This Land Was Never Ceded: Indigenous Sovereignty, Resistance, and What Indigenous Peoples’ Day Is Really About

What Columbus Did, and What That Made Possible

Christopher Columbus did not discover America. He arrived in 1492 on a continent already home to nations with their own governance, astronomy, agriculture, and medicine. After European contact, the Native American population shrank by about half, through violence, enslavement, forced assimilation, and disease. That is the context for everything that followed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Columbus Day in 1934, and Columbus Day grew up around a story that left out what his arrival cost. Indigenous Peoples’ Day exists to tell the rest of it. We have traced how these two holidays came to stand side by side on the calendar. The same colonial systems that displaced Indigenous peoples continue to shape global health policy, land ownership, and economic power. You can read more about how colonialism shapes global health policy here.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day Was Built by Organizing

The movement to replace Columbus Day did not begin with a presidential decision. It began with Indigenous organizers. In 1990, the First Continental Conference on 500 Years of Indian Resistance met in Quito, Ecuador, and its momentum reached local government. In 1992, Berkeley, California, became the first U.S. city to formally recognize the holiday, after Native organizers brought the case to its city council.

This matters because the story of Indigenous Peoples’ Day is one of community power, not government generosity. Indigenous peoples did not wait to be recognized. They organized, and cities followed the organizing. Recognition was won by people who knew they deserved more than a day on the calendar.

Living Nations, Not Historical Figures

One of colonialism’s most persistent harms is speaking of Indigenous peoples in the past tense, as though the damage completed what it set out to do. It did not. Indigenous peoples are physicians, attorneys, farmers, scholars, artists, language teachers, and sovereignty advocates, practicing law, medicine, agriculture, and governance today on their own terms.

The record of Indigenous military service is one of the clearest examples. According to NICOA, American Indians and Alaska Natives have the highest per-capita military service of any population in the United States. That service does not erase the treaties and broken promises that came before it, and it does not oblige anyone to forget them.

Sovereignty Is Not a Metaphor

Indigenous sovereignty means the right of Indigenous peoples to govern their own territories, protect their own languages, practice their own medicine, and steward their own economies. Land Back is not a symbolic demand. It is a call for Indigenous governance over Indigenous land, grounded in the understanding that those who have lived in right relation with a place know how to care for it.

Ubuntu and Indigenous Kinship

Africans are Indigenous to Africa. Ubuntu comes from that inheritance. The Nguni saying umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu means a person is a person through other people. The Lakota phrase mitákuye oyásʼiŋ means “all my relations.” Ubuntu and mitákuye oyásʼiŋ arrive at the same truth from different lands: a person becomes a person through relationship, and all of life is bound together.

Africa’s own human rights system names this too. The African Commission’s Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities works to protect the human rights of indigenous peoples and communities across African Union member states. In East Harlem, where Ubuntu Village is rooted, we name the Indigenous peoples who stewarded this land before us. Solidarity means naming that, and acting in alignment with the communities who have always known how to care for this place. The intergenerational trauma carried in Indigenous communities’ bodies and memory is the direct result of colonial systems. The public health argument for reparations extends here too.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is not about Columbus. It is about sovereignty: the ongoing right of Indigenous peoples to exist on their own terms, govern their own lands, and be recognized as living nations whose knowledge and leadership this moment needs. The communities that have survived the most have the most to teach about how to build what comes next.

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Sources & Research

• National Geographic, Why Some Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Not Columbus Day
• KQED, How Berkeley Became the First City to Ditch Columbus Day for Indigenous Peoples Day
• Time, How Indigenous Peoples Day Came to Be
• NICOA, American Indian Veterans Have Highest Record of Military Service
• International Justice Resource Center, Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities in Africa

Related Reading

• ‣ Colonialism Didn’t End: It Became Global Health Policy
• ‣ Reparations as Healing: A Public Health Argument
• ‣ Your Grandmother’s Strength Lives in Your Cells: Epigenetics and the Science of Ancestral Memory
• ‣ Before We Were Divided, We Were Free: What African Liberation Day Calls Us to Remember

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