on the history that we have with Indigenous folks,” Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Taylor Kanemori said.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a federally recognized holiday and is celebrated every year on the second Monday of October. According to Britannica, the day, originally called Columbus Day, honors the day Christopher Columbus landed in the “New World” in 1492. President Franklin D. Roosevelt established Columbus Day in 1937, but according to Smithsonian Magazine, in 1977, the United Nations International Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas proposed that Indigenous Peoples’ Day should replace Columbus Day.
“I’m glad we’re not celebrating Columbus Day because the entire Columbus story is made-up propaganda. So, I think it’s good that we’re not celebrating a lie,” Upper School English teacher Alana Kaholokula said.
As a Native Hawaiian, she appreciates the changes that have been made to honor Native Peoples’ rather than Columbus.
“I love the shift to it being Indigenous Peoples Day, especially given the false story of Columbus and the kind of way that has been told for decades and generations, it does feel like a form of justice to me,” Kaholokula said.
Kaholokula also emphasizes the importance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, not only to Indigenous People but to all Americans.
“I think it’s important because, as a community, Indigenous people have a history of being erased. The history of colonialization, as in many places, is the case here in North America,” Kaholokula said. “And so, in this way, we can recognize that a group of people not only exists in the present but also attempt to celebrate that existence despite all of the work that had been done over time to erase them.”
To recognize and honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day, University Prep hosted an assembly on Wednesday, October 9th. This year, Kanemori and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Program Manager Flor Hernandez Morales presented an overview of the holiday during the assembly. Although they were unable to host a guest speaker for this year’s assembly, Kanemori emphasizes that they are going to have many other Indigenous guest speakers in the future.
“We’re also going to make a promise to make sure that we’re bringing Indigenous voices in throughout the year. I and many diversity practitioners across Seattle and the country are thinking about ways to not just tokenize certain days,” Kanemori said. “It is a day we want to recognize and celebrate. So we’re not going to ignore it or move past it. We’re going to make a promise to continue to make sure that indigenous stories and histories are told in our classrooms and throughout other programming in the year.
Note: The reporter reached out to the student body multiple times to attempt to find Indigenous/Native American/Native Hawaiian students to interview, but got no responses.
